U.S. to release census data used for legislative redistricting

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters) – The U.S. Census Bureau will release data on Thursday from the 2020 census that states will use to draw congressional and state legislative districts for the next decade, marking the start of what will be a fierce partisan battle over redistricting.

Demographers also expect the data to show that the country’s white population is declining for the first time in history, with people of color representing virtually all population growth.

The release will arrive months later than originally expected after the census took longer to complete due to the coronavirus pandemic. The delay has forced some states to go to court to postpone their redistricting deadlines.

States use the data to redraw district lines for the U.S. House of Representatives after each decennial census, based on where people now reside.

In April, the bureau published state-level figures, showing that Texas, Florida and North Carolina – all states controlled by Republicans – will gain congressional seats next year based on increased populations.

Electoral analysts have said Republicans could potentially erase the Democrats’ thin advantage in the House through redistricting alone.

Thursday’s more detailed data will show how and where the country’s white, Black, Hispanic and Asian communities grew.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by David Gregorio)

U.S. Supreme Court throws out challenge to Trump census immigrant plan

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday threw out a lawsuit seeking to block President Donald Trump’s plan to exclude immigrants living illegally in the United States from the population count used to allocate congressional districts to states.

The 6-3 ruling on ideological lines, with the court’s six conservatives in the majority and three liberals dissenting, gives Trump a short-term victory as he pursues his hardline policies toward immigration.

“At present, this case is riddled with contingencies and speculation that impede judicial review,” the ruling said. The decision noted that the court was not weighing the merits of Trump’s plan.

Challengers led by New York state and the American Civil Liberties Union said Trump’s proposal would dilute the political clout of states with larger numbers of such immigrants, including heavily Democratic California, by undercounting state populations and depriving them of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“If the administration actually tries to implement this policy, we’ll sue. Again. And we’ll win,” said Dale Ho, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who represents the challengers.

The administration has not disclosed what method it would use to calculate the number of people it proposed to exclude or which subsets of immigrants would be targeted. Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall told the justices during the Nov. 30 oral argument in the case that the administration could miss a Dec. 31 statutory deadline to finalize a Census Bureau report to Trump containing the final population data, including the number of immigrants excluded.

During the oral argument, Wall told the justices that it is “very unlikely” the administration would amass data to exclude all immigrants in the country illegally. Instead, Wall said, it may propose excluding certain groups, such as the fewer than 100,000 in federal detention, and the total number may not be high enough to affect apportionment.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissenting opinion that the government can currently try to exclude millions of individuals, including those who are in immigration detention or deportation proceedings, and the some 700,000 young people known as “Dreamers” who came to the U.S. illegally as children.

“Where, as here, the government acknowledges it is working to achieve an allegedly illegal goal, this court should not decline to resolve the case simply because the government speculates that it might not fully succeed,” Breyer added.

There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally. The challengers have argued that Trump’s policy violates both the Constitution and the Census Act, a federal law that outlines how the census is conducted.

The Constitution requires apportionment of House seats to be based upon the “whole number of persons in each state.” Until now, the U.S. government’s practice was to count all people regardless of their citizenship or immigration status.

By statute, the president is required to send Congress a report in early January with the population of each of the states and their entitled number of House districts.

The challengers have argued that Trump’s plan could leave several million people uncounted and cause California, Texas and New Jersey to lose House seats.

A three-judge panel in New York ruled against the administration in September.

The Supreme Court in June 2019 ruled against Trump’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census. Critics said the question was intended to frighten immigrants from taking part in the population count and artificially reduce population numbers in heavily Democratic areas.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; additional reporting by Andrew Chung; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Special Report: 2020 U.S. census plagued by hacking threats, cost overruns

Special Report: 2020 U.S. census plagued by hacking threats, cost overruns
By Nick Brown

(Reuters) – In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nation’s once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house, or buy one from an outside contractor.

The bureau chose Pegasystems Inc, reasoning that outsourcing would be cheaper and more effective.

Three years later, the project faces serious reliability and security problems, according to Reuters interviews with six technology professionals currently or formerly involved in the census digitization effort. And its projected cost has doubled to $167 million — about $40 million more than the bureau’s 2016 cost projection for building the site in-house.

The Pega-built website was hacked from IP addresses in Russia during 2018 testing of census systems, according to two security sources with direct knowledge of the incident. One of the sources said an intruder bypassed a “firewall” and accessed parts of the system that should have been restricted to census developers.

“He got into the network,” one of the sources said. “He got into where the public is not supposed to go.”

In a separate incident during the same test, an IP address affiliated with the census site experienced a domain name service attack, causing a sharp increase in traffic, according to one of the two sources and a third source with direct knowledge of the incident.

Neither incident resulted in system damage or stolen data, the sources said. But both raised alarms among census security staff about the ability of the bureau and its outside security contractor, T-Rex Solutions, to defend the system against more sophisticated cyberattacks, according to five sources who worked on census security, as well as internal messages from security officials that were reviewed by Reuters.

Among the messages, posted on an internal security registry seen by Reuters, was a note observing that T-Rex’s staff lacked adequate forensic capability as recently as June of this year. “In the event of a real-world event such as a significant malware infection,” the team would be “severely limited in its capability to definitively tell the story of what occurred,” the message said.

One of the sources with direct knowledge of the hack involving Russian IP addresses described the internal Census Bureau reaction as a “panic.” The incidents prompted multiple meetings to address security concerns, said the two sources and a third census security source.

Census Bureau spokesman Michael Cook declined to comment on the incidents described to Reuters by census security sources. He said no data was stolen during the 2018 system test and that the bureau’s systems worked as designed.

The work of Pega and T-Rex is part of the bureau’s $5 billion push to modernize the census and move it online for the first time. The project involves scores of technology contractors building dozens of systems for collecting, processing and storing data and training census workers for the once-a-decade count. T-Rex’s security work is projected to cost taxpayers up to $1.4 billion, according to the census budget, making it the largest recipient of the more than $3.1 billion that the bureau set aside for contracts.

The problems with Pega and T-Rex reflect the Census Bureau’s broader struggle to execute the digitization project. The effort has been marred by security mishaps, missed deadlines and cost overruns, according to Reuters interviews over the past several months with more than 30 people involved in the effort.

“The IT is really in jeopardy,” said Kane Baccigalupi, a private security consultant who previously worked on the census project for two years as a member of the federal digital services agency 18F, part of the General Services Administration. “They’ve gone with a really expensive solution that isn’t going to work.”

The potential costs of a hacking incident or a system failure go beyond busted budgets or stolen data. A technological breakdown could compromise the accuracy of the census, which has been a linchpin of American democracy since the founding of the republic more than two centuries ago.

The U.S. Constitution requires a decennial census to determine each state’s representation in Congress and to guide the allocation of as much as $1.5 trillion a year in federal funds. Census data is also crucial to a broad array of research conducted by government agencies, academics and businesses, which rely on accurate demographic statistics to craft marketing plans and choose locations for factories or stores.

In a worst-case scenario, according to security experts, poorly secured data could be accessed by hackers looking to manipulate demographic figures for political purposes. For example, they could add or subtract Congressional seats allocated to states by altering their official population statistics.

The Census Bureau says its information-technology overhaul is on-track. Systems supporting initial census operations – such as creating its address database and hiring workers – are “fully integrated with one another, performance-tested, and deployed on schedule and within budget,” bureau spokesman Cook said.

Cook said that the bureau had conducted a “bug bounty,” a bulletproofing practice in which benevolent hackers are invited to search for vulnerabilities. He called the effort successful but declined to provide details for security reasons.

Lisa Pintchman, a spokeswoman for Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Pega, said the company was selected through a “very rigorous process” and stands by its work. T-Rex, headquartered in Maryland, declined to comment.

The escalating costs and reliability concerns for Pega’s front-end website have prompted the bureau to consider reverting to an in-house system, which remains under construction as a backup, according to three technology professionals involved in the census project. Census spokesman Cook confirmed that the in-house system, called Primus, would be available for use if needed next year.

This exclusive account of the Census Bureau’s technology troubles comes after government oversight agencies have chronicled other security problems, delays and cost overruns.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the fiscal watchdog for Congress, has said the 2020 census is at high risk for a breach or system outage that could prevent people from filling out surveys. The GAO has also said the bureau’s information technology systems won’t be fully tested before the census kicks off for almost all Americans on April 1, 2020, and that 15 of the bureau’s systems – including Pega’s data collection mechanism – were at risk of missing development deadlines ahead of the census.

The Inspector General of the Department of Commerce, meanwhile, in October announced plans to audit the bureau’s technology operations, months after identifying mismanagement of its cloud data-storage system that left it vulnerable to hackers.

Cook declined to comment on the audit but said the bureau is poised to “conduct the most automated, modern, and dynamic decennial census in history.”

The effort to move the census online aims to streamline the counting process, improve accuracy, and rein in cost increases as the population rises and survey response rates decline. Adjusting for 2020 dollars, the 1970 census cost $1.1 billion, a figure that rose steadily to $12.3 billion by 2010, the most recent count. The 2020 tally is projected at $15.6 billion, including a $1.5 billion allowance for cost overruns.

The bureau’s technology woes mounted outside the limelight, as Washington focused on the Trump administration’s push to add a question asking census respondents if they were U.S. citizens, part of a larger effort to curb illegal immigration.

The president abandoned that effort in July after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected it, cheering civil rights groups who had worried it would dissuade immigrants from responding and cost their communities political representation and federal dollars. Still, an October 18 study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that more than one-fifth of Hispanics say they may not participate in next year’s census, compared to 12% of whites.

Graphic: Why the Census Matters, https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-CENSUS/010092JZ39N/index.html

‘SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE’

The census technology overhaul got off to a late start, in part because Congress gave the bureau less funding than it requested for most of the decade. Pressed for time, bureau leadership at times prioritized speed over security, according to four people familiar with the bureau’s security operations.

New technology systems, they said, were tested in settings that were vulnerable to hackers despite carrying unresolved risks that had been identified by the bureau’s in-house security team. The testing was authorized by bureau leadership and supported by T-Rex, over the objections of the in-house security officials, who wanted the vulnerabilities fixed first, three of the people said. It stoked internal tensions that ultimately led one security boss to quit his post, the people said.

The Census Bureau’s Cook declined to comment on whether the testing was done over the objections of in-house security officials but said that the bureau follows a strict protocol to minimize risk.

The bureau began rolling out its technology plans in 2014, promising a technological tour-de-force with 52 separate systems. Twenty-seven of them will be used for collecting census data, which include building the website where respondents submit forms and the tools used by door-knockers tasked with nudging stragglers.

Most of the Census Bureau’s $5 billion in technology spending has gone to seven main contractors, who together have tapped another 41 companies as subcontractors, according to public presentations by the Census Bureau in 2018.

Within months of the rollout, government advisors from two outside agencies – the U.S. Digital Service and 18F – began warning officials off the sprawling approach, according to Baccigalupi and five other people familiar with the discussions. The outside advisers urged a simpler system, one that would be easier to defend against hacks and glitches.

The Digital Service was created in 2014 by President Barack Obama after the troubled launch of Healthcare.gov, the website meant to allow Americans to sign up for health insurance under Obamacare. Design flaws left the site overwhelmed by higher-than-expected traffic and prevented many users from registering for weeks. Digital Service officials saw the 2020 census as a potential repeat of that fiasco, two of the people said.

The General Service Administration’s 18F unit – named for the address of its Washington, D.C. office – functions like a private-sector consultant and is paid by agencies seeking technology help.

18F declined to comment for this story, and the Digital Service did not respond to requests for comment.

The debate between Census Bureau leadership and its advisors from the Digital Service and 18F focused on two broad approaches to software production: monolithic versus modular.

A monolithic framework – like the one envisioned by Census Bureau officials – bundles different functions into one system. In the case of the census, that could mean a system that allows people to answer the survey on a website, translates incoming responses into data and stores it. Monolithic systems can be easier to build, but critics say they become hopelessly complex when something goes wrong. A problem with one function can shutdown the whole process.

“It’s a single point of failure,” Baccigalupi said.

In a modular system, by contrast, engineers build different pieces of software for each function, then write code to allow them to interact. While it’s more challenging to move data through different components, the risk of a system collapse is much smaller. If one function breaks, others can still work while it’s repaired.

Census officials brought in 18F and Digital Service consultants on long-term secondments to help with aspects of the project but largely ignored their recommendations to take a more modular approach, said 18F’s Baccigalupi and Marianne Bellotti, a former agent at the Digital Service who consulted on the project in 2017.

“I told them pretty consistently in 2017: If you suffer a denial-of-service attack, I’m not sure your architecture can withstand it,” Bellotti said.

In a denial-of-service attack, a hacker tries to prevent legitimate users from accessing a program, often by overwhelming it with more connection requests than it can process. Any extended outages during the census would reduce response rates, compromising the accuracy of the data and making it more expensive to collect.

Cook, the Census spokesman, did not comment on why the bureau chose a more monolithic approach but said the consultants recommending against that path did not fully understand its systems.

“18F and USDS looked at portions of our systems and provided recommendations, but neither group had an overall understanding of how those systems integrated or their capabilities,” Cook said.

Graphic: Census costs soar to more than $15 billion, https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/editorcharts/USA-CENSUS-TECHNOLOGY/0H001QXF693K/index.html

RISING COSTS

Bellotti and Baccigalupi say they told the bureau repeatedly in 2016 and 2017 that Pega’s technology wasn’t well-suited to its central tasks – building the self-response website and the mobile applications to be used by census door-knockers. Pega’s code, they argued, would require so much customization that the final product would be slow and prone to glitches.

“If you want to build the fastest car in the world, you build that car from scratch,” Baccigalupi said. “You don’t try to customize a tour bus until it’s the fastest car in the world.”

The Census Bureau’s outside advisers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute shared the concern and told the bureau in a 2016 memo, which was reviewed by Reuters, that commercial products such as Pega’s “are not designed to meet an organization’s specifications.”

Neither the bureau nor Pega commented on the assertion that the need for customization made the system expensive and unreliable.

Before hiring Pega, the bureau already had a workable system for data collection, built by in-house staff, Baccigalupi said. Starting in 2014, small teams had fashioned prototypes for online responses and mobile apps that seemed to work. The online response prototype, known as Primus, had been built at little cost beyond the salaries of the half-dozen or so coders.

The in-house systems were tested, and Primus was used in a real-world setting during smaller surveys conducted by the bureau. All performed well, John Thompson, who served as Census Bureau director from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview.

In a 2016 public report explaining its choice to go with an outside contractor, the bureau called Pega’s product a “commercial off-the-shelf solution” that could work with minimal alterations. Pega would do what Primus and the in-house mobile apps could do, but cheaper, with an estimated price tag of $84.5 million, compared to the $127 million forecast for building in-house. Pega would also supply other key functions, such as transferring user responses to data storage.

The reality was messier. Pega’s off-the-shelf solution has required so much modification that it has become “unrecognizable,” said one former Census Bureau official involved in the contracting process. In January 2018, the bureau nearly doubled Pega’s cost estimate to $167.3 million. It has spent about $149 million so far.

Contract documents reviewed by Reuters showed about $121 million of Pega’s contract has gone toward “contracting services,” a category that two former bureau contracting officials said typically refers to the labor required to write and customize code. The figure is more than 13 times Pega’s initial estimate for contracting services.

The bureau did not comment on the escalating costs. Pintchman, the Pega spokeswoman, said the work is “on budget” and that “any changes in estimates would be a result of changes in project scope as well as the Census Bureau identifying additional opportunities for us to add value.”

Thompson, who ran the bureau at the time it decided on Pega, described the decision as a “tough call.” While Thompson and his team viewed Primus as capable of scaling up for the 2020 Census, he said the prospects for scaling up the in-house prototypes for census-worker mobile apps were less certain.

As Pega’s problems have become more clear, Census officials have considered reverting to Primus, the in-house system, for data collection, said three sources familiar with the bureau’s thinking. As recently as this summer, they were instructing employees “to build Primus out, in case it was needed,” said one of those people.

SECURITY INCIDENTS

The only full-scale test of the system took place in Providence, Rhode Island, last year. The bureau conducted a kind of dress rehearsal – essentially a mini-census, with respondent data collected and stored online.

That’s when the system was accessed from IP addresses in Russia, the two census security sources said. Other hackers launched a domain name system attack on the website, which one source described as similar to a denial-of-service attack.

The domain name system attack was not as worrisome as what it revealed about the abilities of T-Rex to respond to such a threat, according to five people involved in census security.

T-Rex staffers “didn’t know how to access the cybersecurity defense tools that were in place, and they didn’t know what to look for,” said a person familiar with the operation. This source added that the bureau had purchased a license to use forensic-analysis software, called EnCase, to investigate hacks more than a year earlier, but T-Rex had yet to fully integrate EnCase into the security system when the security incidents occurred.

T-Rex’s security work had encountered trouble early on. The GAO reported that, by June of 2018, Census’ Office of Information Security (OIS) had flagged more than 3,000 security compliance deficiencies, 2,700 of which were related to components being developed by T-Rex.

OIS voiced concern over the flags and recommended addressing the bulk of them before testing, according to two security officials familiar with the matter. But bureau leadership authorized live-testing of the systems anyway to keep the project on schedule, the people said. The bureau’s Office of Information Security chief, Jeff Jackson, quit his post in October out of frustration over his office’s lack of influence on the project, two sources familiar with the matter said. Jackson did not respond to requests for comment.

A June report by the Department of Commerce’s Office of Inspector General called attention to other snafus. It revealed that, for a prolonged stretch in 2018, the bureau lost the codes needed to gain unrestricted access to its Amazon-based cloud data-storage system. Without the codes, the IG reported, the bureau could not have stopped a hacker from accessing or destroying data stored in the cloud.

The IG, in an October 17 letter to Census Director Steven Dillingham, said it would “immediately” begin auditing the bureau’s technology to “determine the effectiveness of security measures.”

Baccigalupi, the former 18F consultant, called the project’s problems to date “infuriating” given the high cost to taxpayers, and said the bureau’s internal staff could have built the systems better and cheaper.

“Those teams are eager to do it,” Baccigalupi said, “and demoralized to see bad and expensive software going out instead.”

(Reporting by Nick Brown; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Brian Thevenot)

Supreme Court faults Trump bid to add census citizenship question

FILE PHOTO: An informational pamphlet is displayed at an event for community activists and local government leaders to mark the one-year-out launch of the 2020 Census efforts in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s administration did not give an adequate explanation for its plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, delivering a victory to New York state and others challenging the proposal.

The justices partly upheld a federal judge’s decision barring the question in a win for a group of states and immigrant rights organizations that challenged the plan. The mixed ruling does not definitively decide whether the question could be added at some point.

The Republican president’s administration had appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts blocked the inclusion of the census question.

A group of states including New York and immigrant rights organizations sued to prevent the citizenship question from being included in the decennial population count. Opponents have said the question would instill fear in immigrant households that the information would be shared with law enforcement, deterring them from taking part.

The census, required by the U.S. Constitution, is used to allot seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and distribute some $800 billion in federal funds. The intent of the citizenship question, opponents said, is to manufacture a deliberate undercount of areas with high immigrant and Latino populations, costing Democratic-leaning regions seats in the House, benefiting Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.

The administration argued that adding a question requiring people taking part in the census to declare whether they are a citizen was needed to better enforce a voting rights law, a rationale that opponents called a pretext for a political motive.

Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled on Jan. 15 that the Commerce Department’s decision to add the question violated a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. Federal judges in Maryland and California also have issued rulings to block the question’s inclusion, saying it would violate the Constitution’s mandate to enumerate the population every 10 years.

Furman said the evidence showed that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross concealed his true motives for adding the question and that he and his aides had convinced the Justice Department to request a citizenship question.

Businesses also rely on census data to make critical strategic decisions, including where to invest capital. Citizenship has not been asked of all households since the 1950 census, featuring since then only on questionnaires sent to a smaller subset of the population.

The Census Bureau’s own experts estimated that households corresponding to 6.5 million people would not respond to the census if the citizenship question were asked.

While only U.S. citizens can vote, non-citizens comprise an estimated 7 percent of the population.

Evidence surfaced in May that the challengers said showed that the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question was intended to discriminate against racial minorities.

Documents created by Republican strategist Thomas Hofeller, who died last year, showed that he was instrumental behind the scenes in instigating the addition of the citizenship question. He was an expert in drawing electoral district boundaries that maximize Republican chances of winning congressional elections.

Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that asking census respondents whether they are American citizens “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redrawing electoral districts based on census data.

Hofeller suggested the voting rights rationale in the newly disclosed documents.

The Trump administration called the newly surfaced evidence “conspiracy theory.”

A federal judge in Maryland is reviewing the Hofeller evidence.

Most people living in the United States will be asked to fill out the census, whether online or on paper, by March 2020.

For a graphic on major Supreme Court rulings, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2V2T0Uf

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung and Bryan Pietsch; Editing by Will Dunham)