DoD reforms student recruiting

In an agreement to settle a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) on behalf of several high school students, the Department of Defense announced major changes on Jan. 9 to its database of information about high school students, which is used for military recruitment efforts. The changes will protect the privacy of high school students and give students and their families more tools to exempt themselves from aggressive military recruitment in their schools and their homes, the NYCLU said. "The students who brought this lawsuit stood up for the privacy rights of all American high school students," said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU Executive Director. "Our job now is to spread the word that young people who don't want to be harassed by the military must do a 'double opt-out'–by both telling the Defense Department that they want out of the database and telling their high schools not to provide the military with their contact information." The NYCLU filed the lawsuit after the Defense Department's billion-dollar Joint Advertising and Market Research Studies (JAMRS) military recruitment program began collecting, maintaining and distributing the personal and private information of millions of high school students in a rogue database. Under the settlement, the Defense Department will stop disseminating student information to law enforcement, intelligence or other agencies and instead limit use of the JAMRS database to military recruiting; limit to three years the length of time that Defense Department retains student information; stop collecting student Social Security Numbers; and establish and clarify procedures by which students can block the military from entering information about them in the database and have their information removed. Announced in 2005, the Defense Department's massive database flouted restrictions passed by Congress in a 1982 law intended to balance the promotion of military recruitment with the protection of students' privacy. Lawmakers specified that the Defense Department must keep the information private and use it only for military recruiting purposes, must store the information for no more than three years and must collect only basic contact and educational information. In direct contrast, in its database, JAMRS allowed the information to be disseminated widely to law enforcement, intelligence and other agencies, kept the information for five years and aimed to collect a wide variety of private and personal information about every high school student in the United States, including ethnicity and social security numbers. "Today's changes to the JAMRS database represent an acknowledgment by the military that they do not have carte blanche to recruit without respect for the privacy of students and their families," said Corey Stoughton, an NYCLU staff attorney and lead counsel in the case. "It's refreshing to see the Defense Department recognize that it is not above the law." Hope Reichbach contacted the NYCLU when she was a student at Hunter College High School in New York City and became a plaintiff in the lawsuit after trying and failing to have her name removed from the lists and databases that have subjected her to repeated phone calls from military recruiters. "I got involved in this lawsuit because I just wanted the military to leave me and other students alone," Reichbach said. "I feel like we sent that message, and the [Defense Department] stood up and listened." Despite undertaking these major changes, the DoD refuses to stop collecting information about students' race and ethnicity. According to the NYCLU, the Defense Department's resistance likely stems from the military's ongoing efforts to target racial and ethnic minorities, especially from African-American and Latino communities, for aggressive recruitment campaigns. The NYCLU filed the case, Hanson et al. v. Rumsfeld et al., in the Southern District of New York on Apr. 24, 2006. Named defendants included Donald Rumsfeld, in his official capacity as then-United States Secretary of Defense and other Defense Department personnel.