I am putting this here since it is pre-American involvement...

But does fit into how "we" knew how many and where the Japanese-Americans were at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It also will show the demographics of the 1930s in America, should be quite interesting.

NEW YORK (AP) — It was a decade when tens of millions of people in the U.S. experienced mass unemployment and social upheaval as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and rumblings of global war were heard from abroad.
Now, intimate details of 132 million people who lived through the 1930s will be disclosed as the U.S. government releases the 1940 census on April 2 to the public for the first time after 72 years of privacy protection lapses.

Goto:

News from The Associated Press

 

I would like the source Jeff, as I understood it the FBI used "extraordinary (that is the term I read)" jurisdictional requirements to read "relevant" sections of the Census related to the "non-native born" citizens in America. Only the release to general publication is "illegal" as I understand it, the Census Bureau data is part of the American data source itself, for use by the government. But not the general public, this is not new, only in that the full information is now available to the general public for the first time and even Freedom of Information requests won't break this seal of time for persons outside of government investigation organs, like the FBI, NSA, etc..

Perhaps I have read that incorrectly, but John E. Hoover was almost an independent force even then. I have never been a fan of Hoover, I always thought he was as close to a Himmler as America ever came. He sure did love publicity, and was such a photo op guy I really wonder what real "investigative" work he ever did himself. He did ramrod a change in interstate jurisdictional limits so that some criminals could be pursued across state lines for their crimes, and that was a "good thing". A citizen of one state shouldn't have to think that a felon could run across a state line and be immune from both apprehension and prosecution, but that was the law at that time.

Hoover was a driving force (as a lawyer) to change this federal policy. For that alone he deserves some respect. Many of his other "accomplishments" leave me a bit less than appreciative. I know that FDR used Hoover to recall, interview, and re-establish all German and Italian naturalized citizens with a "loyalty oath" before the 1940 Census, I know that Hoover applied this to excess by including natural born citizens of German, Italian, and Austrian ancestry.

Have you something to add to this Hoover missive Jeff?