Predatory Pentagon Program

Parents can find out how to take action to protect their kids from illegal privacy violations by predatory Pentagon military recruiters at Leave My Child Alone.org:

Did you know...

... that the notorious No Child Left Behind Act includes a sneaky section that requires high schools to turn over private information on students to military recruiters?

And that the Pentagon has created an illegal database of 30 million 16-25 year-olds, including names, addresses, email addresses, cell phone numbers, ethnicities, social security numbers, extracurricular activities, and areas of study?

No Child Left Behind Act A Trojan Horse For Pentagon Recruiters

The Pentagon has used the No Child Left Behind Act as a Trojan Horse to propagandize vulnerable teenage students, invade their privacy, harass them, and get them to enlist.

Passage of the NCLB in 2001 has given Pentagon recruiters “unprecedented access to public high schools and to students’ personal information” and has “changed the landscape of military recruitment in public high schools across the U.S.,” the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) charges.

Section 9528 of NCLB not only permits recruiters to obtain students’ personal information without prior parental consent but guarantees them access to public high schools without parental consent, ACLU says.

As such, NCLB violates Article 3 of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty ratified by the Senate.

“Recruiters use the lists of students’ names and contact information provided pursuant to the NCLB to cold-call students for hours each day,” ACLU has found, adding the military is targeting “poor students and students of color.”

School districts that want to get Federal funds under Section 9528 of NCLB must provide recruiters with student information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers.

And while NCLB allows parents to “opt out” of providing the information, "many school districts do not have a clear process in place by which to do this," ACLU says and don't inform parents of this option.

Pentagon Recruits Kids Under 17, Violating UN Protocol

In violation of its pledge to the United Nations not to recruit children into the military, the Pentagon “regularly target(s) children under 17,” the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) finds.

The Pentagon “heavily recruits on high school campuses, targeting students for recruitment as early as possible and generally without limits on the age of students they contact,” the ACLU states in a 46-page report titled “Soldiers of Misfortune.”

This is in violation of the U.S. Senate's 2002 ratification of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Pentagon recruiters are enrolling children as young as 14 in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps(JROTC) in 3,000 middle-, junior-, and high schools nationwide, causing about 45 percent of the quarter of million students so enrolled to enlist, a rate much higher than in the general student population. Clearly, this is the outcome of underage exposure. [snip]

The Pentagon also spends about $6 million a year to flog an online video game called “America’s Army” to attract children as young as 13, “train them to use weapons, and engage in virtual combat and other military missions…learn how to fire realistic Army weapons such as automatic rifles and grenade launchers and learn how to jump from airplanes,” the ACLU reports. As of Sept., 2006, 7.5 million users were registered on the game’s website, which is linked to the Army’s main recruiting website.

And when Pentagon recruiters sign 17-year-olds into the inactive reserves under the Future Soldiers Training Program, (the idea being to let them earn their high school diploma), they frequently don’t tell the children they can withdraw with no penalty.

“Over the years, we have had reports from students who were told that if they change their minds, they would be considered deserters in war time and could be hunted down and shot,” the New York City-based Youth Activists-Youth Allies said.

Back to School: Military Recruiters Increasingly Targeting High School Teens

Guests:

David Goodman, contributing writer for Mother Jones. His most recent article is titled “A Few Good Kids?: How the No Child Left Behind Act Allowed Military Recruiters to Collect Info on Millions of Unsuspecting Teens.”

Ari Rosmarin, Senior Advocacy Coordinator at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where he works on the organization’s Project on Military Recruitment and Students’ Rights.

JUAN GONZALEZ: As millions of students prepare for the start of another school year, we turn to an issue that concerns many parents: the increasing presence of military recruiters in the nation’s high schools and the military’s ability to gather information about students.

Journalist David Goodman writes in the new issue of Mother Jones, quote, “Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students’ GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect, the soldier may know more about the kid’s habits than do his own parents.”