MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 41“This is [true] if you have documents or do
not have documents.” The census, too, she
said, “is a right that one should exercise. And
it is a right that we all have as immigrants and
as human beings.”
She asked how many of the women had
participated in the census before. Only a few
raised their hands. Maria, a farmworker who’d
been in the United States for 37 years, said
she’d filled out the form in 2010 but couldn’t
convince her neighbors to do so. “They’re
afraid,” she said. “They tell you, ‘They’re not
going to count me. They only count people
with documents. We thought we were going
to be investigated.’” Her friends who received
the form threw it in the trash, she added.
Adela, who came to Fresno 10 years ago,
had never filled out a census form either.
“You come not knowing the laws,” she
said. “People say, ‘Oh, don’t fill it out be-
cause you don’t have insurance. You’re not
here legally. As a result, you can’t fill it out.
It doesn’t count. Even if you fill it out, it
doesn’t count.’” She also recalled seeing 2010
census forms in trash cans in Fresno.
Quezada explained that California re-
ceived $77 billion annually from the fed-
eral government, allocated according to
census data, for programs that many people
in the room used, like Head Start, English-
language classes, and Medi-Cal public
health insurance. If these 25 women were
counted, she said, then over 10 years they
would attract funding on the order of “half
a million dollars, in this little room.” She
added, “I hope you see the magnitude of the
consequence of not participating.”
Francesca, a mother of four from Guerrero,
Mexico, who had lived in Fresno for 18 years,
raised her hand. She wanted to know why,
despite staying at the same address in Fresno
for 11 years, she didn’t receive a census form
in 2010. “Almost everyone I know has never filled out a
form,” she said. She wondered if that was one reason there
weren’t enough teachers at her children’s schools and the
classes were too large. (Census data helps school districts
decide where to build new schools and hire teachers.)
Twenty percent of Californians live in hard-to-count areas
like Fresno, where more than a quarter of all households
failed to mail back their 2010 census forms, including a third
of Latinos and African Americans, Quezada told the group.
She pulled up a map showing that California contains 10
of the 50 counties in the country with the lowest census
response rates. Those 10 counties are home to 8.4 million
people; 38 states have smaller populations.
“There I am,” Francesca said, pointing at the map.
“Yes,” Quezada responded. “There you are.”
after the 2010 census failed to count 1.5 million US
resi dents of color, the government might have been ex-
pected to devote more resources to ensure an accurate
count. Instead, in 2012 Congress told the Census Bureau,
over the Obama White House’s objections, to spend less
money on the 2020 census than it had in 2010, despite
inflation and the fact that the population was projected
to grow by 25 million. After Trump took oice, Congress
cut the bureau’s budget by another 10 percent and gave
it no additional funding for 2018, even though the census
typically receives a major cash infusion at this juncture
to prepare for the decennial count.
The bureau’s director, John Thompson, testified on
Capitol Hill in May 2017 that the budget cuts would
force “diicult decisions.” A week later, he announced hisDOWN FOR THE COUNT
Security experts warn that an online census will
leave us more vulnerable than ever.in 2016 , Australia tried to run a more
eicient national census by conducting
it online. Things went badly from the
start. On the day the survey was posted,
hackers launched a denial-of-service
attack that brought down the system
for 40 hours. The census was eventu-
ally taken, but the government sufered
massive embarrassment.
Now the United States is planning its
first census that will be conducted pri-
marily online. And with ongoing hacking
of US political and government data by
foreign powers, it’s no surprise security
experts are warning that things could
go very wrong.
“We know that certain foreign intel-
ligence services like to mess with US in-
stitutions and to try and cause distrust
in the system, right?” says Patrick Gray,
a leading cybersecurity journalist based
in Australia who was the first to piece
together what happened there in 2016.
“Messing with the census would be a
good way to do that.”
The US Census Bureau tested an inter-
net survey in 2000 and scrapped it in 2010
because of concerns over data collection
efectiveness and security. Now, despite
cost overruns, underfunding, understaf-
ing, and tight deadlines, it’s back for 2020.
Jake Williams, a former National
Security Agency hacker, says there are
several ways state-sponsored or politi-
cally motivated hackers could underminethe census. They could launch an attack
like the one in Australia to overwhelm the
system and undermine confidence in it.
They could flood the portal with phony
data to manipulate the results. Or they
could breach the system and leak people’s
personal information. Any of these would
take substantial time and money to fix.
“It’s asymmetric warfare,” Williams
says. “If I can spend $1 and force you to
spend $10, that’s the Cold War all over
again. That’s how we won.”
Already, problems have cropped up.
The bureau’s compressed timeline pre-
vented it from conducting reliable tests
to detect holes in the computer sys-
tem’s security. In tests it did conduct,
data collected by census workers could
not be transmitted and in some cases
was deleted completely.
A lack of confidence in the internet
census could be self-fulfilling. In Australia
in 2016, people opted to leave some per-
sonal information blank on their forms
after civil liberties groups warned that
their data might not be properly secured.
Kenneth Prewitt, who led the Census
Bureau from 1998 to 2001, says a breach
of the basic information people submit
to the census probably wouldn’t lead
to identity theft but could erode trust
in government. “It wouldn’t amount to
much because there’s not much to learn,”
he says. “But the optics of it would be
devastating.” —AJ Vicens