Editorial: A Double-Edged Sword

Imagine if you will, a world where the government monitors almost every aspect of your personal information-from e-mail address to ethnicity-and uses it, among other things, to determine if you're an ideal target for military recruitment. Scratch that-this nightmare has already become reality.

Just days ago, the Pentagon announced a project it has had in the works for a while now. It has enlisted the aid of marketing firm BeNow Inc. in an effort to collect and consolidate all types of personal information on high school students aged 16-18 and all college students. So far they have data on a staggering 30 million people. That number is even more appalling when you consider the breadth of data filed away on each one-Social Security numbers, grade point averages, e-mail addresses, ethnicities and even the subjects students study are only part of the information that has become free game for military recruitment.

Technically, federal law restricts the government from collecting so much data on its citizens, although the military has already been doing limited collection from high schools and universities. According to the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, high schools must comply with military recruitment or risk losing funding-and so must universities, who also can't endanger what funds they still receive. But with this "new and improved" version, the military is gleaning the bulk of this data from private companies, sidestepping the very restrictions keeping it from collecting such data by not actually doing the "collecting" themselves.

This policy, though it technically doesn't violate federal restrictions, is unequivocally against the spirit of the law. Such regulations are meant to protect the people from these invasive tactics, tactics the military seems ready to use with impunity. Such dangerous policies bypass the system so easily because they don't go through the public eye the way other major laws do as they pass through Congress-as the Department of Defense is part of the executive branch, it has no need to submit to popular or even legislative vote.

For such policies, there's often little more than the minimum one-month "comment period," after which the law is made permanent. This waiting period is usually symbolic, as dissenters have no power to change the policy. This period is also shamefully underpublicized, as with this and the "export license" policy that discriminates against foreign-born students ("With Rules Like These," May 23).

And without public outcry, there's no way for people to take note of all the problems with this policy-aside from ethical ones. For example, why on earth do they claim to need Social Security numbers? By law, no organization is allowed to demand this information, and the Pentagon isn't even asking permission. There's a reason for this policy-we've seen how easy it is to steal this data. The reason military officials give is that they don't want to have duplicate entries in their databases-a laughably trivial reason for tracking such private information. What's more, there are ways that marketing firms can track individuals without using Social Security numbers-something they should at least be looking into with BeNow Inc. instead of trying to grab as much of our personal data as possible.

Recruitment officials say this will help make recruiting students into the military more efficient. Of course, it hasn't crossed their minds that perhaps the reason they can't seem to reach their quotas is that they're waging a costly and unpopular war. Writing dangerous and unethical laws to circumvent this issue is not the way to go about solving a problem.

In spite of claims that the data will only be used to place irritating calls to your home, the military can distribute it to nonmilitary organizations, such as law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress. The only way you can opt out is by sending in a form with detailed information on it so they can keep it in a "suppression file." There's being stuck between a rock and a hard place, and then there's this. And with the one-month period over, the law is set in stone.

Why, then, should we criticize a law that shows no hope of being changed? Because there is something truly wrong with a government that endangers the security of its own citizens and doesn't even ask them about it. In this informational age, where the smallest piece of personal data can be used to ruin a person's record, this of all political issues should be made a public decision. This law should not only be revoked; the whole policymaking process needs to be reviewed before even more democratic freedoms are endangered by our own government.

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