FBI Data Mining Students' Financial Aid Records

crumley writes "The U.S. Department of Education has been running a program that data mines student financial aid records for the FBI. The program, now five years old, is known as Project Strike Back. It trolls for names of suspected terrorists through the Education Department's database of information, which is derived from students who fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The discovery of this program by Northwestern University journalism student Laura McGann has added fuel to the debate about the Education Department's proposal to start a new database tracking the academic progress of all students."

Comments

Re:1000 Records is a really small number

[TopShelf]

From the article:

Mr. Miller said the Education Department had been asked to "run names of subjects already material to counterterrorism investigations" to look for evidence of student loan fraud or identity theft.

"No records of people other than those already under investigation were called for," he said. "This was not a sweeping program, in that it involved only a few hundred names. This is part of our mission, which is to take the leads we have and investigate them."

This wasn't trolling through student data at random, it was for specific names that were already part of an FBI investigation. That point is being entirely missed in the comments here. The FBI has a list of people they're investigating, and are asking the DoE to check if any of them are applying for financial aid anywhere. That sounds like basic police work to me. Perhaps it's newsworthy because it's surprising that two branches of the federal government can coordinate on anything.