Sign of the times?
NPR reports that the Census Bureau will be GPS-ing every house in America:
the Census Bureau plans to send an army of 100,000 temporary workers down every street and dusty, dirt road in America. They will be armed with handheld GPS devices. Robert LaMacchia, head of the Census Bureau’s geography division, says they’ll capture the latitude and longitude of the front door of every house, apartment and improvised shelter they find.
“We will actually knock on doors and look for hidden housing units,” he says. “We will find converted garages; from the outside, it may not look like anybody lives there.” But census workers will add each dwelling, legal or not, to the Census Bureau’s Master Address File…
the census will end up with the geographic coordinates — accurate to within 10 feet — for about 110 million residences. But the Census Bureau can’t, by law, share that list with anyone, even local governments. LaMacchia says the information has to be treated as confidential. Otherwise, people might lie, and the census wouldn’t be accurate.
“People would not tell us about hidden housing units,” LaMacchia says. “People would not respond to the questionnaire if they believed that that information would be turned over to law enforcement or code enforcement and become public information.”
There is an ACORN angle to this story, as you might expect under Obama, but in some ways the creepiest thing is that this was all planned in the Bush administration. That NPR story above is from 2006.