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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."
It should not be tracking us.
This is unacceptable. The lack of self-control exhibited by this administration and its departments over the last six years is unbelievable. If enough of this junk happens, it is actually going to cause social instability. What a clusterf* modern government has become.
My little site.
All these surveillence programs would be acceptable if we could trust the government not to abuse them. Not to expose our personal info to ID fraud (and worse). Not to hand the data to their corporate cronies. Not to spy on political enemies for counterstrategy or blackmail. Regardless of which party, faction or person is in power, publicly or covertly.
Not just "trust" as in "the president seems like a decent person", but Reagan's promise to "trust but verify". Real Congressional oversight. Real punishment for violators. Real institutional processes for keeping data within the scope of only the required transaction. Real trustworthy government processes that make "security" both use and protect data.
--
make install -not war
1000 would be a good number to try as a test batch before rolling out a much larger program.
After the security breach at the FSA, and now this, I'm seriously beginning to regret going to college in this country...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
They are mining data from the "Free Application for Federal Student Aid". Isn't this a federal agency/program? I do NOT approve of what they are doing in any fashion, but why is anyone surprised that a federal agency (FBI) is given access to federal documents (FAFSA)?
Who would have thought it?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Sure 1000 is nothing, nothing that is until one of those happens to be you or me. It's that small first step that makes them think they can take a bit of a bigger one next time. All of this is done, of course, in the name of tracking the terrorists and keeping us safe.
Not so much really- Trawling involves the use of a net dragged behind a moving boat to ensare anything big enough to not slip through the holes in said net, while trolling (in the fishing sense) involves the se of individual baited line(s) dragged behind a moving boat to target a specific type of fish. Thus, trawling would be some basement dweller in the Pentagon running every FAFSA app against some sort of profile, while trolling would involve searching the database for specific names, then fulling those FAFSA apps for further review/storage. Not that the program is a good thing, but at least you're supposed to already have your name on a FBI watch list for this thing to pull your records for review...
how poor a lot of students really are and how hard paying for college can be....but then again, who am I kidding. If Americans could get a cheap education the number of people enlisting in the Army would plummet.
Monstar L
On the contrary, this could be BAD.
If they're using the records of a MILLION people, they could be doing some sort of statistical analysis. As is, it's rather clear that they're actually looking at each individual person in detail.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
The absolute majority of foreign students are not eligible for FAFSA
That is the most important point, which most people including professors themselves don't know. I don't think there is any federal financial aid for foreign except for very very minute segment. So if the FBI is investigating or analyzing these records you have to wonder who they are "striking back" against? US citizens? FBI sure does have heads up their asses.So our government's response to 9/11 should have been to not do anything except perhaps apologize to the Islamic community for placing our skyscrapers in the paths of the airliners they hijacked?
What exactly should the government be doing? Waiting patiently for the next attack?
You're confusing two things- the demands of justice in response to such an attack, and what a logical response to such an attack should be.
Justice is a compelling motive for a strong reaction, but that reaction should then be just itself. Removing every American's privacy rights is unjust. This is what is not sinking into people's skulls.
What would a logical response to the attack be, if you were wanting to minimize loss of American life? Well it certainly wouldn't be this.
Since asthma killed more people in 2001 than died in 9/11, I would suggest that we should lose as many or fewer of our rights as Americans, than we do in our reaction to asthma.
A lot of people object when I make this argument, but other than ad hominem attacks nobody ever refutes it or explains why it's wrong.
I fly all the time, and I live in one of the blue states most likely to be affected by terrorism, but I do not worry about terrorism at all because I am not stupid. In fact it's clearly the people least likely to be affected by terrorism who are clamoring for our rights to be taken away because of it.
I realize that asthma is not as politically exploitable as terrorism, and the American press fixates on it whenever the JonBenet story dies down, but the alarmism of the press is one reason why Americans are incapable of correctly assessing risk.
According to the article, law enforcement has open access to this information at any time without giving valid reasons. If these people are under suspicion for valid reasons, why isn't it possible for our government to obtain search warrants to look at the data?
The cop chasing someone into a department store has a reasonable suspicion that someone in the department store has committed a crime. In situtations where a crime is currently being committed or someone is in immediate danger, allowances are made to protect people from harm. It is likely that the FBI had a reason to look at these students specifically, however no one outside the bureau knows that reason. There was no judicial oversight.
IANAL, but it would seem to me that since this information was transferred from a different federal department that had no relation to law enforcement it should have required some sort of warrant. In your analogy , the cop is looking at information that is already publicly available (i.e. your face). Your financial history is definitely not supposed to be public information.
There should be some sort of process where a person outside of the executive branch (like a judge) oversees requests for this information. It is routine for other types of crime, why is terrorism an exception? Although in this case it may seem justified on the surface, if a precedent like this is established it may lead to very harsh consequences. There are restrictions on the executive branch for a reason.
I just hope mine gets deleted, along with any paper trails to the banks that lent me the money. I think I would actually let the government use my records in a trade for paying them off. Sounds good to me. :-P
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
Except that you have to fill out a FAFSA even if you are applying for private student loans. So if Citibank lets foreign people receive loans they would still have to fill out the form and would end up in the database, which is the point.
...then they DAMN WELL BETTER keep track of where they disperse it. I for one certainly do NOT want my money finding its way into grants, loans, etc going to students, charities, business or any other entitiy that is involved in the committing of acts of violence against our allies, with the ultimate stated goal of destroying our way of life. Furthermore, there is something rather sick about giving money, education, etc. to someone so they can use it all to kill you or destroy your society.
My problem isn't at all with the data-mining of the student financing program--by problem is with how it was conducted. How awful is it that the gov't doesn't think it is important enough to inform its citizens when it wishes to do something that may affect your civil liberties? It should be stated in bold at the top of student finance applications that come or all of the information submitted is subject to possible FBI search. There should be strict regulations on sharing this information with anyone outside the department responsible for the programme and the authorities, and severe punishment for those goverment officials wo violate such regulations. However the FBI is quite justified in wanting such an investigative tool. The key to all of this is INFORMED CONSENT.
As to the records of student progress/transcripts/whatever I think that is overstepping things a bit, mostly becasue I don't see any real benefit except to be nosy (I dunno, maybe if it is a course on flying or a nuclear physics degree? still...). If the FBI finds something suspicious in the student financing records then a warrant could perhaps be justified.
I think that as is the case with a lot of Homeland Security initiatives is that the stated intentions are noble (real intentions?...not so sure) but the execution ranges from stupid to dangerous. Airport security for example...the watchlist is a disaster and ineffective and very bad at dealing with false entries--it is totally counter to "informed consent" becasue passengers have never been given any idea how authorities decide who must be on the list, nor at what point your name is screened against the list. Additionally it takes a "shoot first as questions later" approach by immediately blocking/deporting/holding passengers found on that list without sufficient cause--and just being on the list is far from sufficient cause to ruin someone's travel plans much less expel them from the country because the list is so inaccurate and clumsy. The name "Yousef Islam" is on the list, and when poor "Yusuf Islam" tried to fly to DC a whole plane of passengers was diverted to Bangor and Yusuf was apprehended and immediately deported. Yousef allegedly offered financial support to the terrorist group Hamas so I can see why he is on record, but Yusuf has won international pease awards and is a leader in legitimate, well-respected charitable efforts. Plus, he has a pretty successful career in music performing as Cat Stevens.
This is the real world and you cannot expect the government to be like those three monkeys and turn a blind eye to suspicious activity, though I do agree with you that the US gov't is losing self-control (as does happen in all large institutions left unchecked). Perhaps it may seem difficult to imagine the gov't being disciplined enough to properly inform its citizens and following due procedure at this point, but we in western society have nobody to blame but ourselves. I find it distasteful when peole bitch and moan about how nasty gov't is then reveal that they no next to nothing about how gov't works and rarely or never vote. The US gov't is like a neglected feral cat--its owner once cherished it but slowly stopped bothering to feed it and change its litterbox, and when the cat started catching critters to feed itself and crapping in the houseplants the owner chastised it and threw it outside to fend for itself. Now the gov't is a big ugly stray cat that is suspicious of all people and does the most base things in its own self interest...all because we decided it wasn't worth the bother to care about it and keep it properly fed, cleaned and trained.
Terrorists don't use their real names when they enter the country, just like they don't bring stuff to airports that they know we'll check for.
All they're really searching for are people with arab names.
This isn't true. A better analogy would be if a car was wanted on suspicion of being involved in a hit-and-run, and the police went down to the DMV and asked where said car was registered.
It's beginning with a particular piece of information (either the terrorism suspect's name, or the suspected vehicle's tag number) and then searching through records to find out where that person or vehicle may be, so that it can be investigated further.
The police don't need a warrant to do that any more than they need a warrant to check to see if your car is stolen when you get pulled over.
Where it would have become improper, was if the police had said, "give us the names and addresses of anyone from country x, y, and z who has applied for financial aid to college," or instead of giving the Dept. of Education a list of particular names to search for, they had simply requested a dump of the entire database (or access to the database) to comb through at their leisure. Either of those things would be overly invasive and wrong. But to say that the police shouldn't have the ability to search through government records during the course of an investigation is ridiculous.
Many long-term investigations are broken only because a suspect will unintentionally break cover in some subtle way; it makes sense to have individuals who are on watch lists (terrorism/foreign-nationals-of-interest lists, FBI Wanted lists, outstanding warrants lists) to be filtered through existing databases on a periodic basis to see if they turn up. Frankly I'm surprised they don't just have some sort of batch program set up to do this; rather than making it a one-shot, they ought to re-run the names continously and then notify law enforcement if there's a 'hit.' Doing so wouldn't compromise the privacy of persons not on the lists, and wouldn't require that anyone else's information be turned over to law enforcement -- so unless they were interested in you already, submitting your FAFSA wouldn't put you at risk.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The databases with citizen information in the government's possession are proportional to the number, size and scope of our government's agencies.
Frankly, it serves us right to have the government mining all this information about us; we let them accumulate it in the first place. When failures happen in the institutions we expect to be protecting our health and safety, we demand better interagency communication. Well, here it is.
Each new aspect of our lives that we grant entitlement status to -- which we think should be secured and managed by the public sector for every citizen -- creates a new information sink about those citizens. You can't dump that kind of information into the government and then expect there to be an impenetrable wall protecting it *from* the government. It's not going to happen, no matter how much indignation and idealism we hurl at the issue.
Just wait 'til we have universal health care; anytime someone needs treatment for a chemical burn, they can probably expect a knock on their door asking for an explanation of how the injury happened. But hey, we're clamoring for the House & Senate to ride in on their white horses & fix health care for us, so in our collective subconscious, we must want things that way.
If you want to firewall data like this from willy-nilly government sifting, find a way to move it outside the government. Clamor for a bill forcing agencies to contract out their data storage to organizations with strict charters and civilian privacy oversight. Better yet, clamor loudly for a bill giving all Americans the right to opt out of any government service or program that collects private data and stores it in a government-controlled warehouse, Social Security and Census Bureau included. Force private & non-profit alternatives to exist for most of these data-collecting agencies, and force the agencies to use third-party data warehouses for those services where direct private alternatives aren't possible. Ultimately though, if you want the benefit of public services, then there is some consequential loss of privacy, plain and simple.
None of what I suggest will happen in our lifetimes, of course, but privacy is already evolving into a commodity in its own right. As such, this will eventually affect the public sector to the extent that it is exposed to normal economic pressures.
Pi Ran Out
only if you care.. most people will use any size set for statistical analysis
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
The fact that the names were part of an ongoing investigation is utterly meaningless because the FBI will not tell us who they were investigating or what they were being investigated for. What you are saying, ultimately, is that you trust the FBI to do what is right regardless of your ability to discern what they are actually doing. The lack of transparency in these kind of programs is what is truly alarming, not the fact that they exist at all. Granting legitimacy to a formerly secret data sharing program effectively grants legitimacy to any program like it. And since the burden of discretion is left up to a narrow channel of the federal government without any public, judicial, or legislative oversight, you will not have an opportunity to complain about it when a related (and likely escalated) program goes into effect, because you will never hear about it unless a ballsy investigative journalist picks up on clues, harasses the government for details, or gets a call from an inside whistleblower. Furthermore, it would be naiive to assume the FBI were only interested in investigating terror suspects -- the federal government has a rich history of infiltrating and conducting surveilance on student dissidents and campus organization. Just last year the Pentagon put the UCSC activist group "Students Against War" on a Credible Threat list...for protesting military recruiters at a campus job fair.