The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Alex R:

(Note to Electrolite readers: I also posted this comment at Calpundit...)

This report is almost certaintly bad reporting by the Washington Times. (The fact that this report appeared there should have given a clue!)

Executive summary: The NASA report uses **publicly available** Census data, not private data that can track individuals.

I went to the relevant page on EPIC's website, and found a reference to this NASA study.

The study (which *did* use the improperly released NWA data, by the way) had this to say about Census data:

This data set contains the responses from the 1990 decennial Census in the United States. The data has information on both households and individuals. ..... Our data comes from the 5% State public use microdata samples and we used the short variable list [24].

Reference [24] is to the Minnesota Population Center Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.

Here's what the Minnesota Population Center has to say about their dataset:

Most population data - especially historical census data - have traditionally been available only in aggregated tabular form. The IPUMS is microdata, which means that it provides information about individual persons and households. This makes it possible for researchers to create tabulations tailored to their particular questions. Since the IPUMS includes nearly all the detail originally recorded by the census enumerations, users can construct a great variety of tabulations interrelating any desired set of variables. The flexibility offered by microdata is particularly important for historical research because the aggregate tabulations produced by the Census Bureau are often not comparable across time, and until recently the subject coverage of census publications was limited.

Microdata do pose some limitations, however. For the period since 1940 census microdata are subject to strict confidentiality measures that limit their usefulness for some applications. The IPUMS samples for these years include no names, addresses or other potentially identifying information. To further ensure that no individuals can be identified, the Census Bureau limits the detail on place of residence, place of work, very high incomes, and several other variables. Most important, the microdata records for the period since 1940 identify no geographic areas with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants (250,000 in 1960 and 1970). Therefore the IPUMS is inappropriate for research that requires the identification of specific small geographic areas in those census years.

(Emphasis added)

So as far as I can tell, there is no evidence that the Census department released inappropriate data to NASA for this project. It may be that their confidentiality restrictions are insufficient -- see in particular the study's description of outliers in the census dataset. But this dataset is available to anyone who wants it, including you and me, and has at least been somewhat trimmed to avoid privacy violations.

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