October 17, 2005
Organizations Urge Rumsfeld to Shelve Controversial Recruiting Database
Contact:
Nancy Talanian, Director
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
413-582-0110; info@bordc.org
More than one hundred national, state, and local organizations sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the oversight and appropriations committees for the Department of Defense (DOD), seeking an end to a database recruitment project called the Joint Advertising and Market Research Studies (JAMRS) Recruiting Database. The database unduly compromises the privacy of 30 million U.S. residents between the ages of 16 and 25.
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) supports this effort because, with the JAMRS recruitment database, the military is attempting to use private companies to gather information on U.S. residents, as a means to short-circuit the Privacy Act’s prohibitions regarding the government’s collection and use of private information.
"Government agencies, including the DOD, have legitimate needs for information about U.S. residents, but they also have a legal obligation to observe laws enacted to protect people’s privacy,” said Nancy Talanian, BORDC’s director. “When Congress passed the Privacy Act, its intention was not that the government should turn instead to the private sector for unlimited personal information without prohibitions on how it may be used.”
The letter to Secretary Rumsfeld states that the signers support the men and women of the U.S. Armed Services, but that they strongly object to the DOD decision to create the JAMRS database for several reasons, including the lack of proper notice to the public, the unnecessarily comprehensive information to be included, and the fact that parties who provided the information were not warned of the military recruiting purpose.
The DOD was required by the Privacy Act to provide notice 30-days before beginning their work on the Joint Advertising and Marketing Research Studies recruiting database in 2002. The federal agency delayed making public notice of this project until a Federal Register notice published on May 23, 2005.
The sources of information for the DOD database include the High School Master File and the College Students Files, which are compiled for purposes that are unrelated to an interest in military service or recruitment. The High School Master File is created from information provided by state motor vehicle departments, and the commercial brokers American Student List and Student Marketing Group.
American Student List sells databases of children's names in grades K-12 overlaid with data on sex, age, whether they own a telephone, income, religion, and their race or ethnicity. This information is often obtained from surveys that are administered while children are at school, under the pretense of education-related purposes.
The letter’s signers, known as the Dump the DOD Database Coalition,
are working to end the JAMRS database to protect the civil liberties,
including privacy rights, of this generation of young people.