EDITORIAL
Defense should scrap teen military database

The Pentagon has embarked on another military mission, this time a deplorable drive to gather data on high school students for a targeted recruitment campaign.

The new Defense Department database will compile information on teens as young as 16, including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and subjects of study.

Some of this data mining is allowed through an ill-conceived provision of the No Child Left Behind Act.

But going a step further, the government is cynically sidestepping legal limitations on its data-banking powers by hiring private brokers to do the rest of the work using drivers' license records and other sources.

All of this concerns parents and privacy advocates, whose worries are well-founded.

The Pentagon promises that the teens can "opt out": They do so by providing personal information that will be kept separate, referred to only when managers want to screen the recruitment file and make sure it contains no data on those who opted out. But why should anyone feel reassured by that promise when there's no way to check?

And the Massachusetts company managing the database, BeNow Inc., does not even have a published privacy policy, another disturbing revelation.

The type of information gathered is perhaps the most distressing aspect. There is no reason to note a child's ethnicity— unless it's to zero in on minorities, many of whom are economically disadvantaged and more vulnerable to a pitch about military service. Minorities already are overrepresented among the troops now risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan deployments.

Granted, the military needs an aggressive and creative recruitment campaign, more so because defense officials are having difficulty meeting enlistment goals. Recruiters do conduct armed forces career-day events on high school campuses. That is acceptable because the teen is not compelled to part with personal information against his or her will.

But in this age of security breaches in commercial and government databases, it's wrong to subject underage students to the risks of identity theft.

The No Child provision that allows some of this is a shakedown: Schools that refuse to provide the information to the military risk losing federal funds.

At a minimum, this section should be excised from the law.

Surely government has other means of enlisting new recruits that won't compromise civil rights, as this database does. The Pentagon should pursue alternatives — and keep its hands off the private information of teenagers.