As usual, Bruce Schneier is dispensing wisdom:
We learned the news in March: Contrary to decades of denials, the U.S. Census Bureau used individual records to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Census Bureau normally is prohibited by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals; the law exists to encourage people to answer census questions accurately and without fear. And while the Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily suspended that protection in order to locate Japanese-Americans, the Census Bureau had maintained that it only provided general information about neighborhoods.
New research proves they were lying.
The whole incident serves as a poignant illustration of one of the thorniest problems of the information age: data collected for one purpose and then used for another, or “data reuse.”
You should definitely read his article (why don’t you open it in a new tab, so you don’t forget), but I wanted to comment on something else: I feel kind of stupid that I didn’t learn this in March, regardless of Schneier’s “we”. Should I feel stupid? Was this big news? Or is this another case of something that feels to me like it should be big news but which fails to crack the cultural consciousness?
Sometimes life feels so hypnagogic. Or should that be hypnopompic?
I feel exactly the same way. I feel like I do a reasonably good job keeping up on the news, and, given my wife’s heritage, I think that I notice most stories about the Japanese-American internment camps. But you’re the first I’ve heard of this.
And yes, it’s shocking–the census bureau was, like the Justice Department until recently, one of those agencies I had implicit trust in. Not that they were going to be perfect, but that they were essentially organized to be impartial and straightforward.