RIDGE GIVEN ARAB-AMERICANS' CENSUS INFO

The Census is a bit of a sacred compact. You tell the feds about yourself, to help the government divvy up its resources more fairly. And, in return for that information, the government agrees to not to use it to spy on you.

The Department of Homeland Security may have broken that trust, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). According to the papers, the Census Bureau gave Tom Ridge's crew "statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry."

According to EPIC, one data set shows "cities with 1,000 or more people who indicated they are of Arab ancestry. For each city, the tabulation provides total population, population of Arab ancestry, and percent of the total population that is of Arab ancestry. A second tabulation, more than a thousand pages in length, shows the number of census responses indicating Arab ancestry in certain zip codes throughout the United States."

It's unclear how all this information was – or still is being -- used. The documents EPIC pried out of the government have been edited heavily. But EPIC makes some dark allusions. "During World War II, the Census Bureau provided statistical information to help the War Department round up more than 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans and confine them to internment camps," the group said in a statement.

Earlier this year, EPIC discovered that NASA had also used census information, in an unusual attempt to build an anti-terror database.

"The census requires the trust and cooperation of the American public," EPIC added. "The Census Bureau should not become one-stop shopping for law enforcement agencies."

THERE'S MORE: File this under "yeah...right." A Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman told the New York Times that the census data was used "to help the agency identify in which airports to post signs and pamphlets in Arabic. 'The information is not in any way being used for law enforcement purposes,' she said. 'It's being used to educate the traveler. We're simply using basic demographic information to help us communicate U.S. laws and regulations to the traveling public." Fishy.