If the Census Bureau’s plan to keep your name attached to your census response doesn’t ring huge alarm bells in your head, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you, a Nigerian Prince who needs help reclaiming his millions, and a beautiful Russian billionairess bride desperate to meet you.
Even if the Census Bureau doesn’t intend to use the deeply personal information it collects against you, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be plenty of other government departments lining up to access / subpoena the census information on anyone they find interesting… for any reason they find convenient.
In a world where there are so many rules, regulations, and bylaws to break, and the ever-present threat of over-the-top enforcement of meaningless infringements, it’s insane to think it’s ok to hand over in depth information about yourself to any government department if that information can be traced back to you!
If that seems paranoid, if you think that anyone who wouldn’t willingly hand over their detailed information to the government ‘must have something to hide’, set aside 45 minutes and watch this video:
And if after watching that video you STILL can’t understand why someone would want to keep their private life private, then this isn’t the blog for you my friend. Go in peace, and may God have mercy on your clueless soul.
But this decision by the Census Bureau is doubly stupid. Not only are they turning themselves into a threat to the privacy and therefore liberty of all Australians, they are also going to get VERY low quality data on this next census! In the past people would have been more likely to answer honestly thanks to the fact that they believed their answers could never be traced back to them. Now, a very high percentage of people are going to be hesitating… asking themselves ‘what if’ questions about the implications of the information they’re giving away, and maybe not being entirely truthful.
Again, that doesn’t mean they have something to hide, it just means they have some understanding of the long history of governmental abuse of information, and aren’t dumb enough to give the hangman a customised length of rope for their necks!
Increasingly governments and bureaucrats are able to wield terrifying amounts of power over people thanks to the sheer number of laws, and the ‘discretionary powers’ they are entrusted with… and thanks to the sheer volume of information they can get on each and every one of us. If someone decided they had it in for you, how long would they need to look before they could find an excuse to make your life hell? Keep in mind that they don’t actually have to find wrongdoing… just the whiff of it… just enough of a possibility of wrongdoing to set the dogs loose on your sorry ass and watch you get dragged through legal hell till you’re out of money, divorced, homeless… and finally found innocent of any wrongdoing.
So there you have it, in one fell swoop a lowly bureaucracy has managed to threaten our privacy, make the government seem that little bit more menacing, and destroy the integrity of their census (which is the whole reason they exist). Nice work, government. This is exactly the kind of quality decision making we’ve all come to expect from you.
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