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Confidentiality Expires For 1940 Census Records
Hugh Pickens writes writes "In spring of 1940, the Census Bureau sent out more than 120,000 fact-gatherers, known as 'enumerators,' to survey the nation's 33 million homes and 7 million farms. Now as the 72 years of confidentiality expires, the National Archives website buckled under the load as the 1940 census records were released and 1.9 million users hit the archives servers in the first four hours the data went public and at one point, the Archives said, its computers were receiving 100,000 requests per second. Data miners will have the opportunity to pick and chip through more than 3.8 million digital images of census schedules, maps and other sociological minutiae. What will we learn from this mother lode? The pivotal year 1940 'marked the beginnings of a shift from a depressed peacetime to a prosperous wartime,' says David E. Kyvig, author of Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939. The vast data dump, Kyvig says, will allow historians 'to look closely at particular communities and how people within them were doing in terms of employment, income and material comforts.' The 1940 census was the first Census that looked deeper into the details of much of American life. 'As we see how the country evolved over the subsequent 20 years, where we have aggregate census data ... we ought to be able to see more clearly how government spending bettered everyday life, confirmed Keynesian economic theory and revealed that, before the war, the New Deal did too little, rather than too much, to stimulate the U.S. economy.""
Get all 18TB of it while it's hot.
Just because the government was able to implement a Keynesian solution to that economic problem, does not mean that it holds the solution to every economic problem, for instance one that involves post - peak natural resource production.
We need a good war. Kill a few million and there's more money left for the survivors to pay for the credit bubble. We can't have creditors losing their investments, getting wiped out. Gotta keep those zombies walking.
Deleted
OK it's somewhat sensitive information, but why was it confidential for so long?
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I heard about this last week(!) on AlJazeera(!)...
Why did you say "we ought to be able to see more clearly how government spending bettered everyday life" Why don't you say "we ought to be able to see more clearly how world war bettered everyday life" "Clearly in the 1990s and early 2000s there were too few wars rather than too many to stimulate the US economy" correlation !=causation Still I would rather have a 1940 size US government with a 1940 size budget and 1940 amount of federal regulations. (and a 2012 respect for civil rights)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Someone gonna torrent that?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Keynes suggest government deficit spending during depressions and recessions... then pay it off when times are good?
I've never actually read his work so I don't know. This would make more sense than that an economist would recommend what is going on though.
They never tell you THAT is going to happen.
Yeah, so, now you know why you're never going to see me in a census download.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
All of the above and more are from the postwar period. I don't think you can have it both ways: 2012 respect for civil rights is only possible through 2012 regulation. One could say the same about clean water, food safety, highway safety, and other important issues.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Job requirements include typing/photocopying 18 TB's worth of sensitive data into digital format.
How could your name and age be used against you?
Learn to love Alaska
The pivotal year 1940 'marked the beginnings of a shift from a depressed peacetime to a prosperous wartime
Baloney. Wartime might appear more prosperous in that a lot of people were suddenly "employed" by the government who were previous unemployed, but everyone still lived under rationing and scarcity. Real economic recovery didn't happen until 1946.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The farmer was selling more of his crops to feed the soldiers and factory workers than he was able to sell during the depression era prior to the war and therefore the war made him prosperous as well.
I guess if someone is dumb enough to list "Drug Dealer" as his occupation rather than "Unemployed".
To be worried about the Census Bureau having your name, age and address is stupid, Law Enforcement can already get it from the IRS, SSA, or state DMV databases, and that's just a few and they are likely much more up-to-date than the Census Bureau's data.
It's really great that you can get such a relatively recent census, while people on it are still likely to be around. In the UK, the most recent one was 1911 (only made available after 100 years) which is slightly too long to be able to link it with living people. If you are doing genealogical research censuses are prime sources, but the 100 year rule makes it frustrating to bridge that last gap between the living and the dead.
Oh great, the server is way busy. Now I'll have to wait for all the geeks to finish. :/
-- Boycott Shell
Actually, it's in the Constitution.
Best Slashdot Co
Anybody else find it interesting/sad that the time limit on copyrights is longer than the privacy time limit on the Census records? Just a clear indication that corporations are valued above people.
Keynesian economics did too little? We didn't have enough people performing useless "work" for the CCC? We didn't strongarm enough small business with the NRA until it was mercifully killed by the Supreme Court? A 97% income tax rate wasn't high enough? Confiscating the gold of citizens, then selling it to foreigners at a profit wasn't enough? Maybe just removing the protectionist, job-killing Smoot-Hawley tariff that Hoover had imposed would have been enough, but that's wasn't tried. I'm sure that more spending on various programs would have worked. After all, as his own Treasury Secretary Morgenthau exclaimed, "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started . . . and an enormous debt to boot!"
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
...there is no statutory bar from the Census Bureau furnishing its data to Law Enforcement, the census clearly violates the 5th Amendment, and you cannot be compelled to participate.
Sorry, but you're clearly wrong on all three points.
Posting anonymously was a good idea, though.
It's as likely to do this as confirm that god exists.
The only thing the subsequent 20 years of data will "confirm" is that all of the economic rivals of the USA were destroyed during WWII, leading to great prosperity for the USA.
However, the Census bureau doesn't stop there. Have you seen the "American Community Survey"? They request extremely detailed information (what time do you go to work?) that could easily be used to victimize people. And if you refuse to answer, they threaten you with fines.
Never mind that the Constitution only empowers the government to take a head count once every 10 years, not a detailed statistical sampling of 1/10th of the population every year. I ended up filling in the number of people in my household and sending it back. I got a few visits from Census officials every few days for a few months but they gave up eventually.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The 1940 census data is organized by city blocks. I am not sure if they remember the streets they lived on that year. People moved a lot during the heard times.
"Get all 18TB of it while it's hot."
You know we only accept quantification by the LOC Standard.
It's not just about government spending. World War II killed fifty million people, thereby reducing the global supply of labor and driving up wages. THAT is probably what ended the depression.
In 1940 most of the big cities of the midwest, mid-Atlantic, and northeast were still predominantly white... and quite industrious and prosperous despite the toll taken on them by the Great Depression. For example Cincinnati had the huge Proctor & Gamble plants as well as steel mills and aluminum plants, Detroit was the center of all things automotive and machinery plants too, Pittsburg was king of the steel mills, Baltimore had shipyards and aircraft factories. The decline of these economic giants began in the 1950's with the onset of the urban decay brought on by a new kind of disruptive socio-political change. Look where these once-great cities stand today and form your own conclusions.
Sorry, but you're clearly wrong on all three points.
He's only wrong right this second. Don't forget that the government changed the rules before. They'll change them again when it suits them.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The census is a matter of requirement, not empowerment. They have to conduct it. What information is gathered in that process is not defined as a restriction, but a minimum.
Your objections that it is limited to a bare head count are manufactured from your personal belief, not explicit in the Constitution.
If you want that, work to make it explicit rather than taking it as implied given presumption.
For me, the duties of government are sufficiently encompassing that I prefer them to have knowledge to shape their actions, and the Census is a cost-efficient baseline. Do you deny that the federal government does have powers and responsibilities and that to conduct them effectively, it would be better to be informed than ignorant?
Does this mean I believe the government to be unlimited in its inquiries? Not at all, I just do not concur with your position which I see as extreme and irrational.
Mitt Romney: Monsters are people too my friend.
Even PBS and Sesame Workshop are guilty of drilling this one into us.
The quote at the end is from David Kyvig, a historian at Northern Illinois University. I'm not going to debate economics or politics, but it disturbs me to see a scholar coming out and saying "This data will show X" before having analyzed it. It's assuming your conclusion and is just biased.
Whenever you mention his name it generates hoardes of angry blog posts and a few defensive responses. All of that Internet activity generates a tremendous number of pageviews and ad impressions. Keynes is stimulating the economy, even from beyond the grave.
Your objections that it is limited to a bare head count are manufactured from your personal belief, not explicit in the Constitution.
I guess the 9th amendment doesn't exist then?
For me, the duties of government are sufficiently encompassing that I prefer them to have knowledge to shape their actions, and the Census is a cost-efficient baseline. Do you deny that the federal government does have powers and responsibilities and that to conduct them effectively, it would be better to be informed than ignorant?
Yes, absolutely. Nothing about that means it's OK for them to extract that information under threat of violence however. Forcing me to make any kind of declaration whatsoever violates my freedom of speech.
Not at all, I just do not concur with your position which I see as extreme and irrational.
And it's rational and not extreme at all to send government agents to my door asking personal questions and criminalizing me if I assert my right to privacy?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From the original post: "... we ought to be able to see more clearly how government spending bettered everyday life, confirmed Keynesian economic theory and revealed that, before the war, the New Deal did too little, rather than too much, to stimulate the U.S. economy." From the Sherlock Holmes novel A Scandal in Bohemia: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." What I got from that article is "Now that we have data, we can pick and choose what suits the theory we have already decided as true". The attitude people ought to take if they want the actual truth rather than just some sort of affirmation (which few people do in politically charged issues such as Keynesian economics, sadly) is "let's look at this massive bunch of data and see what theory it suggests is true",
Probably a bad idea to throw in that speculative quote since the entire thread has been hijacked by rabid pro/anti Keynesian posters... you've been trolled!
I would have preferred to have more actual discussion of the data itself... how to search it, how to analyze it, etc. Instead, we just have people flaming about Keynes.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
tl;dr version: No disrespect was meant. The proxy baptism for your father was an act of love and friendship, which he is free to reject if he doesn't want it. I'm sorry if you were offended.
The long version:
I think you misunderstand the nature of the ordinance. Here's the logic we Mormons use to justify this:
Where's the disrespect in that? If we're right, and he needs it and accepts it, we're doing him a favor. If we're right, and he doesn't want it, it wouldn't matter if we'd done it or not. If we're wrong, then why does it matter?
Furthermore, church policy is that names submitted for baptisms must be from the submitter's own family; this was reinforced just this past weekend during the semi-annual General Conference (prophet + apostles speaking to the entire church membership, happens twice a year). Unless a mistake was made you should be asking your own relatives to find out which one is a closet Mormon, not lashing out angrily at our entire community. When you find out who it was, please be kind; they truly believe that without this ordinance the gates of Heaven are closed to your Father, and they love him enough to arrange for them to be opened.
By the way, you wrote:
A person's right to practice their religion should be conditional on respect for others and their beliefs or lack thereof.
Ummm... wow. Posting anonymously in case you take this post as disrespectful and try to take away my right to practice religion.
I agree with you, though, that leaving others free to worship as they choose is important; it's one of the central doctrines of my religion:
Eleventh Article of Faith: We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.
I realize that my tone in the long version has been somewhat defensive and can be interpreted as confrontational; I'm sorry about that. I respect your choice to live according to your own beliefs, and I hope you can see that I'm not trying to deprive your dearly departed Father of his choice either. It's not my intent to offend you, only to persuade you that whoever arranged for your Father to be baptized postmortem did so in a spirit of love.
The first thing I thought when I read the last paragraph of the summary was "the comments thread is going to be useless" ...
The Mormons have plans to convert the entire pile of images into a searchable database -- in the next six months. I understand it will be available on-line for you and me to use free of charge.
This is no small task. They have thousands of volunteers that have been doing this for years, with other indexing projects, but they have been ramping up for this project, training new volunteers and getting ready to jump on it. The program they use downloads images a page at a time from their storage server, and highlights various parts of the image while the volunteer types the data into input forms. Each page gets sent to two different indexers, who transcribe the data independently. The program checks the data, and any discrepancies are sent to a third arbitrator volunteer who decides which data is correct.
So yeah, they're serious about this stuff. And although they try to maximize the accuracy, by the very nature of the amateur volunteers some mistakes are bound to slip through. If this project is anything like the 1930 census they already have indexed, you can still get to the original scans to check the data yourself. After you have found a record by searching the indexed database, if you have an account on ancestry.com, a click or two will bring up the scanned image of the page that name was on.
As far as Mormons being a huge part of the traffic, I expect the indexing server needs a copy, but other than that, most of them will be downloading the images from their server. I don't expect there are many Mormons requesting their own copies if the data.
As far as privacy goes, I've seen worse. I have a third cousin who is into genealogy. Somehow he got my family's personal information and stuck it on his web site--all about our mutual third great grandfather. One feature is a tree of all of his descendants. It has names, birthdates, family connections (mother's maiden name, for example) and such. After repeated requests to remove me from his list, we're still there. In contrast, the Mormon family search won't show you any information on people who are still alive. There's a good chance your data is in their database if you have a close family member who is Mormon. Just nobody can get to it until after you are dead. They seem to be making a reasonable effort to maximize genealogical research capabilities while trying to avoid privacy problems.
How would the 9th Amendment preclude something that is explicitly provided for in the Constitution as:
"The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
If you don't want to accept that they have the right to determine how to conduct the Enumeration, then you really will have to make them declare it.
It's a duty in the Constitution. They are required to conduct it. Ensuring the cooperation of the participants through various means is completely rational. To do otherwise would be an abrogation of their aforementioned obligation.
If you wanted to argue that putting you in jail for 10 years was cruel and unusual, that'd be fair enough, but a 100 dollar fine? Even the original census had a fine. Of 20 dollars. With inflation and all, that's considerably more than what it would be today.
They request extremely detailed information (what time do you go to work?) that could easily be used to victimize people. And if you refuse to answer, they threaten you with fines.
So the root of the problem is the government lying to people for its gain. But rather than focus on the specific issue, it's a "OMG, Census evil" rant. They can't fine you for refusing to give the time you go to work. And nobody has ever been victimized from any census information, so worrying about that is insane, you might as well worry about Martians invading, it's happened as often and is as likely to happen.
I see there being a serious problem with government institutionalizing lying. offering "help" with sentencing in return for pleas when the cop on the scene has no authority for such bargains. Undercover cops lying to entrap people (and yes, most undercover stings are entrapment, as the person would not have committed the crime they are charged with if the other person hadn't been solicitation the crime). Rogue Census workers threatening false repercussions for failure to answer non-required questions. That's not a census issue, that's a government problem, and picking on just the census indicates an unreasonable bias against it.
Learn to love Alaska
I guess the 9th amendment doesn't exist then?
The Constitution explicitly includes the census, so there's nothing in there that could violate the 9th. Have you ever read the Constitution, or do you just know what you like and read only the parts that you think support you? There's no definition of "Census" in the Constitution, and even the first census included demographic questions (you know, the census written by the same people who wrote the Constitution). So your false re-write of history fails on every count.
Learn to love Alaska
If the government wants to kick in your door to frame you as a terrorist one morning, they are not going to the Census Bureau to find out that you answered that your leave your house at 7:15 every morning. More likely they will notice that your credit card data tells them you stop to buy a coffee from a Starbucks a few blocks away every morning at 7:20 and infer they should kick down your door before that.
You forget Wal-mart and Target likely know more about you than the government does and they do not have a 72-year confidentiality clause.
Make them declare it? Ugh, sorry for the lack of clarity caused by bad writing there.
I should have written "make a more explicit declaration of your restrictions" or something. But as it is, they're pretty explicitly allowed to make it in such manner as they may by law direct.
This includes the questions and the methods to facilitate cooperation. Much like say, Jury Duty, Taxes, or what not.
If you want a government without the power of compulsion or coercion, you're in the wrong place.
Survivors of the Japanese (and to a lesser extent German and Italian) internment camps can probably tell you.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
So does this data allow me to figure out YOUR mother's maiden name?
they have actually looked at the fucking data. social science is incredibly important, but tends to be run by fucking hacks.
as though it were as proven as gravitation. its not. its just a goddamned theory.
This, kids, is why you should never underestimate the paranoid terror the average American lives with.
well well now you can find out how many jews entered ur country in 1940, and expose the lie that 6 (oh now revised to 3, oh no revised again to 2, oh no revised agaiin to 1.5, oh no was it even there?) million jooz were killed in Germany.
Why is this quote from a relatively unknown Northern Illinois University professor being reprinted everywhere, as if his opinion about what the 1940 Census may contain is the most important factoid about the 1940 Census? It's not as if the debate over the efficacy of the New Deal had been set aside until the 1940 data might provide a definitive answer.
I guess he was just so happy to be asked for his opinions by NPR, that he could not help but include his own "Big Government is Best" spin.
But we already knew that the unemployment rate was still 14.8% by 1940, after seven years of New Deal policies. And there was evidence that the economy would have recovered much faster if the Roosevelt Administration had done the exact opposite from the policies it implemented. That's also the case today, with respect to the Obama Administration.