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nl
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377

It's too bad this has become political.

I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.

giancarlostoro
> I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.

You mean legislation?

jmyeet
Yeah, calling your legislators is going to do precisely nothing [1], just like data centers are almost universally opposed by the communities and the negative externalities are way more real and direct. Yet they keep getting approved anyway.

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.

[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ypTX9ntTQ

idle_zealot
Agreed: sure, call your representative. If they're cagey or noncommittal, do what you can to get their ass primaried. Every "moderate" will absolutely sell you into a Panopticon.
onetokeoverthe
ask tom s. in california if all that spend guarantees anything.

more urgent is to repair the broken election process especially in california where it now takes 30+ days to "count" the votes.

dhotson
Heya, fellow Aussie here. Have you ever tried contacting your local MP?

I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!

The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.

It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.

an0malous
Ranked choice voting would go a long way, the two-party system is an intentionally forced false dichotomy like when parents give their kids the choice to eat broccoli or carrots so they’ll think it was their decision. Both parties are controlled by the investor class.
[dead] aosmith
[flagged]
foresto
> Direct P2P connections using Iroh gossip protocol over QUIC

How does it handle NAT traversal?

cwillu
The article is about the ban on differential privacy and other modern privacy techniques in use with the census and similar, not social media.
bogwog
Warning: this is AI generated. Don't actually trust it to be secure.
alexpotato
One of my favorite recently learned facts about Congress:

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.

hahahaa
If a million people want it and it is worth $100 to them they could create a superpac for this with $100m funding?
Fomite
One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.
8note
if DSA gets enough people in, that might go through?

pretty directly within the realms of what their candidates support, and they have a pretty good purity test to tell who to support or not with the genocide question

baranul
Well, if you think money in politics or corporations buying politicians is bad now, it is going to get exponentially worse in the USA. The Supreme Court recently gave a decision that allows the rich oligarchy to give unlimited amounts of money[1] to their favorite puppets... excuse me, politicians.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-c...

anonymousiam
Free housing, free food, free health care, and free income are also wildly popular with the US adult population. The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

throwaway173738
I guess the rich people will have to cope with one less super-yacht this year.
alex43578
You’re welcome to give all your money away first, then worry about taking others.
hilariously
You a temporarily embarrassed billionaire? Paying their fair share in taxes (corporate and otherwise) is far from "taking all their money away".
alex43578
The top 1% alone are 40% of the federal income tax receipts.

40% of the population pays 0% in income taxes, often receiving credits and refunds.

I’m all for everyone contributing: one side looks like it’s contributing 40% already. How much more do you think should be taken from them to give to the people that currently contribute 0?

hilariously
Why do you think the top 1% pays that much in tax? Because we impose arbitrary taxes on them or because they get the vast amount of the wealth as well?

What's the top income tax bracket? Does it go up to Jeff Bezos levels or does it taper off quite a far amount below that?

How much do you value a stable society that doesn't promote mass death? What percentage of the wealthiest's income should we recognize comes from a world that is stable and peaceable because of opportunities for us all?

throwaway173738
I was parodying someone very famous who said the same thing about dolls last Christmas.
jmyeet
This has been studied, famously by Princeton [1]. The chance of any given bill passing is roughly 30% and any amount of public support from 0% to 100% has almost zero impact on that 30%.

Elected offices have become fiefdoms to enrich oneself and maintain the status quo. Anyone who bucks this trend has historically rarely gotten into office or been chased out once they do. This could be from funding another candidate, simply starving an existing candidate of campaign funds or in some cases by redistricting somebody out of a seat.

And look at the reelection rates for Congress [2]. They tend to hover between 90% and 95%.

[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

[2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-ra...

thayne
From the responses I've gotten from my representatives when I've written them, my impression is they care a lot more about their corporate sponsors and the party line than they do about their constituents.
yieldcrv
If we had voter referendums at the federal level, most “hot button” partisan issues would be solved because there is consensus across 70-75% of the population, even if weighted by state somehow
AnthonyMouse
> 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.

This sounds like the sort of thing where if you poll people yes/no, a majority of people support it, but then if you ask them whether they'll change their vote over it, the people who said yes say it's not their most important issue and they don't care about it enough to do anything. Whereas the people who said no are e.g. small business owners if you don't exempt them from it because they can't afford to pay someone for extended time off while simultaneously paying someone else to fill in for them, or large business owners if you do exempt the small businesses because they hate anything that gives smaller companies a relative advantage, and both of them will actually care if you try to do it and oppose the policy either way for fear that it might get changed during or after being enacted.

So then you have 80% wants x 1% cares vs. 20% wants x 75% cares and the second number ends up being bigger.

throwaway173738
Washington’s paid parental leave act has us put money into our Unemployment Insurance program in addition to the UI payments we already make. So the business owners don’t have to pay for it, they just have to allow it to happen.
AnthonyMouse
What percent of the original 80% who support it still support it when you tell them they're the ones who will pay for it though? (They would have been either way, but that sort of thing tends to affect polling numbers.)
bo1024
What is the political goal behind this directive? I assume there is some completely non-subtle purpose, but I can't tell what it is.
kg
The people currently in power want every single byte of data they can get on people who reside in this country so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please. Depending on the person, that might mean imprisonment, it might mean deportation, it might mean something worse.
rapjr9
Doesn't this mean such data analysis can be used by anyone against anyone else? This does not just mean one political group can do this analysis, any political group or foreign power can make use of the data if it is not protected using differential privacy. Has the military weighed in on this? Seems like the data could be used to attack police forces, cities, states, demographic groups, groups of almost any kind. It could be used to identify military forces, say those at secret bases. Turning off the privacy protections seems like tearing down a fence; makes it easier to take your horse out for a ride, but also makes it easier for the wolves to get in.
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onetimeusename
There has been debate among statisticians and political scientists about using differential privacy for census data. 2020 was actually the first Decennial Census that used differential privacy. This is the mandated census done every 10 years that counts population and is used for apportionment. Some have criticized the use of differential privacy.[1][2] But others have argued that coarsening does not protect privacy sufficiently and that differential privacy does not distort apportionment.

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...

[2]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk3283

_alternator_
I'd like to emphasize that coarsening is not just theoretically non-private, a number of attacks that lead to leaking personally identifiable data were demonstrated on the 2010 census. So it's not really a he-said/she-said situation.
wxw
> On June 4, 2026, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce issued a directive (DAO 216-26)

> 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.

atoav
It is not cursed. It is actively trying to cement its own power like the authoritarian fascists they are. And some of you still pretend if they just cheer enough for dear leader the tide will turn for them as well. As if this all was just a sports game where you have to cheer for your team even if they actively break the rules.
jackpirate
Coursening is not as elegant as differential privacy. But using coursening is not a "privacy emergency", it is a very-slightly-less-accurate census. And no one knows what the actual economic impacts of this level of accuracy difference are.

I would love to see the more elegant techniques used, and also have the intuition that this is bad policy, but I don't see the "emergency" here. Labeling it as such just histrionic to me.

censusnerd
Well, it's not just that they'll publish the same data with minimal protection. Which IMO is pretty disastrous. The likely consequence is that the Census Bureau just won't publish data, because confidentiality can't be sufficiently protected w/o noise infusion. That's a lot of data products (and detailed info in those products) that Census Bureau just won't be able publish anymore. For example, I can't really see race and ethnicity data being published at granular geographies anymore--and that's required for redistricting and whatever is left of the voting rights act.
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bertil
I have a very low opinion of the current US administration, which might be a blindspot when they do something both horrible and not caveman-like in its sophistication. I’m genuinely surprised they would look into differential privacy (again: this sounds judgmental, but I’m just trying to confess my prejudice).

I’m more surprised that they were able to look into it and come to the conclusion that they should get rid of it… What could be the logic here?

padjo
The administration will do almost anything if asked, so long as the person asking is willing to offer tribute.
mikestew
That might be accurate, but it doesn’t answer the question asked.
pseudosaid
really? yes it does. a bribe is answer.
BoppreH
It could have been as simple as "noise infusion" being interpreted as "adding fake data". Especially if you don't trust the people adding the noise.

Wouldn't be the first administrative action taken at a keyword-level of understanding.

This could have also been how the administration got convinced by someone with deeper understanding and specific goals.

ano-ther
From the second linked article, this could be a motive:

> People who were using Census data to actually reconstruct records could no longer do so. Demographers admitted that this was common practice. It's also an open secret that this was done by political operatives as part of gerrymandering efforts.

https://desfontain.es/blog/banning-noise.html

throwawayqqq11
You wont take away my tin hat here.

I think they are using any data source, private and public to compile enemy lists. We will see them use it to manipulate the mid term elections. Isnt it wise at this point to assume that extend of malignance and long term plannig?

ls612
It fucks over every econometric technique that researchers use (by design) I’ve been hearing people in academia beating the drum about this since like 2021.
red-iron-pine
the current administration is owned by billionaires and foreign interests.

both want to see the US government collapse.

a lot of people are going to have to go to jail, hang, or be exiled before anyone will take the US seriously again.

where are all of these chickenhawk 2nd amendment gun nuts now? they'll talk about FREEDOM while the house burns down around them.

zkmon
> If followed, this order will destroy the Commerce public data our nation relies on for important decisions, such as where to build necessary services for our community’s well-being

So this is not about privacy. Scott sounds like a computer scientist forced (by the American ecosystem) to become a bombastic talker.

dmvdoug
Can’t release data sets if they can’t be sufficiently anonymized so as to avoid Privacy Act/other non-disclosure statutes. Can’t anonymize data sets sufficiently if you’re banned from using the techniques data people use when anonymizing data sets. Not that difficult to follow.
Sniffnoy
This is guest post by Cynthia Dwork; that's Dwork's writing, not Aaronson's.
jhhh
The article presents two possible methods to protect privacy in a dataset. It then attacks a theoretical weakness in a contrived scenario in the old method, which intends to incline us to choose the other, newer solution. The article does not describe in detail the newer solution beyond its name. I have have questions that the article doesn't cover in enough detail: 1) Has the coarsening failed in the way described in the article in practice which leaked information? 2) How does the 'other' solution we're expected to desire work? 3) What is an example of the difference in level of detail offered by the newer solution that was not possible when the data needed to be coarsened in practice?
flowercalled
(1) "A Simulated Reconstruction and Reidentification Attack on the 2010 U.S. Census" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.11283

(2) By adding carefully tuned Gaussian noise. In the last 6 years we have also figured out how to add much less Gaussian noise: "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08986

(3) This one is harder to answer, since the Census Bureau aimed to release the same style of statistics as in previous decades. So the goal of 2020 was to release the same statistics with the same error bounds. Evidence suggests they succeeded in doing this. "Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's Privacy Protection Methods" http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07521, "Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decennial Census" http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01320

stymaar
Can anyone explain me why the Heritage foundation targeted these statistical techniques? What's the political motive behind it?
cma
Probably related to things like "The Nazis utilized data from routine censuses, tax returns, and municipal police registrations. In Germany, and in occupied countries like the Netherlands, this information was systematically organized. In some instances, IBM technology (via Dehomag punch card machines) was used to tabulate and sort census data to identify individuals of Jewish descent."
xhkkffbf
The 2020 Census had a number of issues and many of them ended up giving the Democrats more seats in the House than they should have. Oh, and the Census results were due at the White House in December 2016, but somehow they didn't reach the WH until January 21, 2017.

Was Differential Privacy specifically involved? I don't think so, but I think it's being lumped into the mix and being blamed for the other issues.

censusnerd
No disclosure avoidance was applied to the state-level population counts used for congressional apportionment (i.e. how house seats are divvied up). There are plenty of valid critiques of the 2020 Census disclosure avoidance systems, but the Rs who claim that DP was used to manipulate state population counts to give Democrats more seats either have no idea what they're talking about or are being malicious.

Also... the first census results typically come out in the same year, e.g. December 2020, not 2016? More detailed demographer data take a bit longer. COVID was really the cause for delayed releases.

xhkkffbf
The Rs are just confused. The manipulation happened but they didn't need DP to do it.

As I said, it wasn't the disclosure avoidance that generated the most discrepancies. It was other forms of adjustments.

stymaar
> The 2020 Census had a number of issues and many of them ended up giving the Democrats more seats in the House than they should have.

Do you have any source on that. For a census issue to have an actual impact in an election outcome, it must either be:

- a lucky issue (flipping a very close race from one side to the other)

- a very big issue

Both can happen occasionally, but I have a hard time imagining “many of them” occurring in the same election.

xhkkffbf
I believe a few states would have fewer seats in Congress if it weren't for some last minute adjustments. It wasn't the actual election. It was the allocation of seats to each state that had the biggest effect.
red-iron-pine
empower big corporations, and blow open statistical protections to allow for 1) better agit-prop efforts, to allow for more easy chasing of minorities they don't like, and 3) to target elections