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S.E. Fienberg 145between the academic statistics community and statisticians in the federalgovernment.The release of the two-volume Report of the President’s Commission onFederal Statistics was a defining moment not only for the Federal StatisticalSystem, but also for the National Academy of Sciences. It had many recommendationsto improve aspects of the Federal statistical system and itsco-ordination. One topic explored at length in the report was privacy andconfidentiality — I’ll return to this shortly. For the moment I want to focuson the emphasis in the report on the need for outside advice and assessmentfor work going on the federal government:Recommendation 5–4: TheCommissionrecommendsthataNationalAcademy of Sciences–National Research Council committee beestablished to provide an outside review of federal statistical activities.That committee was indeed established a few years later as the Committeeon National Statistics (CNSTAT) and it has blossomed to fulfill not only therole envisioned by the Commission members, but also to serve as a repositoryof statistical knowledge, both about the system and statistical methodologyfor the NRC more broadly. The agenda was well set by the committee’s firstchair, William Kruskal, who insisted that its focus be “national statistics” andnot simply “federal statistics,” implying that its mandate reaches well beyondthe usual topics and problems associated with the federal statistics agenciesand their data series.I joined the committee in 1978 and served as Chair from 1981 through1987. CNSTAT projects over the past 35 years serve as the backdrop for theother topics I plan to cover here.13.4 Census-taking and multiple-systems estimationOne of the most vexing public controversies that has raged for the betterpart of the last 40 years, has been the accuracy of the decennial census. Asearly as 1950 the Census Bureau carried out a post enumeration survey togauge the accuracy of the count. NRC committees in 1969, and again in 1979,addressed the topic of census accuracy and the possibility that the censuscounts be adjusted for the differential undercount of Blacks. Following the1980 census, New York City sued the Bureau, demanding that it use a pair ofsurveys conducted at census time to carry out an adjustment. The proposedadjustment methodology used a Bayesian version of something known as dualsystemestimation, or capture-recapture methodology. For those who haveread my 1972 paper (Fienberg, 1972) or Chapter 6 of Bishop, Fienberg andHolland (1975), you will know that one can view this methodology as a variantof a special case of log-linear model methodology.