NEW YORK, July 30: The Arab-American advocacy groups are protesting the US Census Bureau's decision to provide a detailed list of people of Arab background living in the United States to the US Department of Homeland Security.

On Friday The New York Times reported that the Census Bureau had provided specially tabulated population statistics on Arab-Americans to the Department of Homeland Security, including detailed information on how many people of Arab backgrounds live in certain ZIP codes.

The newspaper said the assistance was legal, but civil liberties groups and Arab-American advocacy organizations say it is a dangerous breach of public trust and liken it to the Census Bureau's compilation of similar information about Japanese- Americans during World War II.

But critics of the information sharing said general demographic snapshots could be derived without such detailed information and that the ZIP-code-level data with its breakdowns of ancestral origin seemed particularly excessive because for all of the groups only English or Arabic need be used.

"The real question is to Homeland Security. What are they hiding? Why do they need this?" Samia El-Badry, an Arab-American member of the Census Bureau's decennial census advisory committee said in an interview with the New York Times.

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, observed that the data sharing was particularly harmful at a time when the Census Bureau was struggling to build trust within Arab-American communities.

"As this gets out, any effort to encourage people to full compliance with the census is down the tubes," Mr Zogby told the Times. "How can you get people to comply when they believe that by complying they put at risk their personal and family security?"

The tabulations were produced in August 2002 and December 2003 in response to requests from what is now the Customs and Border Protection Division of the Department of Homeland Security. One set listed cities with more than 1,000 Arab-Americans.

The second, far more detailed, provided ZIP-code-level breakdowns of Arab-American populations, sorted by country of origin. The categories provided were Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian and two general categories, "Arab/Arabic" and "Other Arab," the Times report said.

Hermann Habermann, deputy director of the Census Bureau, told the paper that such cooperation was standard practice. "We are required to provide information to other federal agencies," he said. "This is not a cabal calculating secret tabulations."

But Mr Habermann also expressed concern over application of the data, adding: "We do worry about how information will be used. However, we have not been given the authority to determine which organization gets which information." Census tabulations of specialized data are legal as long as they do not identify any individual.