7/30/2004

Profiling made easy: The Electronic Privacy Information Center has obtained documents revealing that the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry. The special tabulations were prepared specifically for the law enforcement agency. There is no indication that the Department of Homeland Security requested similar information about any other ethnic groups. One tabulation shows cities with 1,000 or more people who indicated they are of Arab ancestry. For each city, the tabulation provides total population, population of Arab ancestry, and percent of the total population that is of Arab ancestry. A second tabulation, more than a thousand pages in length, shows the number of census responses indicating Arab ancestry in certain zip codes throughout the United States. The responses are subdivided into Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian, Arab/Arabic, and Other Arab. The heavily redacted documents show that in April 2004, a Census Bureau analyst e-mailed a Department of Homeland Security official and said, "You got a file of Arab ancestry information by ZIP Code Tabulation Area from me last December (2003). My superiors are now asking questions about the usage of that data, given the sensitivity of different data requests we have received about the Arab population."

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home