Ever received intrusive American Community Survey from Census Bureau? Required by law. Thoughts?

[TreasonousBastard]

17. The Census Bureau is one of my part-time jobs and, yes, ACS is...

considered as part of the decennial census and required by law to be completed. Nobody I know of has been fined for refusing, but we do bug you for about three months.

http://www.census.gov/acs/www/#

This is one of about a dozen or so surveys we do and not all require participation. Several, like the Current Population Survey have several visits to see how a housing unit is doing over a period of time, and some, like the American Housing Survey are done for other Federal agencies. Generally, the contracted surveys follow the privacy rules of the contracting agency which might be slightly less constricting than those of the Census Bureau itself.

Privacy is a religion in the Census Bureau-- both the FBI and the IRS have sued to get out data and sent packing by the Supreme Court. Everything we do is encrypted with "need-to-know" authorization and I have five different passwords depending on what it is I'm doing at the time and can't even get at data I've input in specific cases. Every one of us working at Census has taken a nondisclosure oath and threatened with huge fines and jail time should we ever release any data we collected, or know about. I could, in theory, go to jail for just gossiping about a neighbor.

A lot of those economic and jobs reports you see bandied about are a direct result of these surveys and while I admit some are a pain in the ass, a lot of this data can't be gotten any other way.

FWIW, I've been doing this for a while and resistance seems to come and go depending on the latest horrorshow coming out of DC. Lately, the NSA hasn't made our jobs easier.