COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Student Privacy
Military Recruiters Work Hard to Leave No Child off Their Lists
David Goodman, Seattle Times
October 6, 2006
My daughter just started high school. This milestone was marked by thearrival in our home of a ream of paperwork. Along with the usual
bureaucratic permissions, I found tucked into this package a seemingly
innocuous form that carries extraordinary consequences: Failing to fill it
out might result in my daughter being harassed, assaulted, or being
fast-tracked to fight in Iraq.
This form asks us if we want to opt out of having our daughter's contact
information sent to the U.S. military. If we overlooked this form, or did
not opt out for some reason, our high school is required to forward her
information to military recruiters. This is thanks to a stealth provision
of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. It turns out that President Bush's
supposed signature education law also happens to be the most aggressive
military recruitment tool enacted since the draft ended in 1973.
The military recruiting requirement of NCLB has forced many schools to
overturn longstanding policies on protecting student records from
prying eyes. My local high school, like most in the country, carefully guards
its student-directory information from the countless organizations,
businesses and special-interest groups that are itching to tempt impressionable
teens. Now, parents and schools are being shoved aside, and the military is
being given carte blanche access to our kids. Not surprisingly, abuse has
followed closely behind.
In August, an Associated Press investigation revealed that "more than
100 young women who expressed interest in joining the military in the past
year were preyed upon sexually by their recruiters. Women were raped on
recruiting office couches, assaulted in government cars and groped en
route to entrance exams ... . One out of 200 frontline recruiters — the
ones who deal directly with young people — was disciplined for sexual
misconduct last year."
Take the case of Indiana National Guard Sgt. Eric P. Vetesy, accused of
sexually assaulting six female high-school recruits in 2002 and 2003.
According to the Indianapolis Star, Vetesy "picked out teens and young
women with backgrounds that made them vulnerable to authority. As a
military recruiter, he had access to personal information, making the
quest easier."
The NCLB recruiter provision is but one piece of a concerted effort by the
Bush administration to reach unwitting teens without their parents'
permission. In June 2005, privacy advocates were shocked to learn that for
two years, the Pentagon had been amassing a database of information on
some 30 million students. The information dossiers on millions of young
Americans were to help identify college and high-school students as
young as 16 to target them for military recruiting.
The massive database includes an array of personal information including
birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point
averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.
The Pentagon has hired the Massachusetts-based company BeNow to run the
database. By outsourcing this work to a private firm, the government is
circumventing laws that restrict its right to collect or hold citizen
information.
If you are concerned about how this information on your children might be
used, you should be: The Pentagon has stated that it can share the data
with law enforcement, state tax authorities, other agencies making
employment inquiries, and with foreign authorities, to name a few. Students
will not know if their information has been collected, and they cannot
prevent it from happening.
The main obstacle to getting kids into the military — concerned parents —
has at long last been circumvented. Private companies can now harvest
data on children, and provide recruiters — some of whom are also now
private contractors — with the information they need to contact kids directly.
Should skeptical parents find out that the "Mr. Jones" calling for Johnny
is offering their child a free ticket to Iraq, the military is spending
millions to learn how best to persuade or bypass these negative
"influencers." One Pentagon study is focused exclusively on changing
mothers' attitudes to enable recruiters to "exert some influence on
mothers who are currently against military service."
Grassroots groups are mobilizing against the Pentagon's massive
student-recruitment and data-mining campaigns. Leave My Child Alone
(www.leavemychildalone.org) offers online opt-out forms that students and
parents can download and submit to schools to keep their names off of
recruiter contact lists. The group estimates that as of 2006, 37,000
students have opted out of the No Child Left Behind requirement. Students
can also file another form to send to the Pentagon to have their names
removed from the giant student database.
I signed my form directing our local high school to withhold my daughter's
contact information from military recruiters. Other parents undoubtedly
missed it. When military recruiters eventually come knocking at their
doors, these families will find out the hard way what President Bush
really meant when he promised to "leave no child behind."
David Goodman is co-author of "Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders
and the People Who Fight Back," published by Hyperion. He lives in Vermont.
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