COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Student Privacy
Coalition opposes student data collection for military recruiting
Jonathan Krim, Washington Post
October 23, 2005
WASHINGTON -- A national coalition of parents groups, privacy advocates, and community organizations launched a campaign last week to dismantle a database of high school and college students built by the Pentagon to help target potential military recruits.In a letter sent to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, more than 100 groups charged that the database violates federal privacy laws and is collecting demographic and other personal information on young Americans that could be misused by the government and the marketing firms handling the program.
''We are not in opposition to those who choose to serve in the US Armed Forces," said a draft of the letter asking that the program be shut down. But ''the creation of the . . . database is in conflict with the Privacy Act, which was passed by Congress to reduce the government's collection of personal information on Americans."
The military, which is struggling to meet recruiting goals, argued that the effort is grounded in law and essential to maintaining strong, all-volunteer armed forces.
The Pentagon is on track to spend $342.9 million on the Joint Advertising, Market Research, and Studies program.
The effort seeks to help recruiters discover and reach more potential enlistees and to develop advertising aimed at those who typically influence young people, including parents, coaches, and teachers.
The money is being spent through a single contract with Mullen Advertising Inc. of Wenham, Mass., that began in 2002 and can be renewed annually until January 2007. The Pentagon has spent $206.3 million, according to a military spokeswoman.
Under a subcontract with Mullen, BeNow Inc., a Wakefield, Mass., firm that specializes in gathering and analyzing personal information for target marketing, is compiling and maintaining the database. BeNow has since been acquired by Equifax Inc. , one of the nation's top credit bureaus and data brokers.
The Pentagon program was little known until June, when the military issued a privacy notice that it was buying lists of all high school and college students to create a database that included birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade point averages, ethnicity, and what subjects the students are studying.
David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said at the time that the privacy notice should have been issued sooner, and parents could request that recruiters not solicit their children.
The Pentagon has not made opt-out forms available on its websites, but it promises to do so by early next year. A member of one group opposed to the database, Leave My Child Alone, created an opt-out letter and said 34,000 copies have been downloaded from the organization's website.
According to Pentagon documents, the information on roughly 12 million individuals is compiled from a variety of sources, including motor vehicle records, commercial vendors of personal information on students, and those who take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, given in many high schools.
The program also includes information from Selective Service registrations. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, the Pentagon also is entitled to entire public high school student lists, which it says are kept separately.
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