16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More!

By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: June 24, 2005

The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

The department began building the database three years ago, but military officials filed a notice announcing plans for it only last month. That is apparently a violation of the federal Privacy Act, which requires that government agencies accept public comment before new records systems are created.

David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, acknowledged yesterday that the database had been in the works since 2002. Pentagon officials said they discovered in May 2004 that no Privacy Act notice had been filed. The filing last month was an effort to correct that, officials said.

Mr. Chu said the database was just a tool to send out general material from the Pentagon to those most likely to enlist.

"Congress wants to ensure the success of the volunteer force," he said at a reporters' roundtable in Washington. "Congress does not want conscription, the country does not want conscription. If we don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense, the military services, an avenue to contact young people to tell them what is being offered. It would be na�ve to believe that in any enterprise, that you are going to do well just by waiting for people to call you."

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the notification in The Federal Register had drawn criticism from a coalition of eight privacy groups that filed a brief opposing the database's creation. Yesterday, many of those privacy advocates, learning that the database had been under development for three years, called its existence an egregious violation of the Privacy Act's rules and intent.

"It's far more serious if the database had been established prior to Privacy Act notice," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It's end-running the act by putting it into private hands and subverting the act by creating a public database without public notice."

The issue of the database has emerged as the Army and, to a lesser extent, the Marines, struggle to meet recruitment goals to replenish the ranks of the all-volunteer services. The Web site for the Pentagon's Joint Advertising Market Research Studies division, which manages recruiting research and marketing for all four branches of the military, describes the database as "arguably the largest repository of 16-to-25-year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records." It is managed by BeNOW Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., a marketing company that uses personal data to concentrate on customers.

The database includes the names of more than 3.1 million graduating seniors, a list bought by the Pentagon, as well as the names of 4.7 million college students, Pentagon records show. Drawing information from motor vehicle records, Selective Service registrations and private vendors, it includes a variety of personal information, including grades, height, weight and Social Security numbers.

The information is used primarily for direct-mail campaigns and to help the military weed out people who would not be eligible. It is also sent monthly to the recruiting command, said Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, and could be shared with local recruiters.

Recruiters have compiled and used similar data for decades, according to interviews with former military officials. But this database is the most extensive centralized collection of such records. The information is continually being merged for focused marketing.

"Halfway through 2004," said a briefing on the program in February that appears on a Pentagon Web site, "we started overlaying ethnicity codes and telephone numbers."

Mr. Chu said the information, particularly Social Security numbers, was closely guarded and had not been shared with other agencies.

For some parents, any information gathered by the military covertly amounts to an intrusion.

"There is no buffer zone," said Sandra Lowe of Sonoma, Calif., who is a mother of four, including two teenage boys. "It's a direct shot to someone's child without consent from a parent. If you were to come on campus and wanted to take a picture of a child, you have to get a release - just to take a picture. This is a lot more than that."

Margot Williams contributed reporting from New York for this article, and John Files from Washington.