Lawmakers blast recruiting database

Benjamin Grove

Monday, July 11, 2005 | 10:46 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Democratic lawmakers including Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., have sharply criticized the Defense Department for hiring a marketing firm to collect private information about high school and college students.

The lawmakers have asked the Pentagon to stop using the Massachusetts-based marketing firm BeNOW Inc., which was hired to maintain a database that charts such information as ethnicity, grades and Social Security numbers.

Berkley also has co-sponsored a House bill that would block military recruiters from accessing student information without permission from students and families.

"Our concerns lie primarily with the erosion of student privacy rights, the potential for racial profiling and the risk of identity theft," Berkley and 61 other House Democrats wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a June 29 letter.

The lawmakers also argued that collecting ethnic data could lead to profiling and sends the wrong message that the military might target only certain groups.

"It is imperative that the Armed Services continue their centurylong efforts to ensure an equality of treatment for all persons, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or socio-economic background," the lawmakers wrote to Rumsfeld.

A provision in the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act granted military officials access to high school campuses and to student contact information, including student names, phone numbers and addresses. Schools stand to lose federal funding for not cooperating.

Under the law, individual students and parents can request that they not be contacted. But the lawmakers argue that students may be part of a marketing-firm database that could make them vulnerable to identity theft.

The Pentagon hired the marketing firm to collect and organize more detailed student information in a massive database to more effectively recruit students, which concerns some parents already wary of recruiters approaching their children in schools. In addition to schools, the firm can obtain information from sources including commercial data companies and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Defense Department officials acknowledged last month that the database had been in development for three years. The Pentagon first disclosed the database in May in a notice in the Federal Register, a daily posting of government notices.

Privacy advocates are howling, arguing that the Pentagon may be violating the Privacy Act of 1974. The Defense Department should rely on traditional advertising methods for recruiting, argues to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a coalition of public interest groups.

The government is trying to evade privacy law by outsourcing the database work, Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union technology project, said in a statement after the Pentagon disclosed its hiring of BeNOW.

"If the military is having trouble finding recruits, it must address the core sources of that problem; the solution is not to target our youth with marketing techniques centered around the collection of ever-more detailed dossiers of personal information," he said.

In Clark County, recruiters are free to chat up students in high schools, sometimes talking to classes and even bringing Humvees to campus.

But few parents have complained to school officials about military recruiters, said Edward Goldman, associate superintendent for educational services.

Still, parents are beginning to hear about the Pentagon database from the media and are increasingly concerned about their privacy, National PTA president Anna Weselak said.

"We're not sure how secure the information is," Weselak said in an interview today. "Parents want to know what information is going to whom. And that's not clear right now."

The Nevada PTA does not have a position on military recruiters, the groups's new president Robin Munier said. No member has brought it up as an issue to be considered at organization meetings, and no parents had brought their concerns to her, Munier said.

"But we would definitely hope, in all aspects of the recruiting process, that parents are involved in any and every way possible," she said.

Recruiters in Clark County now get phone and address information from the school district, said Matthew Wilson, spokesman for the Salt Lake City Army Recruiting Battalion, a regional office that oversees Las Vegas.

Information in the Pentagon database has not filtered down to local recruiting offices, Wilson said. The Pentagon has not told the regional office if and when the database would be available to recruiters in the seven Western states it manages, Wilson said.

The information would be useful, he said. Ethnic information could aid recruiters as they seek personnel who are reflective of the nation's racial diversity, he said.

Student grades could be useful for targeting high-achieving students for highly skilled Army jobs, Wilson said. As for low-scoring students, Wilson said, "At some point I would call them, but they wouldn't be my first priority. We are always focused on recruiting the best educated students we can."