Welcome to the new America where the Pentagon pays private firms to provide aggregate personal information on your kids, collects it via No Child Left Behind, as well as outsources the datamining to a private firm… all with the intention of marketing their product… join the military… to children deemed “high prospects”.

And guess what… you, as a parent, can’t “opt out” of this data collection project. Oh sure, your kids info will go into a “suppression file”, but they’ll continue to collect the information and maintain the data… and still provide it to recruiters…

Welcome to George OrWell’s America.

Parents cannot remove their children’s names from a Pentagon database that includes highly personal information used to attract military recruits, the Vermont Guardian has learned.

The Pentagon has spent more than $70.5 million on market research, national advertising, website development, and management of the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies (JAMRS) database — a storehouse of questionable legality that includes the names and personal details of more than 30 million U.S. children and young people between the ages of 16 and 23.

The database is separate from information collected from schools that receive federal education money. The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to report the names, addresses, and phone numbers of secondary school students to recruiters, but the law also specifies that parents or guardians may write a letter to the school asking that their children’s names not be released.

However, many parents have reported being surprised that their children are contacted anyway, according to a San Francisco-based coalition called Leave My Child Alone (LMCA).

Quite interesting choice for the database name, eh? At least they are being upfront about its purpose. To provide the military/ the government, demographically and psychographically targeted profile information on the youth most likely to be persuaded to become cannon fodder.

So what if you disagree with this approach and feel it is the government invading your childs privacy? Well, you can contact the Pentagon…

Parents must contact the Pentagon directly to ask that their children’s information not be released to recruiters, but the data is not removed from the JAMRS database, according to Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Instead, the information is moved to a suppression file, where it is continuously updated with new data from private and government sources and still made available to recruiters, Krenke said. It’s necessary to keep the information in the suppression file so the Pentagon can make sure it’s not being released, she said.

Krenke said the database is compiled using information from state motor vehicles departments, the Selective Service, and data-mining firms that collect and organize information from private companies. In addition to names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and phone numbers, the database may include cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity, and subjects of interest.

She said the Pentagon spends about $500,000 annually to purchase the data from private companies, and has paid more than $70 million since 2002 to Mullen Advertising — a Massachusetts firm whose clients include General Motors, Hooked on Phonics, XM Satellite Radio, and 3Com — to target recruiters’ messages toward teens and young adults.

The children will of course be broken down by criteria for the highest bang for the advertising buck in the blitz that is sure to come as they refine their data and develop their campaigns…

What might some of the categories be?

  1. Minority, urban, gpa below 2.0, suspended from school, interested in hip hop and fashion, no college fund.
  2. White, rural, gpa below 2.0, DUI convictions, interested in football, no college fund.

Well, that’s just two right off the top of my head… and those are the easy targets. But they will have many an algorithm and matrix that will show influences and connections that will make nearly ALL the children who are not on track for Wall Street or the CIA potentially lucrative targets.

The JAMRS program “provides the services with contact information on millions of prospective recruits annually … Beyond list management services, DM outreach initiatives include targeted fulfillment pieces directed at influencers,” according to the program’s password-protected website.

In real terms, what that rhetoric looks like at the other end can stack up to harassment, said Crush. “Kids have been relentlessly harassed,” she said, “things like persistent phone calls — and you can’t remove your phone numbers from their list because it’s the government; people being called on numbers that have been listed as private, or for emergency only; kids under 17 called at home, night after night, and not being given a realistic picture about life in the military, particularly during a time of war.”

In real world vs. ad speak: they are sending out direct mail pieces and promotions to individuals identified as being an influence on their peer group. Standard marketing tactic applied to your children to encourage them to join Uncle Sam in his Middle East adventure.

And if that doesn’t work they’ll harass you on your cell phone.

So what does Senator Leahy have to say about all this?

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, said he had grave concerns about the legality of the database. “I think this is absolutely wrong,” he told the Vermont Guardian. “You have the law, and then you have an administration that says we don’t like the law so let’s find another way of doing it.”

…

“Data mining and proliferation of using databases are all concerns because it represents an administration that does not believe in checks and balances,” said Leahy. “Can you imagine our country if a Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover has the electronic power these guys have today?“

Good start, but oh my dear buddha, what the hell are you talking about “can you imagine McCarthy…” I can imagine a hell of a lot worse sir and he’s currently in the White House. Where the fuck have you been for the last 5 years?

So some Dems sent Rummy a letter back in June asking him to stop. He hasn’t. Nothing else is going on up on Captiol Hill. Local government and school boards are going to have to be the way to go on this one. Outraged parents from across the country unite and kick ass.

To add further fuel to the already smoking fire, the firm that the Pentagon has contracted does not have a Privacy Policy and “The main commercial vendors that sell students’ data, American Student List and Student Marketing Group, were both pursued recently by consumer protection authorities for setting up front groups that tricked students into revealing their personal information,”.

Good to know your childs life history is in such competent hands.

As for who exactly they are targeting first…

Today and tomorrow every 8-year-old in the state of New York will take a test. It’s part of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind program. The losers will be left behind to repeat the third grade. Try it yourself. This is from the state’s actual practice test.

“The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year.”

And here’s one of the four questions:

“The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played

A two matches in one day
B against each other
C with two balls at once
D as partners”

…

My kids go to a New York City school in which more than half the students live below the poverty line. There is no tennis court.

There are no tennis courts in the elementary schools of Bed-Stuy or East Harlem. But out in the Hamptons, every school has a tennis court. In Forest Hills, Westchester and Long Island’s North Shore, the schools have nearly as many tennis courts as the school kids have live-in maids.

Now, you tell me, class, which kids are best prepared to answer the question about “doubles tennis”? The 8-year-olds in Harlem who’ve never played a set of doubles or the kids whose mommies disappear for two hours every Wednesday with Enrique the tennis pro?

Is this test a measure of “reading comprehension” — or a measure of wealth accumulation?

If you have any doubts about what the test is measuring, look at the next question, based on another part of the text, which reads (and I could not make this up):

“Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs. In this sentence, a club is probably a

F baseball bat
G tennis racquet
H tennis court
J country club”

Helpfully, for the kids in our ‘hood, it explains that a “country club” is a, “place where people meet.” Yes, but which people?

The results of this loaded and class-based test will find their way directly into the JAMRS database where professional marketers will segment and aggregate and draw correlations before flagging the record as “high potential” for recruitment.

Or how about these records… I’m sure they will be classified as “low probability for success/ high probability target for military life”… and btw, sell it to the parents as being good for them to help “straighten them out” and PLUS they’ll learn a skill and get money for college too! I can see the DM pieces in my mind right now… and I’m already writing the script for the recruiter…

More black students than ever are getting the boot from public schools. Things are so bad that the NAACP plans to hold public hearings nationally on the racial disparities in school discipline. It’s none to soon. In a report on school discipline, the U.S. Dept. of Education in 1999 found that while blacks made up less than twenty percent of the nation’s public school students they comprised nearly one out of three students kicked out of the schools.

Five years later nothing had changed. In a report the Children’s Defense Fund branded “Educational Apartheid in America’s Public Schools,” it found that black students are still expelled and suspended in disproportionate numbers to whites. And that’s not all. A recent study by the Advancement Project and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on school discipline procedures in Denver, Chicago and Palm Beach County, Florida found that black students are getting expelled or suspended in high numbers, and many of them also wind up in police stations and courtrooms after being expelled.

In the past year black students have gotten dumped from classrooms or hauled off to jail for using a cell phone, talking in class, or simply calling names. And those being severely punished are getting younger. The arrest and manhandling by police of a five year old in Florida earlier this year ignited a firestorm of protest.

So what can you do, right now, as parents and concerned  Americans?

Meanwhile, asked what parents could do about the Pentagon database, the ACLU’s Steinhardt said, “This is as much a political issue as anything else; it’s an issue to be decided in the Congress. A state like Vermont could take it up. It’s a perfect issue for a town meeting … calling on your senators to pass some legislation. [also good idea to speak out at a school board meeting, bring it up to your local city and state councillors, etc. etc.]”

Information and action

Parents seeking to determine whether information about their children is contained in the JAMRS database system should address typewritten inquiries to:
The Department of Defense
c/o JAMRS, Direct Marketing Program Officer
Defense Human Resources Activity
4040 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 200
Arlington, VA 22203-1613
Requests should contain the child’s full name, date of birth, current address, and telephone number. Do not include a Social Security number.

To ask that your child’s name be added to the suppression files of the database, send a typewritten request to:
Joint Advertising and Marketing Research
& Studies Office (JAMRS)
Attention: Opt Out
4040 North Fairfax Drive, Ste. 200
Arlington, VA 22203-1613
Include the child’s full name, street address, date of birth, and telephone number. Do not include a Social Security number.

For more information: www.leavemychildalone.org, www.jamrs.org/