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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/30/politics/30census.html

WASHINGTON - The Census Bureau has provided specially tabulated population 
statistics on Arab-Americans to the Department of Homeland Security, 
including detailed information on how many people of Arab backgrounds live 
in certain ZIP codes.

The assistance is legal, but civil liberties groups and Arab-American 
advocacy organizations say it is a dangerous breach of public trust and 
liken it to the Census Bureau's compilation of similar information about 
Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The tabulations were produced in August 2002 and December 2003 in response 
to requests from what is now the Customs and Border Protection division of 
the Department of Homeland Security. One set listed cities with more than 
1,000 Arab-Americans. The second, far more detailed, provided 
ZIP-code-level breakdowns of Arab-American populations, sorted by country 
of origin. The categories provided were Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, 
Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian and two general categories, 
"Arab/Arabic" and "Other Arab."

Hermann Habermann, deputy director of the Census Bureau, said such 
cooperation was standard practice. "We are required to provide information 
to other federal agencies," he said. "This is not a cabal calculating 
secret tabulations."

But Mr. Habermann also expressed concern over application of the data, 
adding: "We do worry about how information will be used. However, we have 
not been given the authority to determine which organization gets which 
information."

Census tabulations of specialized data are legal as long as they do not 
identify any individual.

Christiana Halsey, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, said 
the requests were made to help the agency identify in which airports to 
post signs and pamphlets in Arabic. "The information is not in any way 
being used for law enforcement purposes," she said. "It's being used to 
educate the traveler. We're simply using basic demographic information to 
help us communicate U.S. laws and regulations to the traveling public."

But critics of the information sharing said general demographic snapshots 
could be derived without such detailed information and that the 
ZIP-code-level data with its breakdowns of ancestral origin seemed 
particularly excessive because for all of the groups only English or Arabic 
need be used.