Napolitano Urges Secretary Rumsfeld To Stop Invading Students' Privacy
Congresswoman Grace F. Napolitano joined 19 Congressional colleagues on Wednesday in sending a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, insisting that the Pentagon discontinue a program that gathers private information of college and high school students for recruitment efforts.
"We demand that the Pentagon rescind its practice of utilizing mass marketing firms to collect Social Security numbers, ethnicity data and other private personal information for the purposes of recruitment," reads the letter initiated by California Rep. Michael Honda and Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings.
According to the Federal Register, the Department of Defense has contracted with the marketing firm BeNow to collect and maintain data including ethnicity, grades and Social Security numbers of high school and college students. The legislators believe this activity is a violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, which details strict guidelines about the type of information federal agencies may keep.
"How far are they willing to go? This is an invasion of privacy," said Napolitano, D-Norwalk. "What makes this even more troubling is the hiring of a third-party firm to collect such sensitive information in this day and age, when we have watched a number of companies fail to protect the data from hackers and criminals."
More than 10 million Americans are victims of identity theft on an annual basis. The Department of Defense program would offer no easy way for students to remove their names from the database.
http://www.napolitano.house.gov/press_releases/press_2005/pr_2005_06_29.htm