August 8, 2022 at 1:35 p.m.
The American Community Survey: It's back and it's still dangerous
The American Community Survey: It's back and it's still dangerous
It has lots of questions about your life. It's just a little survey, progressives say. No biggie, and it helps the government identify and help underserved communities. What's the harm?
The harm is plenty. For one thing, the ACS is a compelled and unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Not only does the survey pose a series of highly personal questions - sexual orientation and gender identity have been added - those selected to answer them have no choice but to do so, for the survey is compelled by federal law. The Census Bureau can levy fines, and refusal to participate could cost a person up to $5,000.
What's more, the questions have to be answered for every household member. About 3.5 million people receive the survey each year on a rolling, random basis. That's why, if you haven't received your survey yet, you likely will at some point.
Besides its constitutionality, it is yet one more attempt by the government to create a registry of its citizens, a registry containing valuable information for the government in case said government decides it needs to "find," "monitor," or "take action" against certain groups. The reason government registries are so dangerous is that they incentivize abuse: Individuals cease being equal individuals and become labels in a subset, data points to be analyzed and manipulated. Indeed, why collect so much data on Americans - private citizens not under any suspicion of wrongdoing - unless you believe that someday the government may need that data to target certain classes of those innocent citizens?
Whatever reason that may be, it's wrong by its very definition to collect it coercively. Government registries are always problematic because they are just one change in administration away from being abused - if that. And the ACS may be the most egregious of all because it is compiling extraordinarily personal data on millions of Americans that can be used for nefarious as well as productive purposes.
The controversy over the ACS has been simmering for well over a decade, though conservatives have not been able to do anything about it. As far back as 2009 Republican lawmakers tried to kill it, and the House actually voted in 2012 to do so. Later, Republican lawmakers - including Kentucky's U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and then Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota - introduced legislation to make it optional. All those efforts failed, and, wouldn't you know, after Trump was elected, and Republicans suddenly controlled the House and Senate, somehow all that conservative opposition to the survey disappeared.
Now, a couple of citizens - Maureen Murphy of the state of Washington and John Huddleston of California - have filed a class action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the survey. It is long overdue.
In their lawsuit, Murphy and Huddleston, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, underscore the survey's intrusiveness.
Unlike the decennial Census, the American Community Survey is conducted every year and asks detailed and personal questions such as the person's sexual orientation, gender identity, fertility history, marital status, and divorce history. It asks about private health information, including the effect of medical and psychological conditions on the individual's daily activities. It asks how much taxes and utility bills the household pays. It even asks how many beds, cars, and washing machines the household has. The American Community Survey contains about 100 such questions.
And, the complaint states, people who refuse to answer this detailed questionnaire - which number in the thousands - are subject to fines of up to $5,000.
According to the complaint, Census Bureau agents visited Murphy's house at least three times in December 2021, and sent her at least two letters, in which they told Murphy she was required by U.S. law to answer the ACS. Similarly, a Census Bureau agent visited Huddleston's house at least once in January 2022 and sent at least one letter to his house, stating the same thing.
Among the information the government wanted was their "race"; each household member's name, gender, age, and race, and the household members' relationships with each other; the house's description, year built, move-in date, acreage of land, number of rooms, and number of bedrooms; whether the house had hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, a sink with a faucet, a stove or range, a refrigerator, cellphones or landlines, and a desktop, laptop, smartphones, or tablets.
The government wanted to know whether the house had internet access, and whether the occupants accessed the internet using cellular data plan, broadband, satellite, dial-up, or some other service. The bureau wanted to know the number of cars the occupants had and what fuel was used for heating, as well as "truthful dollar amounts" for electricity, gas, water and sewer, "oil, coal, kerosene, wood, etc." bills, and any monthly condominium fee.
The government wanted to know actual dollar amounts for annual real estate taxes, fire, hazard, and flood insurance, and monthly mortgage payments and whether there was a second mortgage on the house and the dollar amount of the monthly second-mortgage payments.
The government wanted to know whether the occupants were born in the United States or elsewhere, whether they were U.S citizens, the year they came to live in the United States, the highest level of education completed, and a description of their bachelor's degree major.
As if all that wasn't disturbing enough, the bureau wanted to know details of the occupants' physical, mental, or emotional conditions, and whether they had any difficulty concentrating, remembering, making decisions, walking or climbing, dressing or bathing, or running errands.
The government wanted to know if they were working, who they worked for, and how they got to work. They wanted to know their marital status, whether the occupants had been married, widowed, or divorced, and how many times. The government wanted to know their fertility status and whether the occupants had children in the past year, had minor grandchildren, or provide for the grandchildren's basic needs, and how long they had been providing for them.
And the list went on.
Now the dangers of compiling such information are obvious. There's no pretending our untrustworthy federal government would scrub identity from these surveys. Surely questions about citizenship could be used, if the government wanted to, to deport those in the country illegally. On the other side, questions about mental stability and the ability to make decisions could be used to take firearms away from "incompetent people," if the government chose to do so using derivative red flag laws. Questions about gender identity could be used for or against those groups, depending upon who was in power.
The long and the short of it is, none of this is the government's business, especially the federal government's.
As the lawsuit argues, this kind of invasion of the private lives of Americans is unconstitutional on its face. It is an infringement of the First Amendment - the right to speak or to not speak at all - and it is a violation of a fundamental Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
And that is what is going on here: Invading the lives of Americans who are under no suspicion without a warrant to seize information.
The libertarian Ron Paul agrees.
"The founders never authorized the federal government to continuously survey the American people," he wrote. "More importantly, they never envisioned a nation where the people would roll over and submit to every government demand. The American Community Survey is patently offensive to all Americans who still embody that fundamental American virtue, namely a healthy mistrust of government. The information demanded in the new survey is none of the government's business, and the American people should insist that Congress reject it now before it becomes entrenched."
Well said, but sadly, in a nation that did roll over and submit to every governmental medical tyrannydemand during Covid, and where the Democratic Party blindly trusts government authority, from health edicts to foreign policy, it's hard to see any real resistance to the ACS.
Too bad that, for within the mountains of personal data the government is compiling there awaits a moment of recognition - the moment when the citizen realizes she or he is no longer an individual as much as a collective data point on a government list. And that day is the day when the lush mountain becomes a barren prison.
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