US Armed Forces Data Mining Info Source? No Child Left Behind Act

by Karen Hatter | September 6, 2009 at 08:42 am

274 views | 46 Recommendations | 9 comments

In today's technological age, any and all manner of information can be harvested by almost anyone, usually, in most cases, within certain limits.

I can't really say why but, I'm always surprised when I get a tally of costs I have incurred and items I have purchased at my favorite pharmacy chain, which makes me shudder if I think of the information gleaning process, occurring on a large scale, that exists for every aspect of our lives.

David Goodman, co-author of Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back, contributing an article to Mother Jones, reports that in 2002, then Louisiana Republican Representative now Senator David Vitter added a provision to the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act that required the nation's high schools provide names and contact details for the juniors and seniors in their schools to Army recruiters, among the names collected, minors as young as 15.

Failure to comply risked the schools' funding from the program.

An opt out provision was available but the article states students were not made aware of that choice by all school districts.

From the article:

The military has long struggled to find more effective ways to reach potential enlistees; for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.) Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush's signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form—but not all school districts let them know about it.

Yet NCLB is just the tip of the data iceberg. In 2005, privacy advocates discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years quietly amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15. The massive data-mining project is overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, whose website has described the database, which now holds 34 million names, as "arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country." The JAMRS database is in turn run by Equifax, the credit reporting giant.

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Pythiian1

at 09:49 on September 6th, 2009

There are all kinds of databases that collect countless minute details of the public, unbeknownst to them. The concern is the safekeeping of these data and where are they being stored, which are not always in the US.

Rory Cripps

at 05:57 on September 7th, 2009

Pythiian: Yeah . . . it seems that nowadays we often wind up talking to someone overseas when we call tech support or make inquiries about our credit cards.

a211423

at 11:07 on September 6th, 2009

Where was the public outcry when this was done?

Do some parents think its okay for their children to be marketed to the military, but not okay to have them listen to a speech by the president about the values of education?

I think it was in a Michael Moore film a few years ago about war where he exposed the unfair, targetted recruiting of poor, minority young men and women of inner cities like Detroit. Another memorable scene was when he stood on a street corner and approached congress people and asked them if their sons or daughters were recruited or were serving in war zones. Most scurried away when they saw him.

Rhonda J Mangus

at 11:51 on September 6th, 2009

Thanks for this, Karen!

Any school district that fails to notify parents of the "opt-out" provision needs to be addressed swiftly. It is the law.

Grace H

at 11:57 on September 6th, 2009

I do not think they do. I am a senior and had not heard of this until recently. I have recieved letters from West Point but never considered it due to my social views.

The_Cynic

at 13:23 on September 6th, 2009

Imperialism needs an army? /j/k

I saw this a while ago, if I remember correctly I blogged about, too. But there will not be any outcry about it. The US has taken on the roll of worlds police with the vast military it has, all you need to do is look at how big it really is - bigger than China, Russia and the EU combined!

To facilitate that you have to have the recruits - yet we see that there are still fewer wanting to join up.

The poor have always been the cannon-fodder for the State. The proof in that pudding is the British Empire.

BruceCarson2008 (not verified)

at 20:54 on September 6th, 2009

Bigger then the EU, yes, but the EU by in large has no standing army capable of even a nation sized peacekeeping action (note the deployments in Haiti). Germany does not even meet its obligations to NATO for military investments and size. And China has a military many times the size of ours, in fact it's the largest employer in the world. Of course, China's not a threat, they told us so, right? No matter Tibet or their own secret prisons and mobile execution chambers.

Barry Artiste

at 05:05 on September 7th, 2009

That is pushing things a little too far! Is this something Obama condones?

Rory Cripps

at 05:52 on September 7th, 2009

In my day, when we turned 18, we had to register for the draft and we received various classifications such as 1A. This was during the Vietnam war. Thus it was easy for the military to keep track of its recruitment pool. Today there's no more draft and I guess it's the case that the military has to come up with new and creative ways to gather bodies. I personally don't like the military's methods.