Feb 6, 2019 12:07 PM

The Challenge of America's First Online Census

Going digital could make the 2020 census more inclusive and efficient, but experts fear the Census Bureau is also opening itself up to new risks.

On a frigid morning in Washington, DC, last week, four staffers from the United States Census Bureau stood shoulder to shoulder on a stage, smiling widely as they soaked in the whoops, whistles, and eager applause from the crowd seated before them. The Esri Federal GIS Conference, an annual event where government employees gather to talk about mapping technology, isn’t exactly what you’d call a rowdy affair. But this year, the Census Bureau representatives---a quartet of geographers and IT professionals---put on a particularly impressive show, demoing a suite of new tech tools for the 2020 census. At least, it was impressive if you knew anything about how the census usually works.

Despite the country’s ballooning population and advances in automation, the crucial process of counting every person living in the United States hasn’t changed all that much in the course of the census’ 230-year history. Until now, it’s mostly come down to distributing paper questionnaires to every home and hiring an army of clipboard-carrying canvassers to knock on the door of anyone who doesn’t respond. In 2020, that will change. For the first time ever, the bureau is asking the majority of people to answer the census online. Not only that, but behind the scenes the entire process of running the census is getting a high-tech facelift.

If the bureau’s plan works, a digital census could make the count more inclusive and, eventually at least, help cut costs—the 2010 census was the most expensive in US history, costing more than $12 billion. But surveying a population of 330 million people in real time using brand new technology is a lot harder than pulling off even the most high-stakes demo. For as many opportunities as this tech-centric approach to the census holds, experts fear the bureau is opening itself up to a range of new risks, from basic functionality and connectivity failures to cybersecurity threats and disinformation campaigns.

Given the ways that census data underpins the fundamentals of democracy, those aren’t risks to be taken lightly. It’s the census, after all, that decides how congressional districts get divvied up, how many seats each state holds in the Electoral College, how the federal budget is allocated, and, ultimately, whether people are fairly and accurately represented by their government.

Standing before a blue-lit background at Esri, the Census Bureau team showed off the goods.

First, there was a tool called BARCA, which uses satellite and aerial imagery to help census workers see how every block in the country has changed over the past decade. They can use that information to more efficiently build out address lists for every home in the United States before the census begins. What used to take two hours for canvassers to do on foot, the bureau representatives said, now takes just two minutes in the office.

Then came ROAM, a mapping product that’s helping the bureau predict where people are least likely to respond to the census using historical and demographic data. With this information, the bureau can target specific community groups, like churches and other organizations, to help spread the word. Both BARCA and ROAM were developed internally at the Bureau.

Finally, the team demoed what is arguably the most transformative tool of all: an app called ECaSE, which some 350,000 census workers will use as they take to the streets on foot next year to follow up with the estimated 60 million households that are expected not to respond to the census the first time around. The app, which was developed in partnership with a contractor, will run on iPhone 8 devices provided by the bureau, and will personalize canvassers’ routes based on their work availability, the languages they speak, and the best time of day to visit each household. The data they collect will be encrypted and automatically uploaded to the Census Bureau’s central repository. The goal is to replace, or at least radically reduce, the 17 million pages of paper maps that the bureau printed out for the 2010 census and the 50 million paper questionnaires that field workers had to tote around with them. And because the tools are expected to make field workers more efficient, the bureau expects to hire roughly half as many people as it did in 2010.

Little wonder the audience seemed pleased with the presentation. And yet, thanks to years of budget cuts and a series of scaled-back field tests, some fear the Census Bureau and the broader US government are ill-equipped to handle any new issues that could arise as a result of the high-tech census, particularly at a time when hackers and propagandists seem to be working overtime to undermine American institutions.

“There’s a good reason a lot of information is becoming digitized. It’s efficient and useful,” says Josh Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. “But it also creates vulnerabilities, and we’re reminded of that virtually every week in the form of a hack or data being used in ways it’s not supposed to be.” Last year, Geltzer and a group of cybersecurity experts sent a letter to the Census Bureau expressing their concerns and asking for answers about how the whole operation will work.

The bureau is well aware of the risks it faces, and it’s spent years developing defenses against them. The data will be encrypted, and both the field staff and office staff who access it will only be able to log into the system using two-factor authentication. The bureau is also working with the Department of Homeland Security to implement a system called EINSTEIN 3A, which will monitor government networks for malicious activity, and to communicate with the intelligence community about specific threats. In a recent program review, the agency said it would conduct a bug bounty program to test public-facing systems.

“From the moment we collect your responses, our goal---and legal obligation---is to keep them safe,” the Census Bureau said in a statement.

But the bureau’s tech team has also acknowledged that some external threats aren’t fully within their control, like, for instance, the threat posed by hundreds of millions of respondents using unsecured, potentially corrupted computers, phones, and tablets to report their answers, leaving those answers open to manipulation. The bureau has also warned that phishing attempts, where fraudsters contact people posing as the Census Bureau, could trick people into divulging sensitive information about themselves. The same goes for bogus websites that imitate the bureau. And, in the age of social media, there’s always the risk that a dedicated disinformation campaign could attempt to mislead people about the Census or undermine their faith in the process.

"Some of these challenges are new for the 2020 census," the bureau's deputy director Ron Jarmin said onstage at the Esri conference. "This is a foundational thing for our democracy. Much like elections, people that want to sow discord in our country might try to mess with the census."

The bureau says it’s been working with companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft to counter this sort of behavior and flag it before it’s too late. But as recent examples of election meddling around the world have shown, there are limits to what the government, or these companies, can do to totally mitigate these threats. “While we cannot control bad actors, we are working with partners to identify phishing attempts and website spoofing,” the bureau says.

According to John Thompson, who served as director of the Census Bureau from 2013 through May 2017, the most important thing the government can do is educate the public about what the Census Bureau will and won’t ask of them. It won’t, for example, ask people for their social security numbers or attempt to contact them by phone or email.

The problem is, the bureau has been woefully underfunded for years, an issue that has far-reaching consequences for census preparation.

Usually, the Census Bureau sees its budget increase in years leading up to each decennial count. Between 2014 and 2017, however, funding was essentially flat. Thompson says that forced the agency to defer a number of programs for years, including research on its paid advertising program, which helps inform the public about why it's important to respond to the census and offers assurances about the security of census data.

“That’s an incredibly important program,” Thompson says. “A lot of stakeholders were becoming concerned it was being deferred.”

The bureau says it’s on track to begin running ads in January 2020, two months before the first census invitations go out in March. And while early research may have been deferred, the bureau has since conducted surveys and focus groups that will help the agency understand people’s mindset toward the census.

Research on advertising wasn’t the only thing that got cut during the lean days. Due to budget restraints, the bureau was forced cancel a series of planned field tests in 2017 and dramatically reduce the scope of its "dress rehearsal" test in 2018, which was supposed to replicate the full census in a few key geographic areas. Originally, the 2018 test was to be carried out in rural West Virginia; Providence, Rhode Island; and tribal lands in Washington State. In the end, the Census Bureau eliminated all its end-to-end tests except the one in Rhode Island. That meant the agency never got to see how the full system would function in a rural environment.

“It was a difficult decision, but it was all we could do,” Thompson says.

The lack of comprehensive testing in remote locations presents a serious possibility that the system simply won’t work properly in areas that are on the wrong side of the digital divide. “There’s been less practice for this than even the Census Bureau thought there should be,” Geltzer says. “Given it’s going to scale up dramatically for the real thing, the lack of practice is a concerning thing.”

The bureau did test what’s known as address canvassing---the process of building the address list---in West Virginia and Washington. This allowed field staff to at least try out some of the tools they’ll use during the real census. According to the bureau, those tests did turn up connectivity issues, motivating the agency to tweak the technology so that now, the bureau says, “if a census taker is in a low connectivity area, the data they collect is stored and encrypted until the device is connected to the Internet.”

As an additional backstop, the Census Bureau will also mail out paper questionnaires to the 20 percent of households in regions with limited connectivity or with older, less tech savvy populations. It relies heavily on data from the annual American Community Survey to assess where these populations live. These people will still have the option of completing the census online if they’re able. Every household will also have the opportunity to answer by phone for the first time.

For all of the bureau’s contingency plans, fancy new tools, and slick demos, there are plenty of recent examples of what could go wrong when invitations to respond begin going out across the country in March of 2020, says Terri Ann Lowenthal, former staff director of the House of Representatives’ census oversight subcommittee.

Healthcare.gov famously crashed after only a few thousand people tried to apply for health insurance. Traffic to the census response website will be several orders of magnitude larger, Lowenthal says.

Then there was the Australia debacle. On August 9, 2016, millions of Australians tried to complete their country’s first online census, only to receive an error message on the government website. Australia’s Bureau of Statistics tweeted that the site was experiencing an outage and hoped to have an update by morning. It wound up taking days to recover from what the bureau said was a distributed denial of service attack against the website. The total cost of the setback was more than $21 million.

“The Census Bureau must pull off the census on time, according to a minute-by-minute schedule,” Lowenthal says. “If something goes wrong, the entire process is not only disrupted but potentially undermined.”