Census Workers Marking GPS Coordinates of U.S. Homes
June 19, 2009 by Bob Livingston
The United States Constitution calls for an enumeration (census) to be taken every 10 years to determine the number of representatives each state will send to Congress. The next one is set to begin on April 1, 2010.
But census workers are already on the streets of America, and they’re doing more than just seeking the number of people in each household. They’re tasked with marking the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of every house in America.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau website, “This GPS technology allows us to reduce the amount of time spent by census workers in locating addresses while increasing productivity. Most importantly, by adding a GPS coordinate to each housing unit, the Census Bureau is able to ensure that residents are counted in the right location. This is important as the data are used to apportion congressional representation and used to draw redistricting lines.”
But the idea of mapping GPS coordinates for every front door in America reeks of Big Brother intrusion. And it’s just a continuation of Big Brother Government’s efforts to compile more and more data on each individual.
Already the census goes far beyond its Constitutional charter of counting the population. Census forms ask intimate questions that are not the government’s business.
Information such as income, description of your property, whether you have running water, a shower or bathtub, type of heating system, the type of fees you have to pay in your community, rental or mortgage payment amounts, education level, whether you have insurance, whether you have a disability, how you get to work and much more is requested on some forms. All of it beyond the scope of what our Founders had in mind when they set up the enumeration.
All that information is great for pencil-pushing, snooping bureaucrats and newspaper editors writing statistical stories. But it’s much too much information for the government to have on its citizens.
Now comes the GPS coordinates as a further intrusion. As blogger Douglas V. Gibbs wrote on his American Daily Review, “GPS coordinates of your front door will make it easier for the government to monitor you. The U.S. Census Bureau is simply an excuse—a harmless-looking means of obtaining the front door coordinates. The creation of GPS coordinates for front doors has nothing to do with the Census, in all honesty, no matter how much the United States Government tries to convince you that it does.
“Why would the U.S. Government desire the exact location of your front door to be entered into their GPS data base when they already have the location of your home in the system?” Gibbs asked.
How’s this for a scenario? With the military stretched thin by fighting a two-front war, what’s going to happen in the case of a national emergency?
Gibbs posits that perhaps United Nations troops, many non-English speaking and certainly unfamiliar with U.S. communities, would use them to locate the neighborhoods they are required to police or the houses of people they are sent to take into custody.
Certainly foreign troops would be more willing than U.S. soldiers to quell an uprising of U.S. citizens fed up with an increasingly socialist/fascist government.
And who can forget the scenes of smart bombs and tomahawk missiles, guided by GPS coordinates, going through the windows and doors of buildings during the invasion of Iraq?
Who thinks this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the census into the Constitution?
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