WASHINGTON — With the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan making it increasingly hard for the U.S. military to fill its ranks with recruits, the Pentagon has hired an outside marketing firm to help compile an extensive database about teenagers and college students that the military services could use to target potential enlistees.
The initiative, which privacy groups call an unwarranted government intrusion into private life, will compile detailed information about high school students ages 16 to 18, all college students, and Selective Service System registrants. The collected information will include Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages and ethnicities.
The program, run by the Pentagon's Joint Advertising, Market Research and Studies office, is the latest effort to jump-start a recruiting mission hampered by violent images broadcast daily from Iraq.
BeNow Inc., a Massachusetts direct-marketing firm that compiles and analyzes masses of data, will manage the program.
According to the Pentagon's official notice of the program, the new initiative's aim is "to provide a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service."
"The information will be provided to the services to assist them in their direct marketing recruiting efforts," read the notice in the Federal Register, published last month.
The No Child Left Behind Act allows the Pentagon to gather the home addresses and telephone numbers of public-school students. The new Pentagon initiative would be far more extensive, drawing from government databases compiled by state motor vehicle departments and similar agencies.
The program has angered privacy groups, which contend that the Pentagon is risking the misuse of data by handing over such sensitive material to a private firm.
"We think it's a mistake that violates the spirit of the Privacy Act," said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research group based in Washington.
The privacy center's official response to the initiative -- also signed by eight representatives of similar organizations -- called the database "an unprecedented foray of the government into direct marketing techniques previously only performed by the private sector."
