The Pentagon Wants Your Babies

With armed services recruitment naturally down, the Pentagon is into some shady dealings with some marketing companies that track information about high school age children. The Pentagon is using info such as classes taken and GPAs to target their recruitment efforts, often contacting kids at home. The Washington Post says the Pentagon is using an outside company to do this to circumvent laws preventing government agencies from collecting private information (the article lacks some detail on these laws).

It pretty much sounds like blackmail though as schools that refuse to give up the information can be denied certain types of federal funding. Sonsabitches.

"The purpose of the system . . . is to provide 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," according to the official notice of the program.

Privacy advocates said the plan appeared to be an effort to circumvent laws that restrict the government's right to collect or hold citizen information by turning to private firms to do the work.

Some information on high school students already is given to military recruiters in a separate program under provisions of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Recruiters have been using the information to contact students at home, angering some parents and school districts around the country.

School systems that fail to provide that information risk losing federal funds, although individual parents or students can withhold information that would be transferred to the military by their districts. John Moriarty, president of the PTA at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, said the issue has "generated a great deal of angst" among many parents participating in an e-mail discussion group.