[rolleiflex]

One thing I’m curious about is, why does a country need to do this in the first place?

From the example I’m familiar with: the last ever census in Turkey was held in 2007. There on, there is now a live, real-time count of everyone in the country. Why doesn’t that work in the US?

Surely US is capable of it, but I wonder if the blockage is inertial, political or just not enough of a priority.

[kadoban]

In short? Because the Constitution specifies how it must be done, any ambiguity is enshrined in tradition, and neither is realistically changeable.

[danso]

Can you provide any technical detail as to how a real-time count of every person is possible? What databases are used to track births and deaths and emigration in real time? How about income/housing/education characteristics? Are you a Turkish citizen? If so, are you able to query the government for the exact population count right now?

[rolleiflex]

The population counts are released yearly and I believe you can do what is the Turkish version of FOIA request to get the live count, though don’t quote me on the latter part.

Turkey has a central database, called TCKN, that everyone is assigned by birth or by getting an immigration visa. The births and deaths are tracked by hospitals and the Revenue Service. Income / education / housing - all of these are tracked by the central registers and licensing boards. Every Turkish citizen and resident has an online account at https://www.turkiye.gov.tr/?lang=en_US (for English version) which you can use to view taxes paid, your previous health records (MRI scans and all should be downloadable) see scripts fillable, paperwork for legal action by you or against you, census records, even mobile and landlines registered on your name, and basically pretty much everything you’d expect a state can do. All of the outputs from this site are printable PDFs and they have a barcode on them which I think the government cryptographic signature. So you can get some doc from here, print it out and bring to someone else and they’d be able to verify it by scanning the barcode.

In other words, they have total knowledge. It’s not just the number of people in the country. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t rely on self-reporting, but on ambient data providers. It’s kind of dystopian, but technically fairly impressive and so far (ominously) relatively benign. Failing all else, it’s very useful.

[danso]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I remain skeptical that an accurate detailed count can be automated (at this point in history) but I won’t claim to have any insight about contemporary life and society in Turkey.

[rolleiflex]

I think you are right to be skeptical and I don't claim to have an insight into how accurate it is. However, mind that while Turkey is culturally about 80% western and 20% non-western, it's really unpredictable where that 20% shows up. For example, the reason the census count can be reasonably accurate even in the adversity of undocumented immigrants is that Turkish police can walk up to anybody they see as suspicious on the street and ask for their TCKN / ID to do a spot check for arrest warrants — decidedly free of the need for the western concept of a 'probable cause' or anything like that, it's a member of your community asking to validate your ID. Since they have the readers attached to their mobile phones, the check takes a couple seconds.

This also, by design, makes it really hard to be undocumented in Turkey. There's a significant skin tone difference between people from the Middle East and those in Istanbul, and the police does absolutely use this to be more scrutinous if you're even just walking by them. From an US perspective this is discrimination, and it definitely is, but this is how it works — and they're pretty good at spotting non-Turkish people. As a real example in action, there was a recent directive that required refugees to keep their residences within the borders of the first municipality they registered in (many of the Syrian refugees had moved to Istanbul from where they first registered for benefits), and the police managed to significantly clamp down on unregistered immigrants fairly quickly and send them back to the cities they registered to.

In this specific case this was the right move since the resources are allocated to states (ils) based on where refugees are registered and Istanbul alone does not have nearly the capacity to house that many refugees. My point is that Turkish police does have a lot more leeway than the US police before it becomes socially unacceptable — and while this is overall not a great thing (loose oversight), it also makes them much more effective at making a census in the right ballpark.

[_-___________-_]

Turkey has at least two ... porous ... borders that I've seen in action, so I am doubtful that counting births and immigration visas can provide an accurate real-time count of every person in the country.

[rolleiflex]

Which borders?

I think the border to Syria was at one point fairly porous, for humanitarian reasons, but as of now even that is sealed shut pretty tightly. It's actually third largest border wall in the world after Great Wall of China and US - Mexico one. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria–Turkey_barrier

[onionisafruit]

How do they count undocumented immigrants? If you don’t go to school or have an “on the books” job, are you going to show up in the count?

[stonogo]

"Counting everyone in the country" is one aspect of the census effort. Looking at where they live, what they do for a living, and if they live alone or with others are other aspects. In the US, when someone moves from one state to another, they're not required to notify the US government in any way. Most states have rules about getting your vehicles licensed within a certain time frame after settling in a state, or rules about when you must acquire a driver license and/or state ID. The rules are wildly different across all fifty states, and it's not feasible to "just track" everyone since the national government has no explicit authority to. The census, however, is explicitly assigned to the federal government in the constitution.

[hurricanetc]

The idea that the US federal government doesn’t know where people are and who they are talking to is hilarious. We have the biggest spying apparatus in human history.

This is 100% political.

[stonogo]

25% of Americans do not own a computer. 19% don't own a smartphone. 4% don't own a cellular phone at all. [1]

22% of Americans don't own a credit card -- although neither the Bankrate or Statistic Brain studies counted debit cards accurately, which are equally useful for tracking. [2]

All Americans do not even have Social Security numbers, as there are several moderately-sized religions who are excused from participating in the process. [3]

Finally, not everyone in America is here legally, and many of those people go to great lengths to avoid using technology or participating in programs which would lead to their identification and tracking.

All of these are good reasons to conduct a census now and then. But even if you find none of these convincing, the iron truth of the current situation is that none of these alleged panopticon efforts you're alluding to are allowed to release any of that information -- not to benefit allotment committees, not to infrastructure planners, not even to local law enforcement, so in practice it doesn't do anyone in the government any good at all.

1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

2 - https://www.crnrstone.com/insightvault/2018/03/04/many-ameri...

3 - https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0110225035

[mr_toad]

The census predates mass surveillance. The bureaucracy changes slowly.

I doubt the agencies with the surveillance data want to share it.

The data isn’t a count of people. It’s one record per conversation, or whatever. It’s probably riddled with errors and duplicates, incorrect names, dates of birth etc. It probably misses a lot of people (like children). Getting a unique count of individuals, with accurate addresses and demographic information would be a Sisyphean task.

[kelnos]

I wouldn't say political per se, at least not in the way most people would mean it. Taking the census every 10 years, in this particular manner, is required by the Constitution.

[karatestomp]

The short and slightly oversimplified answer is that one level or another of our government has all the same info on us most other countries do—if they don't, they can sure as hell ask any of several companies for it—but various interest groups demand, for a few different reasons, that they pretend like they don't, mostly in the name of some notion of freedom or advocacy of same (for the latter, see: making income taxes annoying for hundreds of millions of people only because some folks want them to be annoying)

[rootusrootus]

> Why doesn’t that work in the US?

Because the US does not have border controls between states.