The US Census Bureau provided the US Secret Service with information identifying individual Japanese Americans during World War II, according to a study released which claims to undercut decades of denials by Bureau officials.
The agency supplied the names and addresses of 79 Japanese Americans living in the Washington area to Secret Service agents investigating reports of threats on the life of then president Franklin Roosevelt in August 1943, the paper said.
The probe had been prompted by a report in the Los Angeles Times in June, 1943, that a Japanese American man who was being evacuated to an internment camp in California said "we ought to have enough guts to kill Roosevelt."
The agent rapidly concluded that there was no threat to the president. For one thing, the man who allegedly made the remark in 1942 had been committed to a psychiatric unit for treatment of schizophrenia in October of the same year, according to the agent's reports to his superiors.
Nevertheless, the agent's inquiries into the Japanese American community in the capital continued through the fall of 1944, according to Margo Anderson, professor of history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleague, William Seltzer, a senior research scholar in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University in New York.
The Bureau has previously acknowledged that it shared demographic data on Japanese Americans from the 1940 census with US authorities during WWII.
In 2000, the Bureau's then director, Kenneth Prewitt, issued a formal apology when it emerged that the agency had provided statistical data that was used to round up Americans of Japanese ancestry for internment during WWII.
"The historical record is clear that senior Census Bureau staff proactively cooperated with the internment, and that census tabulations were directly implicated in the denial of civil rights to citizens of the United States who happened also to be of Japanese ancestry," he said.
But both Prewitt and other senior officials have repeatedly denied that the agency ever gave up what statisticians call micro-level data, or information that could identify individuals, the researchers said.
At issue is not whether the agency violated the law: the Second War Powers Act of 1942 authorized such disclosures even though the census data was gathered two years earlier under a pledge of confidentiality.
But "ethical questions linger about these World War II disclosures," said the two scholars, urging the agency to disavow its denials of the disclosures and to set the Bureau's historical record straight.
The case has important implications for the upcoming 2010 census because the Census Bureau depends on public trust to succeed in its mission, they noted.
A spokeswoman for the Census Bureau said she could not comment on these latest allegations.
"We have not had the opportunity to review the sources in the archives," said Christa Jones, chief of the office of analysis and executive support.
She added that the laws currently on the books stipulate that census data can only be used for statistical purposes and not for enforcement or administrative purposes.
"The Census Bureau is fully committed to protecting the data we collect. The guarantee of confidentiality is very important in everything we do."
