Dwindling military enlistment? The Pentagon has a plan
Jonathan Krim writes in the WashPost of a new Pentagon plan to collect information on high school and college students; the ostensible purpose is to help military recruiters target the likeliest (most desperate?) among them.
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....
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.
Social Security numbers? Perhaps the architects of the Pentagon database have an eye on integrating it with the Selective Service database in the event of a draft.
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