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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.
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make install -not war
1000 would be a good number to try as a test batch before rolling out a much larger program.
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.
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?
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 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.