Lack Of Internet Access Threatens 2020 Census Success And The Future Latino Voting Power

from the digital-divide-matters dept

American elections are threatened by more than just Russian hacking; the lack of internet access for the growing Latino population undermines our democracy thanks to a shift to online counting for the 2020 census.

Russian agents have and can again hack algorithms and voting systems -- but it matters little in the grand scheme of things if Latinos (the largest minority group in the U.S.) are blocked from participating in the election process before they even get to the voting booth. Without home internet access, the online 2020 census will be another modern civic duty millions of American Latinos won’t have the luxury of participating in, and Congress needs to do something about it.

In 2015, 44 percent of Latinos did not have a broadband connection at home. Connecting to the internet is essential to participate in the 21st century economy. Without internet access, Latinos are shut out from many government benefits and responsibilities -- including the 2020 census. With so many Latinos on the wrong side of the digital divide, the census moving online could cause a domino effect for policies that rely heavily on census data -- like drawing voting districts.

Moving the 2020 census online will make it harder to count Latinos, who have been undercounted in the U.S. census for decades. Particularly, the Census Bureau reports that 1.5 percent of the Latino population was undercounted in 2010. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights cites barriers such as language, poverty, education, and immigrant status as continuing causes to the undercount of Latinos.

To be sure, those who cannot self-report online will have a paper option similar to the paper options of past censuses. However, the Census Bureau will no longer be conducting door-to-door surveying en mass, and will rely heavily on online marketing. The paper option alone will not be an adequate replacement for those without broadband so long as the Bureau also eliminates its door to door survey -- a necessary component to ensure more accurate counts.

It is also true that the Bureau plans to make the 2020 census form available on mobile devices. However, this is not an equivalent option for those who are smartphone reliant. Not to mention smartphone data plans can be extremely limiting and are often the first thing to go in a time of financial hardship. At least 23 percent of smartphone owners report cancelling or suspending their service because of financial restraint.

The online shift in the 2020 census is particularly troubling for a population with a history of census problems. Although there was a one-time “Mexican” option on the 1930 census, the U.S. didn’t make its first real attempt to measure the Latino population until the 1970 census. It wasn’t until the 2000 census that the U.S. even started using the term “Latino.” Before this, mix-ups or exclusive terminology made tracing data from decade to decade problematic.

To worsen matters, the Census Bureau is making this drastic change based on inaccurate, or missing, data on exactly who has internet access -- and who remains unconnected. A lack of Congressional funds and problematic methodologies have slowed processes and produced over-exaggerated maps. Where connection is available, it’s worthless if a household doesn’t have a computer or (in the very least) a mobile device to utilize that connection. Even more troublesome is when families can’t afford to connect; a growing familiarity as cost remains the number one barrier to broadband adoption.

With 21.9 percent of the Latino population in the U.S. living in poverty, more needs to be done to address the digital divide -- both where broadband is already deployed and where it isn’t yet. Closing the digital divide starts with preserving and expanding programs like Lifeline (an FCC program that provides a subsidy for low-income families to access communications services), to expanding municipal broadband, and to encouraging competition in existing broadband markets -- all things Trump’s FCC is actively working to gut.

Despite showing up to the voting booth for President Obama in 2008, Latinos face trouble with voting. If undercounted, Latino voting power will be diminished even more by efforts to gerrymander congressional districts or concentrate Latinos into one or two small districts. Solving these voting rights issues is not likely before the 2020 census, but an undercount of the Latino population due to the digital divide certainly will worsen matters.

As the 2020 census goes online for the first time, the digital divide is a threat to the future voting power of Latinos and other unconnected communities, including disconnected urban areas as well as rural America. One thing is for sure, we will continue to see an undercount and underestimation in political districting if large swaths of Americans can’t effectively participate in the new census. The digital divide’s impact on the 2020 census poses a significant problem that Congress should be invested in solving now instead of when it’s too late.

Daiquiri Ryan is Policy Counsel for the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC)

Filed Under: census, digital divide, latinos, technology, voting

Australia's Census Fail Goes Into Overdrive -- A Complete And Utter Debacle

from the at-least-maybe-people-will-realize-that-e-voting-is-bad dept

Earlier this week, we wrote about how the Australian census was looking like a complete mess, with the government deciding that it was going to retain all the personal info that it was collecting, including linkages to other data, rather than destroying it after it got the aggregate census numbers. There were lots of concerns about privacy and security -- and we highlighted some ridiculous statements from people in the Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) who are running the census, insisting their security was "the best security" while at the same time they were storing passwords as plaintext.

Little did we know that the disaster that many expected was underestimating the actual disaster. You see, once the census website launched on Tuesday, the site immediately got hit by a series of denial of service attacks which took the entire system offline. In fact, it ended up remaining entirely offline for nearly 48 hours, and while the ABS says it's back, many people are still reporting problems. Perhaps that's because the ABS seems to be taking extreme and ridiculous measures to try to block more denial of service attacks, including blocking anyone who's using a VPN or a third-party DNS provider such as Google's DNS offering. For a system that talks up how secure and private it is -- to then push people to drop their use of VPNs and/or more secure DNS providers raises all sorts of questions -- none of them very good.

Meanwhile, as people are realizing that this is making Australia look like a global joke, the government seems unwilling to shoulder any of the blame -- with most of the finger-pointing directed at IBM, the company who built the web-based census system.

Meanwhile, the ABS folks in charge of the census held an apparently pointless "press conference" where they refused to take any questions, and after a few apologies insisted that everything was fine and everyone should go ahead and fill out their census entries. Of course, now people are turning up old clips of the ABS joyfully explaining just how much money they were saving with this system. Perhaps they shouldn't have skimped on basic cybersecurity protections.

About the only good thing that seems likely to come out of all of this is that it may slow down a push for internet voting. People are realizing that if this is how poorly things work when it's "only" the census, then perhaps Australia shouldn't be rushing to implement online voting. If the census can be taken down for two days due to a denial of service attack, just imagine what would happen to an election voting website...

Filed Under: asb, australia, census, denial of service attack, privacy, security

Australian Government's Stupid Census Plans Puts Privacy At Risk, May Destroy Their Own Census

from the short-sighted-in-the-extreme dept

You may have heard that tomorrow is the official day for the Australian census to take place... and many people are planning to ignore it, because of massive security concerns and some incredibly stupid plans by the Aussie government to retain and make use of the data collected. Having an accurate population census is an extremely important tool for a wide range of government services, but especially in an age of increasing (and very legitimate) concerns about government overreach and surveillance, some are reasonably worried about what's done with the data. In the US, it's been made quite clear that census data absolutely must be kept secret and not connected to individuals or used for other purposes.

Over in Australia, they've apparently got some other ideas in mind. Late last year, the Australia Bureau of Statistics announced that for this year's census it would, for the first time, retain all the names and addresses it collected. This has raised some pretty serious concerns, and some fairly weak claims from the government. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced that no one should worry because the government always protects people's privacy. No, really.

Mr Turnbull said on Wednesday the organisation "always protects people's privacy".

"The security of their personal details is absolute and that is protected by law and by practice," he said.

"That is a given."

Anyone claiming that the security of any system "is absolute" has no fucking clue about security. There is no such thing as absolute security, and saying as such probably just acts more to entice hackers to try to break in than anything else. The comments from the ABS's chief statistician are not any more comforting. When asked about security, he went with a Trumpian response of "we have the best security features."

"The ABS has the best security features," he said.

"We've never had a privacy breach with Census information and we do secure the information somewhat differently … These days we can keep names separate from address and separate from other Census content, in three separate computer systems and never brought together."

When asked if he believed this year's Census had been handled poorly, Mr Kalisch responded that "we're well ahead of where we thought we would be".

Making matters even worse, over the weekend, it was revealed that the ABS actually had plans to crossmatch people's data to other government services, and do other things with it -- which is exactly what a large part of the concerns were about.

“Retention of personal identifiers could improve the value of census data through data integration and linking, which would enable new products,’’ the document, released under freedom of information laws, stated.

The same document notes that there may be some "public backlash" to all of this "which would need to be carefully managed."

So far, they're not doing a very good job managing anything. The privacy and security concerns are growing rapidly, and people are speaking out on why they're willing to face fines and punishment by refusing to fill out the census -- even those who strongly support the idea of the census. This post from the former Deputy Privacy Commissioner, Anna Johnson, is well worth a read:

The definition of ‘census’ is “an official count”.  I actually want to stand up and be counted.  But only counted; not named or profiled or data-matched or data-linked, or anything else.  The privacy risks of doing anything else are just too great.

I have thought about just refusing to provide my name.  But even if I don’t give my name, if the ABS is determined to link my Census data with other datasets, there would be enough other information in my Census answers (sex, age, home address, previous home address, work address) to let them proceed regardless.  It won’t be enough to protect my privacy.

There's a lot more in Johnson's post that is worth reading, including just how ridiculous the privacy promises are, and even an analogy of how the ABS is acting "like a very, very bad boyfriend" who "keeps on breaking promises, pushing boundaries and disappointing you."

As for the security assurances, beyond just being ludicrous in claiming "absolute" security, there are already some pretty serious concerns. First of all, can you really claim that your security is "absolute" when you're storing passwords in plaintext? I don't think so -- but that's apparently what the ABS is doing with census passwords. Storing passwords in plaintext is the clear mark of an amateurish security operation.

On top of that, some are already finding that their older computers are apparently unable to handle the census. If the goal is to collect information on everyone, perhaps you should design a simple system that doesn't require a modern computer. Finally, shouldn't people be at least somewhat concerned when the security for the census is being handled by IBM, and an IBM "worldwide security architect" based in Australia tweets (and then deletes) that he expects the census data to be "inevitably leaked"? Having a census is important. But it should be clearly and directly limited to just that purpose. There should be no storage of names and addresses. There should only be storage of the final aggregate data. The fact that Australia is going in a different direction -- and considered "doing more" with the information, including crosslinking it to create "new products" should be extremely concerning. The fact that the government is claiming its security is "absolute" when it can't even properly handle passwords makes the whole thing a joke.

And, now, because of this mess, plenty of people say they're simply not going to obey and respond to the census. And while the Australian government may try to crack down on such behavior, in the end, it's absolutely going to call the accuracy of the census into question. So in their quest to expand the power of the census, the ABS may have done the exact opposite. * Special thanks to Australian journalist/privacy activist Asher Wolf for helping me go through some of the details on this story.

Filed Under: austaralia, census, crosslinking, data, privacy, security

Forget E-Voting Problems, Now We Have To Worry About E-Census Problems Too

from the new-technology-isn't-always-good... dept

It looks like the US census is the latest process to be prematurely "automated" under the silly belief that computers automatically do everything better. Reports are coming out about how the new computerized census systems aren't just costly, they might also be inaccurate (bonus!). The system involves handheld devices for census-takers, but the devices are apparently not that intuitive. Thus there are additional training costs involved, and no one seems keen on paying for that. There are a few options here, including mostly ignoring the new system (which only cost $600 million in taxpayer money) and going back to a more manual process. However, the company that provided the devices insists the complaints are overblown and with just half an hour of training anyone could understand how to use the devices. Either way, it should be a reminder that any attempt to automate a process that uses the "just add technology!" component probably is going to be something of a disaster.

Filed Under: census, technology