| washingtonpost.com Recruiting Tool For Military Raises Privacy Concerns By Jonathan Krim - Washington Post Staff Writer - Thursday, June 23, 2005; A01 The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches. The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying. The data will be managed by BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., one of many marketing firms that use computers to analyze large amounts of data to target potential customers based on their personal profiles and habits. "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. |
Yep. That's your Bush-war Administration, trying to find new ways to suck hapless teenagers into their Iraqi Oil Protection Program. This is a despicable move on your government's part, and a moral affront to your children's civil rights.
Well, unless of course you are part of the Christian Fundamentalist Evangelical War-Hawk Brigade. Because these so-called patriotic Americans are, I'm sure, just chomping at the bit to send their kids off to die for the noble cause of lining the pockets of the military-industrial-petroleum complex headed by Nationalist Neoconservatives.
Get angry, people. This is your life and your world that they are systematically destroying. How much longer are you going to sit back and look the other way?
When do you finally say, "Enough is enough?" When you're paying $10/gal for gas because civil war broke out in Iraq, sucking in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran? When you can find nothing but government propaganda on the news (oops, that's already happened)? When political decisions are based on whether or not it's "christian" (we're halfway there on that one)? When you can no longer speak you own mind lest you be labeled anti-patriotic and thus a terrorist? When any government official can walk into your home at any time for any reason they deem fit? When only the rich can get access to health care? When environmental protection laws are a distant memory and only corporations decide how clean to make the air you breathe and the water you drink? When Labor laws and Unions are reclassified as anti-American and methodically drummed into oblivion? When every child (except the rich ones, of course) are conscripted into the military directly out of high school?
When and where do you draw the line?
No comments:
Post a Comment