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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."
That's a great idea. It will make it a lot easier in the future to track down people who took subversive classes, classes from subversive professors, or classes with other subversives.
Of course, that does make it a little tricky today for students to figure out who will be a subversive in twenty or thirty years. I know that back when I was in University (yes, it was during Vietnam) I would have bet that the people on the wrong side of a Senate subcommittee would have been the ones throwing Molotov cocktails. I would have been wrong, though. They're the ones conducting the Inquisition now.
Well, nothing in life is certain.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I was under the impression that the FBI/CIA/Homeland Security wanted to track the flow of money back to terrorists. And they are looking at the financial records of students who aren't financially supported i.e the ones who have applied for a loan????
>>As a law-abiding student, I really have no qualms with this unless the government decides to start going after law-abiding students.
Just say, in a few years time you go to run for elected office. Would you be comfortable if your oponnent had this information? Every Form you had ever filled out? What if there was a spelling mistake on an application and your oponnent accused you of fraud? What level privacy are you NOT willing to have?
This may sound counterintitive, but I disagree strongly. I want the FBI to be partially on a different page as the Military, as the local police. Sure, it slightly increases the chance that a catastrophic attack might succeed, but there are much more important variables than this in that equation. No, the drag of having massively powerful agencies collaborating is that it makes their view all the more awesomely omniscient. Where then does privacy live?
Look, if you were able to coordinate all extraneous public bits of data that a person ejects into the environment through paperwork, shopping, loan apps, etc, it would, after a certain degree of sophistication and interdepartmental coopoeration, become nearly trivially easy to identify, say, AIDS patients, or gay people, or people who cheat on their spouse with a very high degree of confidence. At that point, all the on-paper privacy in the world doesn't mean squat. With increased automation and advances in data mining heuristics, the cost of correlating data per person keeps going down. Sure, it may be too expensive to do categorical surveillance on a wide scale now, but just wait twenty years.
The government isn't a collection of scientists at a symposium, and not all information *wants* to be free (or whatever the kids' rhetoric is these days). The government has direct power, to coerce, to control, to detain, and yes, even to kill, and do all of these facelessly and on a wide scale. That awesome power is checked somewhat significantly on paper, but the more important practical check on the use of that power usually is pragmatism brought on by bureacratic inefficiency. This isn't about sharing information in the abstract. This is about sharing personal data, the analysis of which may well control the fate of someone's life or freedom.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)