COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Student Privacy
Student privacy’s been hijacked
Springfield Times
Oct 12, 2005
Privacy
is a concern for almost everyone these days. There is legislation that
gives us the opportunity to take our phone numbers off
telemarketers’ lists. Credit card information is being stolen
online. Identity theft is epidemic. However, youth and young adults see
their privacy squandered with legislation that forces schools to reveal
personal information to military recruiters or risk loosing federal
funding. That’s right; unless students and parents know about
their options to remove students from these lists, and take the
initiative to fill out an “opt-out” form, students can
expect to start getting more and more calls from desperate recruiters
needing to fill quotas.
This isn’t about whether young people should consider military
service. This is about how our government forces student information to
be released to military recruiters. We won’t stand for
telemarketers harassing us at home, and so we develop a system to
suppress our contact information from them. What about our youth?
Should we protect their privacy any less?
One way we can address this practice is to push schools to do their
best to inform parents and students of their right to opt out. We
should demand that more is done to educate people about this issue than
to slip an Opt-Out form into the middle or back of a large stack of
back-to-school information. How much time do busy parents have to go
through every piece of paper in that stack?
Another thing that you can do is to call your congressman and ask him
to support legislation like HR 551. This bill would render protection
of student privacy the default. If students want their information
released to military recruiters they can sign up for it with an opt-in;
otherwise, it won’t be released. Don’t recruiters want
names of those interested? Wouldn’t this be a more efficient list
than spending lots of time calling people that aren’t interested
in military service and don’t want to be bothered with calls at
home?
Also, the Pentagon has hired a private database company to glean from
the Internet and other sources a database on civilians between 16 and
26 years old. This database contains even more information on young
people, including cell phone numbers, GPA, area of study in school and
even Social Security numbers. What would happen if this information,
held by a private business, is hacked? Who even gave permission for the
Pentagon to start building databases on civilians (let alone minors) in
the first place? You can write and ask for your information to be
“suppressed” by writing: JAMRS, Attention Opt-Out, 4040 N.
Fairfax Drive, Ste 200, Arlington, VA 22203. However, this will not get
your name off the database. Supposedly, however, writing to this
address will result in your name not being used for recruitment
purposes.
Regardless of whether you want your child to consider joining the
military, let’s not allow this abuse of privacy any longer. Urge
your school district to fully educate about the option to opt out.
Support legislation to change this process to an “opt-in.”
Write to have your information suppressed on
the Pentagon’s database. And finally, tell your congressperson to
have this database destroyed and to stop collecting this information.
To learn more on this topic and how you can get involved see,
www.leavemychildalone.org. Locally, contact the Committee for
Countering Military Recruitment, www.countermilitary.org.
Phil Weaver is co-coordinator of the Committee for Countering Military
Recruitment, a Eugene-based organization that is a joint project of
Eugene PeaceWorks and Community Alliance of Lane County
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of