Two weeks ago, the New York Times and other media outlets reported with much alarm that the Census had given data to the Department of Homeland Security on where Arab-Americans live. Civil liberties groups called the disclosure a “dangerous breach of the public trust” and likened it to the Census’s compilation of similar information on ethnic Japanese during World War II.

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr points out something that the mainstream media neglected to mention–namely, that all of the data the Census Bureau gave to DHS were apparently publicly available from the Census Bureau’s web site.

Kerr explains:

As best I can tell, all the Census Bureau did was run a few queries from their own public website and then e-mail the information to the Department of Homeland Security. The Times story doesn’t tell you this, though; instead, it rather artfully describes the information as “specially tabulated.” Yes, it was specially tabulated; Census Bureau employees ran the queries from its public data and put it in tabular form just for Homeland Security. Ergo, specially tabulated.