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Hacker News Hacker News> DAO-216-26 bans differential privacy and other modern (and not so modern) techniques. It restricts disclosure avoidance techniques to “coarsening,”
> DAO-216-26 forbids “noise infusion”, described as “methods that involve modifying a dataset by adding random values, or noise.”
> By forbidding noise infusion, the directive bans the disclosure avoidance techniques at the core of dozens of data releases over the last three decades.
> Civil servants will do their best to comply with this order while still following the laws that require them to protect the confidentiality of respondents’ data. To balance these competing mandates, they may seek to produce less data or coarsen data so much that it is unusable. Or they might be pushed by political actors to publish data that can be easily unmasked...
This current administration is cursed.
So this is not about privacy. Scott sounds like a computer scientist forced (by the American ecosystem) to become a bombastic talker.
It's too bad this has become political.
I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.
Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.
Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is.
One group it's NOT popular with is corporations. And corporations donate a lot of money to politicians. And it's cheaper to donate to politicians who are against parental leave than it is to pay people for that parental leave.
I enjoy sharing this b/c it's a reminder that there are groups who spend a lot of time and money to get their way. At first, that might feel overwhelming. You might be surprised to know that when you call your local congressperson, those calls gets tallied b/c they want to know what their constituents care about. So give them a call and let them know.
The true crisis here is in the captured political system.
In the 1990s in Australia a racist, white supremacist party arose called One Nation through a very weird confluence of events that led a racist fish and chip shop owner by the name of Pauline Hanson to become a member of parliament. It was almost 30 years ago she gave her now famous miaden speech to Parliament [2].
After some scandals, One Nation kind of disappeared for awhile, in part because the conservative coalition (of the Liberals and Nationals) basically adopted the racist platform in the early 2000s where asylum seekers were effectively scapegoated. But weirdly she's back now. Anyway, that part isn't the point.
Australia has a preferential voting system, what tends to be called ranked choice voting in the US. You generally have two options on how to vote: you can individually number candidates yourself or you can use the registered preferences for a given party. In this case you put a "1" in Australian Labor Party, Australian Greens or whatever. A lot of people do this so preferences matter. Anyway, One Nation had a strategy of voting gainst the incumbent with preferences. So if it was a Liberal seat, the preference went to Labor and vice versa. This scared the bejsus out of the political establishment such that the opposing political parties gave preferences to each other over One Nation, leading to One Nation getting no seats in Parliament despite getting 10%+ (at its original peak) of the popular vote.
My point here is that too many politicians and political parties view their seat as something that belongs to them. In the US primaries are treated largely as a formality by the parties for their anointed candidates. Re-election rates in Congress have sat at 95%+ for decades.
What's interesting is that the Demoratic Party is almost in open revolt currently and over the past few weeks, several long-term (10-30 years) incumbents have been primaried by insurgent candidates.
Here's a funf act I learned this week. It's been ~18 years since Citizens United basically got rid of campaign spending limits. A third of all the money spent since then has been spent this year on primaries. Thomas Massie has $35M+ spent against him in his primary, making it the most expensive in US history. Many others are in the millions. It's estimated that the total spending for the Senate seat in Maine will push $400M. For one Senate seat.
All of this is a long way of saying that the only thing that will work is making these legislators fear they'll lose their cushy positions. And really if somebody has sat in office for 30 years and has nothing really to show for it, it's time for them to go.
The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/business-census-2020-technology-e...