The evidence the Census servers suffered a DDoS attack is weak. A simpler explanation is that they buckled under load of Australians filling out their Census forms as asked.
The government is seeking to reassure Australians their census data is secure, after the ABS was forced to take down the site on Tuesday night to ensure data was protected.
Despite assuring Australians its systems were load tested and secure, the Census site went offline at a crucial time. Could the ABS have avoided such an embarrasing failure?
Nick Xenophon is a populist politician with a knack of identifying issues likely to trouble people. When he said this week he wouldn’t put his name on his form, he immediately elevated the debate around…
The backlash against the Census suggests the Australian Bureau of Statistics didn’t do enough to convince Australians it needed to collect their private information or that it’d be kept safe.
Census data have a real impact on the lives of Australians, from determining political representation through the distribution of electorates, to the allocation of government funding.
Reliable data about the homeless population is vital when developing policy, allocating funding and developing services for vulnerable people. But first the census needs to find them.
By linking censuses through time or by combining other information with the census, many more important policy questions can be answered than if we used one dataset alone.