Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
I just hope that while they are at it they can go ahead and renew my FAFSA for this year.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
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.
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????
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.
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
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.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
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?
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)
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."