It isn't about the money, it's about the power. The power to control your life from birth to death.
Mining for kids: Children can’t “opt out” of Pentagon recruitment database: "“Data mining and proliferation of using databases are all concerns because it represents an administration that does not believe in checks and balances,” said Leahy. “Can you imagine our country if a Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover has the electronic power these guys have today?”
Discomfort over the database extends to other members of Congress. Seven senators, including New York’s Hillary Rodham Clinton and Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, both Democrats, sent a letter to Rumsfeld on June 24 asking him to “immediately cease creation of this database.”
“This personal information, which would be obtained from schools as well as from commercial data brokers, state drivers’ license records, and other sources, could then be used to formulate and execute a targeted ‘marketing’ campaign to identify and recruit individuals based on these personal factors,” they noted.
In his July 11 response, Undersecretary of Defense David Chu said the database was an important component in the nation’s volunteer military — one that enables the United States to avoid a draft.
“The department collects basic information on youth in response to a congressional mandate in 1982 that noted ‘it is essential that the Secretary of Defense obtain and compile directory information pertaining to students enrolled in secondary schools throughout the United States’ to support recruiting for the all-volunteer force and avoid conscription,” he wrote to the senators.
Chu said the central database was designed to save the Pentagon money. “In the past, the data were compiled by each of the services independently. In order to achieve significant cost savings, the data are now purchased by the department, housed centrally, and sent out to the services. The services use these data to provide information and marketing materials to potential recruits.”
Leahy scoffed at such reasoning. “This is coming from a Pentagon that tells us they don’t have money to pay for body armor for our troops over in Iraq,” he said."
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