Prometheus 6

The main obstacle to getting children into the military -- concerned parents -- has at long last been circumvented. Private companies can now harvest data on children and provide recruiters, some of whom are also now private contractors, with the information they need to contact children directly...

I signed my form directing our local high school to withhold my daughter's contact information from military recruiters. Other parents undoubtedly missed it. When military recruiters eventually come knocking at their doors, these families will find out the hard way what Bush really meant when he promised to "leave no child behind."

Reading, writing, and recruiting
By David Goodman  |  September 16, 2006

MY DAUGHTER started high school last week. This milestone was marked by the arrival in our home of a ream of paperwork. Along with the usual bureaucratic permissions, I found tucked into this package a seemingly innocuous form that carries extraordinary consequences: failing to fill it out might result in my daughter being harassed, assaulted, or being fast-tracked to fight in Iraq.

This form asks us whether we want to opt-out of having our daughter's contact information sent to the US military. If we overlooked this form, or did not opt-out , our high school is required to forward her information to military recruiters. This is thanks to a stealth provision of the No Child Left Behind law. It turns out that President Bush's supposed signature education law also happens to be the most aggressive military recruitment tool enacted since the draft ended in 1973...

The database contains an array of personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade point averages, ethnicity, and subjects the students are studying. The Pentagon has hired a Massachusetts-based company, BeNOW, to run the database. By outsourcing this work to a private firm, the government is circumventing laws that restrict its right to collect or hold citizen information.

If you are concerned about how this information on your children might be used, you should be: the Pentagon has stated that it can share the data with law enforcement, state tax authorities, other agencies making employment inquiries, and with foreign authorities, to name a few. Students will not know whether their information has been collected, and they can not prevent it from happening.

The main obstacle to getting children into the military -- concerned parents -- has at long last been circumvented. Private companies can now harvest data on children and provide recruiters, some of whom are also now private contractors, with the information they need to contact children directly.

Should skeptical parents find out that the "Mr. Jones" calling for Johnny is offering their child a free ticket to Iraq, the military is spending millions to learn how best to persuade or bypass these negative "influencers." One Pentagon study is focused exclusively on changing mothers' attitudes to enable recruiters to "exert some influence on mothers who are currently against military service."