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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."
Not that I think this program is good, but they only collected 1000 records for analysis. According to the article there are over 14 *million* student loans each year. I would say that this is a very small fraction of the student population.
Windows Admin Tools
If this means I no longer have to submit my 12 transcripts for every educational and career application, then I'm all for it. Then again, if I were named Ahmed Bin Laden, then I might feel differently about it. (Oh, and I for one, welcome our Dept. of Education Overlords!)
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
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
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!
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,
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."
Argh. The editing at slashdot plumbs new depths of ineptitude.
It should of course be:
It trawls for names.
You know, I was going to say the same thing but I looked it up to be sure. I was surprised but, here's what I found:
troll1 (trol))
v. trolled, trolling, trolls
v. tr.
"trolling." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 01 Sep. 2006. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=trolling& x=0&y=0 >
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????
To me the concept is exactly the same as a cop chasing a criminal who has run into a department store. The officer runs in and starts looking at every face until he finds the criminal. Do we get upset at the officer and get up in his face about looking at us while he was trying to find the criminal?
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
They gave the FAFSA people a list of names, and FAFSA gave them info that was on their application. The poster needs to learn what data mining is.
Sometimes I doubt your committment to SparkleMotion!
...but how would Slashdot investigate terrorism?
- A requestor (government official, etc.) submits a request for a query on a specific database.
- The group gathering this data must be completely unbiased, preferably a group of people outsourced from another country
- This outside group is allowed to modify the requestors query as to remove any prejudice from it.
- Each person submitting their data must first be given an opt out choice as to be exluded from the data mining.
- Each record must be accumulated, counted, and summarized by 2 people, of different races, in order to assure impartiality
- Once a final list of supspected guilty records is created, any person on that list that is frequently stereotyped should also be removed.
- The final list of guilty records should be written in permanent ink and returned to the requestor, in order to ensure the records are not modified.
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.
>>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?
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.
And we all know how well that is working!
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
Terrorism is a crime like any other, only it is less dangerous. Why is it that so many people are horribly opposed to blanket invasions of privacy for daily occurence crimes like murder, rape, etc,
/. are annoyed by opposing viewpoints. This is a pointless argument (More people die from XYZ than from terrorism, so it's less dangerous). Murders is typically targeted at one indiviual. Rape it typically targetted at one individual. Terrorism is targetted at hundreds upon thousands of individuals.
I'll keep it short because apparently posters on
...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.
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
"Q And the poverty problem?
PRESIDENT BUSH: And the poverty problem -- listen, this nation is committed to dealing with poverty. First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill. And so it's important to understand -- people are susceptible to the requirement by these extremists, but I refuse to put a -- put killers into a demographic category based upon income. After all, a lot of the top al Qaeda people were comfortable middle-class citizens. And so one of the things you've got to do is to make sure we distinguish between hate and poverty."
Look, were any of the 911 hijackers on any way shape or form of assistance, subsidy, federal loans, etc.
No. Noth that I'm aware of.
All had plenty of Bin Laden Bucks. IIRC the excess was transferred back before the attack.
Clue to dumbass who thought of this idea;
Federal Financial Aid is barely enough to finance your education (at least back when I was in college).
This is nothing more than an invasive Big Brother abuse of power.
Who will guard the guards?