The Census is our most fundamental tool for measuring who lives in the United States, and where. Ever since the founding of the country, the categories have reflected how Americans think about ourselves, and the data gets used for everything from funding allocations to political districting. So, it might be surprising that the most recent Decennial Census included intentional injections of random numbers to noise the data for privacy protection. This was hugely controversial! In this talk, Moon Duchin will explain some of the history and the impacts of how we enumerate the country.