I filled out the U.S. Department of Commerce’s American Community Survey today, and I’m wondering: Does this thing yield anything useful, and do I trust it?

The survey arrived in my mailbox two weeks ago. Having not returned it immediately, I received a second notice—a message from the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau. “This survey is so important that a Census Bureau representative may attempt to contact you by telephone or personal visit if we do not receive your response,” said the letter. I definitely didn’t want that, so I sat down and began filling in the blanks.

What’s the American Community Survey [ACS]? It’s not the 2020 Census. The Census Bureaus conducts the ACS every year. In censuses before 2010, most households received a short-form questionnaire, while one household in every six received a long form that contained additional questions and provided more detailed socio-economic information about the population. In 2010, everyone got the short-form, and the long form was replaced with the ACS. ACS forms go out every year, rather than once every 10 years. They are sent to a small percentage of the population on a rotating basis throughout the decade. [No household is supposed to receive the ACS more often than once very five years. Good to know.]

As to how I was chosen to participate in the Community Survey, and why I have to fill it out, the Department of Commerce informs me that…

The Census Bureau chose your address, not you personally, as part of a randomly selected sample. You are required by U.S. law to respond to the survey. The U.S. Census Bureau is required by law to keep your information confidential. The Census Bureau is not permitted to publicly release you responses in a way that could identify you. Per the Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2015, your data are protected from cybersecurity risks through screening of the systems that transmit your data.

Also, according to the US Census Bureau, “Every Census Bureau employee takes a lifetime oath to protect your personal identification. Disclosing ANY information that could identify you or your family means 5 years in prison, or  $250,000 in fines, or both.”

Nevertheless, I remain skeptical. Given recent revelations about Facebook, Russian trolls, and the Trump campaign’s links to the downright-dirty Cambridge Analytica group, plus the Trump administration’s pervasive corruption and growing track record of self-dealing, I am rapidly losing trust in our current government’s commitment to privacy and data security. I suspect that I am not alone in that skepticism, and that’s one of my concerns about the accuracy and usefulness of information being collected in the Community Survey.

It took me about 30 minutes to fill out the paper form. If there were more people in my household, it would have taken longer, because you have to answer the same questions for everybody who lives in your house.

The ACS includes questions that go beyond the decennial [big word for every ten years] Census: It asks who’s in school, who’s finished school and at what level, who’s working [where, how often, and the nature of the job], what kind of transportation you use, whether anyone in your household is deaf, blind, receiving benefits for a disability, unable to climb a flight of stairs, or having difficulty focusing on tasks. And more.

I don’t have a problem with these questions. I believe the Census Department’s brochure when it says :

“Communities need data about the well-being of children, families and the older population to provide services to them. The ACS …[helps to] establish goals, identify problems and solutions, and measure the performance of programs. The data are also used to decide where to locate new highways, schools, hospitals and community centers.”

That actually sounds to me like a well-intentioned, good-government program aimed at the common good.

Of course, I also believe that this information would probably be better used by a government led by people who actually care about the well-being of people, rather than the financial health of their corporate cronies.

Nevertheless, I persisted, and  I dutifully plodded through.

And yes, the ACS does ask about your citizenship status. But, as an aside, that’s not new. That question was included in the every-ten-year census from 1890 through 1950. According to snopes.com:

Beginning in 1970 and continuing through 2000, The Census Bureau used two different questionnaires to gather information—a short form sent to more than 80 percent of American households, which did not inquire about citizenship, and a long form distributed to fewer than 20 percent of American households, which did [include the citizenship question.]

The long form was discontinued after 2000, so in 2010, every household received the short form—meaning, in effect, that no one was asked for citizenship data in the big 2010 Census. But households who received the ACS were …Technically, the Census Bureau never actually stopped asking the citizenship question, although since the 2000 census, they have only asked it of around 3.5 million households [2.6 percent of the population] per year.

[Whether it is being added back in to the overall census for 2020 for political reasons is another issue.]

But I digress.

Here are some problems I have with the ACS:

Working your way through it is a bit like stumbling through a maze. Depending on how you answer, say, Question 12a, you are instructed either to skip to Question 15a, or answer Question 12b. [Not real question numbers, in case you’re checking me for accuracy.] There’s a lot of that. You have to repeat the procedure for every member of the household, and I can imagine people getting frustrated and bailing out. [I can just hear the complaints of “ridiculous government bureaucracy” now.]

Then, when you get to the part about household income and expenses, you’re really in the weeds. You’re sitting on the couch with your spouse, filling out the form, and you come to the questions about how much you earned in the past 12 months [not the same period as you’re filing for with the IRS, by the way], how much of that was interest and/or dividends, how much was Social Security, or pension, how much you pay per month for natural gas, electricity, sewer, water, personal property taxes and real estate taxes, and homeowners’ or rental insurance.

I’m a homeowner. I pay bills. But I don’t have those numbers at my fingertips. And, let’s face it, after page after page of questions, I’m just too lazy to go to my files to figure out those numbers.  So I estimate. Or guess. Or just pull a number out of the air, just to fill in the blank. And I’m certain that I’m not alone in short-cutting the process. So, how good is the information going to be?

Also, the ACS asked me to indicate my ethnic background or national origin. They offer suggestions, such as Japanese, Polish, etc. But, really, what am I supposed to say? Where my parents and grandparents came from? There’s just one blank, but my family was from several different countries. I didn’t know what to say. That’s why I left it blank. Maybe the government doesn’t really need to know that, anyway.

And I think that that others may not answer that question, as well, because they fear that ethnic information could be used for nefarious purposes—especially by an administration that is so openly anti-immigrant. [Personally, I’m not yet at the stage of paranoia that I worry that ethnic information will be used to send us to internment camps –although there’s some evidence that pre-World-War-II census information was used precisely for that purpose].

In the end, I did my duty as a citizen and mailed it in—in the conveniently supplied pre-paid envelope. But I have my doubts about the usefulness and privacy of the information I’ve supplied. In today’s prevailing political atmosphere, I’m guessing that many others share my suspicions, and that there will be a lot of spaces left blank and surveys tossed in the trash. That’s a sad development for our country.

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In his book, The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney describes how there are certain types of issues in which Democrats mimic the illogical positions of most Republicans. He cites examples such as the Keystone Pipeline and fracking for natural gas. Both of these involve considerable data analysis. Sometimes Democrats distance themselves from the data because it is so complicated. Thereupon, they let their emotions guide their views, and in these cases like Keystone and fracking, they tend to favor what is perceived as preserving the environment.

It’s possible that another one of these issues is the NSA data collection, which was brought to our attention by Edward Snowden. The legality of what he did may never be determined, because to date he has not come back to the United States. The morality of what he did is certainly up for discussion.

But support for the legality of what the NSA is doing, as opposed to what Snowden did, got a boost on Friday, December 27, 2013. As CNN reported:

(CNN) — The National Security Agency notched a much-needed win in court, after a series of setbacks over the legality and even the usefulness of its massive data collection program.

A federal judge in New York ruled Friday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of data on nearly every phone call made in the United States is legal.

The ruling contrasts with another ruling last week by a federal judge in Washington, who called the same program “almost Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional.

I certainly don’t envy the judges who have rendered these decisions, as well as those on the Supreme Court who will ultimately decide the constitutionality (or their political preferences) regarding data that the NSA collects, and what the NSA does with it.

Progressives have generally lined up with the ACLU in wanting to curtail the extent of the data collection by the NSA. The arguments in favor of their position are both considerable and valid. The primary one is the right to privacy. While the word privacy does not occur even once in the Constitution, courts have historically recognized it as a legitimate right. Virtually all judgments in favor of privacy are based on the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is not much of a stretch to extrapolate from here that electronic eavesdropping should require a warrant based on probable cause that some illegality was occurring. The right to privacy is not a luxury for a special class of people; it is a fundamental right for all of us.

We are left with the ongoing dilemma of what is more important: the right to privacy or the right to security. Neither is absolute, so we’re left to find a consensus between the two. It is presumptuous for any of us to say that we know with certainty where that line should be drawn.

I am certainly glad that Snowden provided us with a much more clear knowledge of what the NSA is actually doing. I’m also glad that a set of judges, rather than Congress, is going to set some guidelines as to how far the NSA can go. When they rule, it will not be the end of the discussion, but at least we’ll have rules that are much more reasonable than in the pre-Snowden era. Numerous questions will still remain, but hopefully we’ll be better prepared to try to answer them.

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Republicans often like to see issues in black and white with no room for shades of gray. This means that they cannot accommodate luck or happenstance or even nuance in describing why or how something happens. One of the best examples of this myopic vision by Republicans is the way Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham responded to the unfortunate attack on Benghazi, Libya in September 2012. They took an event that literally occurred in the dark and to which there were no clear answers and then made an absolutist interpretation, with a paucity of facts to substantiate it.

Some Republicans have been trying to blame the Obama Administration for the recent Boston Marathon bombings. It’s possible that their accusations of an administration failure in gathering and utilizing intelligence is valid, if and only if, they support the near absolute suppression of our right to privacy. Republicans hate the government doing any kind of snooping, unless it helps them make an argument from which they may gain politically.

Washington Post journalists Greg Miller and Sari Horowitz recently wrote a most revealing article, Boston case highlights limitations of U.S. counterterror network. They outline many of the new steps that U.S. intelligence agencies have taken since 9-11 to coordinate retrieval of and access to information. However, they limit their investigations when the privacy rights of likely innocent citizens are at risk.  They are walking a tightwire, and they have to do it very delicately.  They state:

It has been more than a decade since the United States began building its massive counterterrorism infrastructure, an apparatus that has been reconfigured several times in recent years after a series of near-miss attacks.

The strike in Boston marked the first time that a terrorist bomb plot slipped past those elaborate defenses and ended in casualties in the United States. Whether that outcome represents an intelligence failure is already the focus of a multi-agency review as well as a heated political debate.

The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.

In Boston, some of those factors were as fundamental and elusive as timing and luck.

“When this happens, there’s sort of an automatic response to find a linkage to failure,” said Andrew Liepman, who served as deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last year. It’s perfectly reasonable to look into whether there were breakdowns, Liepman said. “But that massive counterterrorism infrastructure works amazingly well to protect the country. We need to get used to the idea that it isn’t foolproof.”

In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the obstacles for U.S. authorities ranged from a misspelling on an airplane boarding pass to the apparent refusal of Russian authorities to go beyond their initial tip. Ultimately, however, perhaps the best chance to detect and disrupt the plot fell into a six-month span on the calendar, the near-empty space between when the FBI stopped watching Tsarnaev and when he is alleged to have begun laying the groundwork for the Boston plot.

The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.

As Miller and Horowitz say, sometimes it’s luck; sometimes it’s factors beyond intelligence officials’ control. These factors raise their heads as stopgaps when protecting the right to privacy is endangered without sufficient evidence to justify it.

What happened in Boston was terrible. But with three people killed and hundreds injured, it was nowhere near the carnage of 9-11,  in which nearly three thousand people were killed and many more thousands injured. It is the only case since 9-11 of American citizens being killed in an act of terrorism that seemingly has foreign connections. We should be most thankful that we went eleven and a half years between such events. The many successes that our intelligence communities have are often invisible and also accomplished under considerable duress. Their work and bravery should not be demeaned by baseless Republican fishing expeditions, whose sole purpose is to place specious blame on the Democratic Party.

It is true that we must be vigilant with how our intelligence agents and policy-makers handle themselves in the fight to control terrorism. There are obviously a myriad of mistakes. The element of bad luck comes in when the universe of government mistakes intersects with the universe of attempted terrorist attacks (see image below). We do our best to minimize those intersections from happening. When they do, it is not an indictment of the whole intelligence network. Rather,  it is usually something that fell between the cracks at a most unfortunate time. We need to try to correct this, but also learn to live with it as we do with other misfortunes that are going to happen from time to time regardless of what we do.  It’s no time for Republican lame chatter.

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