Pentagon recruiting kids with mass data mining scheme

[Gav]

From el reg:

By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Published Thursday 23rd June 2005 20:04 GMT

The US military has retained the services of a commercial privacy invasion outfit to assemble detailed dossiers on all American high school children and college students, according to a report in the Washington Post.

Direct-marketing database outfit BeNow Inc will manage students' information for the US Department of Defense (DoD), in order to sidestep federal regulations limiting the amount of citizens' personal data that government agencies are permitted to retain.

By combining commercial data with information already accessible to the government, the DoD hopes to assemble "a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service."

Military recruiters will then be able to target qualified candidates over the age of sixteen, with complete dossiers of their educational, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. This will enable them to initiate contact with the most effective sales pitch, emphasizing, say, job security to weak students with poor employment prospects, or prestige assignments to those with records of high academic and/or athletic achievement.

The Pentagon's opt-out plan is absurd. It will require students or parents to submit detailed information to be held in a separate database, and checked regularly against the "working" database, to ensure that there are no matches. Thus one is given no option of withholding the information in the first place, but rather, one gets a mere choice of databases, with all the potential for deliberate abuse and accidental disclosure that this implies.

The DoD says that it is confident that all of its information contractors understand and abide by its (putatively strict) data security practices, so there is no reason for concern.

No doubt MasterCard felt the same way about its payment processor CardSystems Solutions, which recently coughed up 40 million credit card records.

hmm interesting. Any thoughts?

You can read the article here. It includes a couple of links to other stories.

[esskreemr]

If they are going to play sleazy like that, then the opt out should be visible on the "Selective Service" form.

I think this should be looked into and investigated. Sounds like another level of constraints needs to be set up.

[Larrison]

I'm of mixed opinions on this. I mean, if Visa and Mastercard can build up data bases on High School seniors to send them "free!" credit cards, why can't some one else?

But... I don't like Visa and MC doing that (or anyone else...), but its not illegal. And I don't like any agency in the government doing it directly or indirectly...

[esskreemr]

Visa and MasterCard aren't going to exploit the data in order to "encourage" youths to sign up so that they can shipped off to fight.

[Larrison]

Originally Posted by esskreemr

Visa and MasterCard aren't going to exploit the data in order to "encourage" youths to sign up so that they can shipped off to fight.

No... they're encouraging them to go into financial indebtedness on the basis of fradulent financial representations....Which I've noted has a *bad* impact on kids graduating from high school...

But it's not illegal to encourage youths to sign up to serve in the military.

If you're against that, you're also against military recruiting in any form? (Serious question -- I'm looking for the limits that you feel is proper?)

And yes, if they are doing this specifically to get around Federal regulations on this, then that's improper.

But as an alternative case, if the military hires a PR firm to do marketing to encourage kids to enlist, and the Military does not have access to the records in any way, and the PR firm uses standard market data (such as used by VISA & MC) to send out tailored marketing pitches, is that improper?