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Pentagon Student Database Targets Minorities
(Jonathan Krim, Washington Post, June 23, 2005)
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 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. John Moriarty, president of the PTA at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, said the issue has "generated a great deal of angst" among many parents participating in an e-mail discussion group. . . . The Pentagon's statements added that anyone can "opt out" of the system by providing detailed personal information that will be kept in a separate "suppression file." That file will be matched with the full database regularly to ensure that those who do not wish to be contacted are not, according to the Pentagon. . . . [COMMENT by Lorenzo: That's a curious way to handle an an op-out list. First of all, a student must provide "detailed personal information" before they can op-out, and then they go into a "suppression" file. My guess is that these young people will be rounded up and "suppressed" once things begin to heat up over here.] . . . Chris Jay Hoofnagle, West Coast director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the system "an audacious plan to target-market kids, as young as 16, for military solicitation." . . . He added that collecting Social Security numbers was not only unnecessary but posed a needless risk of identity fraud. Theft of Social Security numbers and other personal information from data brokers, government agencies, financial institutions and other companies is rampant. . . . "What's ironic is that the private sector has ways of uniquely identifying individuals without using Social Security numbers for marketing," he said. . . . The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress. . . . Some see the program as part of a growing encroachment of government into private lives, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. . . . "It's just typical of how voracious government is when it comes to personal information," said James W. Harper, a privacy expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "Defense is an area where government has a legitimate responsibility . . . but there are a lot of data fields they don't need and shouldn't be keeping. Ethnicity strikes me as particularly inappropriate." . . . [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Of course the screwheads in Washington want ethnicity data. The military targets minorities because there are few other options open to them when it comes to a decent job in this country. To the Bush Junta, these poor kids are nothing more than cannon fodder. Yet many of their parents still vote for these Republican criminals because their religious leaders are telling them to. . . . As the Great Gildersleve often said, "What a revolting development this is."] . . . Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Social Security Administration relaxed its privacy policies and provided data on citizens to the FBI in connection with terrorism investigations.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 10:24 AM

 

House Defies Bush on Patriot Act
(Andrew Taylor, The Associated Press, 15 June 2005)
In a slap at President Bush, lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the Justice Department and the FBI from using the Patriot Act to peek at library records and bookstore sales slips. . . . The House voted 238-187 despite a veto threat from Bush to block the part of the anti-terrorism law that allows the government to investigate the reading habits of terror suspects. . . . The vote reversed a narrow loss last year by lawmakers concerned about the potential invasion of privacy of innocent library users. They narrowed the proposal this year to permit the government to continue to seek out records of Internet use at libraries. . . . [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Don't let this tiny victory for freedom fool you into thinking that Congress might possibly do something right for a change. They are still allowing the FBI to track the Internet use of library patrons. Just because they can't see what books you've been checking out doesn't mean the government isn't using your local library to spy on you. Tracking the Internet trails of their patrons will reveal far more to the screwheads in Washington than the last five books you checked out. . . . Always keep in mind that unless you are using some type of anonymzing software, everything you do on the Net is done in a public square. Hey, the FBI has admitted reading your email with their Carnivore system, not to mention the data-mining all of the free email services like Hotmail and Yahoo are doing with your assumedly private communications . . . and the same goes for IMs . . . all of your words that flow through the Net are all being considered by the great AIs in the basement of NSA headquarters, otherwise known as the belly of the Beast.] . . . "This is a tremendous victory that restores important constitutional rights to the American people," said Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., the sponsor of the measure. He said the vote would help "rein in an administration intent on chipping away at the very civil liberties that define us as a nation." . . . Congress is preparing to extend the Patriot Act, which was passed quickly in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Then, Congress included a sunset provision under which 15 of the law's provisions are to expire at the end of this year. . . . Supporters of rolling back the library and bookstore provision said that the law gives the FBI too much leeway to go on fishing expeditions on people's reading habits and that innocent people could get tagged as potential terrorists based on what they check out from a library. . . . "If the government suspects someone is looking up how to make atom bombs, go to a court and get a search warrant," said Jerold Nadler, D-N.Y. . . . Supporters of the Patriot Act countered that the rules on reading records are a potentially useful tool in finding terrorists and argued that the House was voting to make libraries safe havens for them. . . . "If there are terrorists in libraries studying how to fly planes, how to put together biological weapons, how to put together chemical weapons, nuclear weapons ... we have to have an avenue through the federal court system so that we can stop the attack before it occurs," said Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla. . . . [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Hey Tom, wake up! It's the 21st century, dude. You ought to check out this thing called the Internet. If "terrorists in libraries" are keeping you awake at night, I'm afraid you're going to freak out when you see how old fashioned it has become to use book to learn a dastardly trade.] . . . In the meantime, a number of libraries have begun disposing of patrons' records quickly so they won't be available if sought under the law. . . . Authorities have gained access to records through voluntary cooperation from librarians, Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 10:05 AM

 

The Best of Tomdispatch: Chalmers Johnson
(Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, June 9, 2005)
In September 2003, only four months after our President's "Mission Accomplished" moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of Iraq -- but that, in the process, the American constitutional system as we've known it might well be destroyed. The question of just what Rubicon we might have crossed when American troops first took a bridge over the Euphrates was on my mind -- and Chalmers Johnson's as well. He sat down early that September, having just seen a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and wrote out his own version of the fall of the republic, which he entitled "The Scourge of Militarism," an essay as resonant today as it was then. It is the second offering in my Best of Tomdispatch 2003 series.

Looking back almost two years later, Johnson writes,

"The American governmental system is no longer working the way it is supposed to. Many distinguished observers think it is badly damaged in terms of Constitutional checks and balances and the structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny. General Tommy Franks, commander of the American assault on Baghdad, predicts that another terrorist attack on the United States would 'begin to unravel the fabric of our Constitution,' and he openly suggests that 'the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.'

"Another military writer, the historian Kevin Baker, fears that we are not far from the day when, like the Roman Senate in 27 B.C., our Congress will take its last meaningful vote and turn over power to a military dictator. 'In the end, we'll beg for the coup,' he writes. At the same time the American public seems apathetic. Most Americans sense that the country is in great trouble, but evidently don't know how to think about the crisis we find ourselves in. Having been poorly schooled and without an elementary knowledge of earlier republics, the problems of standing armies in any form of democracy, and the threat of militarism (a fear that virtually all Americans shared during our first century as a republic), the American people today stare blankly at the mounting evidence that our military is totally out of control. Back in 2003, my 'Scourge of Militarism' essay tried to lay out some new ways to think about our current dilemmas based on what happened to an earlier republic faced with similar conditions. Unfortunately, given what's happened since, there is no reason to be optimistic about this fate of ours."

. . . Read more!

posted by A Curmudgeon 2:24 PM