A FEW GOOD KIDS?

g under p

As millions of students prepare for the start of another school year, we focus on an issue that concerns many parents – the increasing presence of military recruiters in the nation’s high schools and the military’s ability to gather information about students. We speak with journalist David Goodman about his Mother Joes article, “A Few Good Kids?” and with the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Ari Rosmarin, who works on the organization’s Project on Military Recruitment and Students’ Rights.

Take a look at this interview with David Goodman on Democracy Now on the lengths our military will go into our schools to recruit the students of America. Mainly targeting teens in high school even venturing into some in college.

Back to School: Military Recruiters Increasingly Targeting High School Teens

Here's David Goodman's article from Mother Jones...A FEW GOOD KIDS?...How the No Child Left Behind Act allowed military recruiters to collect info on millions of unsuspecting teens.

John Travers was striding purposefully into the Westfield mall in Wheaton, Maryland, for some back-to-school shopping before starting his junior year at Bowling Green State University. When I asked him whether he'd ever talked to a military recruiter, Travers, a 19-year-old African American with a buzz cut, a crisp white T-shirt, and a diamond stud in his left ear, smiled wryly. "To get to lunch in my high school, you had to pass recruiters," he said. "It was overwhelming." Then he added, "I thought the recruiters had too much information about me. They called me, but I never gave them my phone number."

Nor did he give the recruiters his email address, Social Security number, or details about his ethnicity, shopping habits, or college plans. Yet they probably knew all that, too. In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students' GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid's habits than do his own parents.

Peace

Claireack

That's completely outrageous! How can they get away with doing that?

Pepe Silvia

crazy!

from the mother jones article:

The military has long struggled to find more effective ways to reach potential enlistees; for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.) Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding.

Yet NCLB is just the tip of the data iceberg. In 2005, privacy advocates discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years quietly amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15. The massive data-mining project is overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, whose website has described the database, which now holds 34 million names, as "arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country." The JAMRS database is in turn run by Equifax, the credit reporting giant.

i remember bill oreilly saying he wished terrorists would attack san fransisco and we refuse to do anything because they didn't want recruiters at high schools