Is the Pentagon Overstepping Its Bounds?
While perusing one of my favorite websites from which to collect controversial and often suppressed news stories, I cam across a highly disturbing article about the Pentagon’s “recruitment database.”
With a budget of over $70 million on their JAMRS database alone (Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies), the pentagon is beefing up its selective service capabilities and keeping records on far too many (at least for my satisfaction) U.S. children in a system that has a “questionable” purpose. To top it off, it is impossible for parents to remove the names of heir children from the list, as all information, if requested to be removed, is kept on he system, but in a “suppressed” state.
I have taken excerpts from the article, creating a summarized version. To view the entire article as I found it, along with some important contact information for parents, visit: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0117-12.htm.
I ask that the readers of The Threshold keep in mind that I’m not a “right wing” or “left wing radical” who supports the abolishment of government: I’m not Libertarian, and most importantly, I’m not an anarchist. I hold that government is an important tool for humanity and that it should be used properly and responsibly. Unfortunately, I often see that those individuals that hold power in governments (both ours and foreign) sometimes lose focus of the purpose of their office, and more often, don’t wield their power with responsibility. The following is, I believe, such a case of "overstepping" one's boundaries. Perhaps our "beloved" Defense Department is even violating the privacy of the American People, those same people whom they live and die to protect.
Summary:
The Pentagon has spent more than $70.5 million on market research, national advertising, website development, and management of the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies (JAMRS) database — a storehouse of questionable legality that includes the names and personal details of more than 30 million U.S. children and young people between the ages of 16 and 23.
The database is separate from information collected from schools that receive federal education money. Parents must contact the Pentagon directly to ask that their children’s information not be released to recruiters, but the data is not removed from the JAMRS database, according to Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Instead, the information is moved to a suppression file, where it is continuously updated with new data from private and government sources and still made available to recruiters, In addition to names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and phone numbers, the database may include cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity, and subjects of interest.
Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, said he had grave concerns about the legality of the database. “I think this is absolutely wrong,” he told the Vermont Guardian. “You have the law, and then you have an administration that says we don’t like the law so let’s find another way of doing it. When my kids were in school I would have been really angry if this had happened,” said Leahy, whose youngest son enlisted in the Marines. “I would have been absolutely ripped if they would have gone into his high school or other records to contact him this way; I know nothing that allows it.”
Discomfort over the database extends to other members of Congress. Seven senators, including New York’s Hillary Rodham Clinton and Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, both Democrats, sent a letter to Rumsfeld on June 24 asking him to “immediately cease creation of this database.”
In his July 11, 2006 response, Undersecretary of Defense David Chu said the database was an important component in the nation’s volunteer military — one that enables the United States to avoid a draft.
“The department collects basic information on youth in response to a congressional mandate in 1982 that noted ‘it is essential that the Secretary of Defense obtain and compile directory information pertaining to students enrolled in secondary schools throughout the United States’ to support recruiting for the all-volunteer force and avoid conscription,” he wrote to the senators.
Chu also said the Pentagon had no intention of using the information for purposes other than targeted recruitment.
But according to the privacy group, BeNow, the direct marketing company chosen by the Pentagon to compile the data, is owned by the credit reporting company Equifax and does not have a privacy policy, “nor has it troubled itself to enlist in a privacy seal program regarding the handling of information collected for this purpose.”
The Leave My Child Alone coalition is urging the Pentagon to add an 800 number and online opt-out links to its websites. The group concedes, however, that given reports of massive security breaches at data firms, the fact that the information remains on file “hardly grants parents peace of mind.”
One California lawmaker is sponsoring state legislation that would require high schools to include opt-out information on the emergency forms that parents must fill out annually for school records. In one California school district that implemented such a policy, the number of families choosing to opt out went from 16 percent to 63 percent, Crush said.
Meanwhile, asked what parents could do about the Pentagon database, the ACLU’s Steinhardt said, “This is as much a political issue as anything else; it’s an issue to be decided in the Congress.
View the article in full here: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0117-12.htm
In the “aftermath" of the November 7, 2006 elections (for those out of the loop, the Democrats gained the majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, where they had been the minority. The change of power will take place in January, and will be a great shift of power away from the Republicans), it will be interesting to see where this leads, what with the Democrats now in control of the entire Congress and Rumsfeld out of the Department of Defense. Let’s see if the Democrats have strong leadership and will stand up to the plate and finally accomplish something after all their complaining of a “stacked” Republican-controlled government.
-- Xi Hyperon
posted by Xi Hyperon @ 6:13 PM
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