The US Census Bureau is gearing up for its 2020 population count by deploying new technology to boost efficiency and cut costs. But a government watchdog is warning that the modernization efforts could leave the bureau and respondents vulnerable to cyber attacks.
For the first time its history, some citizens will be able to respond online to the decennial survey. Census enumerators will also be using mobile devices as they collect demographics across the country, and the bureau is employing “in office” technology to cut down on the need for field canvassing.
These reforms, the bureau estimates, will cut the total cost of the 2020 census by billions of dollars. They also carry with them, however, certain security liabilities, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
In a report released Tuesday on the bureau’s preparations for 2020, the GAO warned, for example, that “the introduction of an option for households to respond using the Internet puts respondents more at risk for phishing attacks”—cyber assaults that mimic other websites or services to lure users into giving up their personal information.
Those attack could be directed not just at respondents, but also Census employees and contractors, the office noted.
The GAO also pointed to the challenges of adequately training the bureau’s massive temporary workforce in proper cybersecurity procedures, and ensuring that individuals have only “limited and appropriate” access to the digitized census data. In addition, the need to adequately secure more than 300,000 mobile devices that will be used by enumerators during the survey.
The bureau is gearing up for an end-to-end test of the new census technology in 2018, but GAO cautioned that it might not prove useful since many of the modernized systems won’t be up and running by then.
The watchdog reported that “the Bureau has not finalized all of the controls to be implemented, completed an assessment of those controls, developed plans to remediate any control weaknesses, and determined whether there is time to fully remediate any weaknesses before the system test begins.”
Surveys of the US population are required by the Constitution to be conducted every ten years. At a cost of $12.3 billion, the 2010 US Census was the most expensive in history.
