Pacific Green Party (Oregon)
Contacts: Joanne Cvar, PGP Media Committee, cvar@oregonvos.net,
541-563-3615
Chris Henry: PGP Co-Chair. critter@riseup.net
Teresa Keane: PGP Co-Chair teresadot@comcast.net
PGP: http://www.pacificgreens.org
USGP: http://www.gp.org
The Pacific Green Party of Oregon (PGP) has joined
the American Friends Service Committee, the Bill of Rights Defense
Committee and other civil rights organizations across the nation in
opposing the creation and use of a new recruiting database by the U.S.
Department of Defense (DoD). According to the official notice of the
program, the purpose of the database, called the Joint Advertising and
Market Research Studies (JAMRS), is “to provide a single central
facility within the DoD to compile, process, and distribute files of
individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military
service.”
The JAMRS database combines the personal
information files of 30 million U.S. residents ages 16-25 obtained
since 2002 from high schools and colleges, as mandated by the No Child
Left Behind Act, with new information which will be obtained through a
contract with a commercial direct marketing company called Benow,
recently acquired by the credit reporting company Equifax. This
private firm has no privacy or security policies posted on its
website.
The new database will include Social Security
numbers, grade-point averages and educational information, height,
weight, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and ethnicity. Additional
information from commercial data brokers and state drivers’ license
records will be collected and compiled. More information on the DoD
database is available at http://epic.org/privacy/student/doddatabase.html.
A letter opposing the creation and use of this
database was delivered to the chairs and ranking members of key House
and Senate committees on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005. The letter states, in
part: “The creation of JAMRS is in conflict with the Privacy Act,
which was passed by Congress to reduce the government's collection of
personal information on Americans. The goal of JAMRS is to increase
recruitment and retention by the military services. However, JAMRS
goes beyond military recruitment by proposing market research studies
such as ad tracking, attitudes of mothers towards military service and
polls of young adults.”
Privacy advocates claim the program is an effort
by the Pentagon to circumvent the law by turning to a private firm to
do the work, and that using database marketers for military
recruitment is inappropriate.
The PGP does not oppose the choice to serve in the
U.S. Armed Forces but does strongly object to the creation of the
JAMRS database and the collection by the government of personal
information on Americans. It is possible to “opt-out” of the
military recruitment, but not from JAMRS as a whole.
