More information about the military’s giant database of personal information about underage teenagers has come to light in the last couple of days, revealing a frighteningly broad effort by the Pentagon to snoop into the lives of American children in its effort to convert them into young soldiers.
In response to public furor over the military database of American children, the Pentagon has vigorously denied that it is up to no good. Pentagon spokespeople have insisted to reporters that the database is only to establish records of the contact information of American kids, but have refused to explain why the military database includes information on things like childrens’ ethnicity, the classes they have taken in school, driver’s license records, and other highly personal information.
It has now been revealed that the Pentagon has been adding information on American children gathered through commercial databases of kids’ activities. Parents: That means that every time you give a corporation any information on your kids, you may be also giving that information to the government. Thus, Total Information Awareness focuses its lens on our children’s shopping habits.
The Pentagon has also been at a loss to explain why it is using BeNow to build the database. BeNow is a company that specializes in identifying targets for marketing campaigns. The very idea of American children being targeted by the US military goes way over the edge of reason. It’s one thing for military recruiters to use their unscrupulous methods against young adults. It is quite another for the Pentagon to build up secret files containing information about kids personal activities in order to hound them more efficiently even while the kids are still living at home with mom and dad.
The excuses by the Pentagon don’t add up, and when combined with new information about how the Bush Adminstration is gathering files on the private activities of American adults, should lead to a new level of investigation. We need to know just what information Bush’s government is grabbing about American citizens’ lives, and what it intends to do with that information. For a government that is notoriously secretive about its own activites, the Bush Administration has shown a frightening interest in peering into the private lives of the people it is sworn to serve.
Thank you for following up on this story. We have to keep reminding the morons in charge of the government that they work for us, not the other way around.