The Pentagon's prying eyes

While we were visiting my grandparents in the hinterlands of western Pennsylvania, my brother made me stop at what he had recently deemed "the coolest store ever." I went in expecting the Star Wars posters, the Dungeon and Dragons gaming tables, the shrines of action figures and that I'd be the only girl present.

What I hadn't anticipated was the business-card holder containing the name, number and e-mail address of the local military recruiter next to the cash register. I took a couple, since it looked so full that it was kind of sad. I guess the clientele generally preferred to leave their fates up to the roll of the 12-sided die.

If the military recruiters have got all the comic-book shops in rural Pennsylvania covered, then it looks to me like they've done just about everything they can in the middle of this recruitment doldrum. The Pentagon, however, disagrees. That's why it hired Mullen Advertising Inc. to create a database under the Joint Advertising, Market Research and Studies program.

The program aims to collect the birth date, Social Security number, e-mail address, grade-point average, ethnicity and field of study of every college and high school student in the country. The company that Mullen Advertising originally subcontracted to has recently been acquired by one of the nation's largest data brokers.

Now that creeps me out way more than a Hellboy doll -- I mean, action figure -- does.

What's more is that while the database actually started collecting information in 2002, the Department of Defense didn't list the database on the Federal Register until last May and didn't send a privacy notice out until a month later.

Predictably, some people have a little bit of a problem with both the program itself and the way the Department of Defense has run it. A couple weeks ago a coalition of groups, including privacy advocates, parents' groups and community organizations, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asking him to dismantle the project. Opponents claim that it violates federal privacy laws in addition to having a lot of potential for misuse by the government and the marketing firms paid to collect the data.

Unlike information databases in the private sector, there's nothing stopping the Department of Defense from sharing the information with others, like law enforcement, state and local tax authorities, other agencies with employment queries and almost any other agency for "national security purposes." In fact, those things I just listed are under the Department of Defense's list of permitted "blanket routine uses" for the database.

While researching, I came across a message-board poster who wrote something to the effect of, "It is so like whiny liberals to complain about the overstretching of the military yet oppose efforts to increase recruitment."

Well, I can kind of see where they're coming from. Except that one of the signatories of the letter is the Republican Liberty Caucus, the libertarian wing of the Republican Party -- not exactly a bunch of commie peaceniks. After all, if you think about it, wouldn't the other side of that coin be to allow the military to do whatever it wants as long as it might help meet the recruiting quotas?

It's a pretty scary thought, the idea that one of the requirements of an all-volunteer military is now the sacrifice of our personal privacy.

Thankfully, there will be opt-out forms made available on Pentagon Web sites ... eventually. Right now, I think they're promising sometime "early next year." I'm not really sure why it needs to take several months to set up a form.

However you may feel about joining the military, whether it's something you'd like to do or the last thing on your list, you should consider opting out of the database. It's not a matter of patriotism; it's a matter of privacy. If there's anything I've learned from those credit-card commercials, it is that identity theft is not a fun experience.

Until that opt-out form becomes available, the closest I'll get to war will be playing a game of "Risk" with my little brother.

Amara Rockar is a junior political science major from St. Louis. Out of Range appears on Tuesdays.

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