Pentagon merges with marketing firm to increase troop levels

Here's a paper I never thought I'd be linking to-- the Boston Herald, which looks a lot like the conservative NY Post. But this story is the sort that the left and the right find troublesome (if only the White House did).

The Pentagon has struck a deal with a marketing firm to target young people who might be persuaded to join the armed forces-- in short, the poor, minorities, and the not-so-bright. Just the sort of individual a wealthy Republican prefers as cannon fodder. The truly disturbing part is the lengths to which they are going to collect information. Such as threatening public schools with decreasing their already-decreased funding.

"It really is an unbelievable amount of information,'' said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which led a coalition of groups demanding that DOD scrap the database. Rotenberg said the DOD should target young people "by setting up desks in a mall or doing good TV advertising.''

"We would much rather that than putting together detailed profiles that these people wouldn't even know about,'' Rotenberg said. . . .

The database would contain information about high school students between the ages of 16 and 18, current college students and those expressing an interest in the military. That data would include their name, date of birth, gender, address, Social Security number, e-mail address, ethnicity, grade-point average and phone number. Krenke acknowledged the database will racially profile teens by allowing the DOD to focus on issues it thinks are central to their ethnic backgrounds.
"If they want to target a specific group entrenched in family and family values they could target their message towards the parents,'' she said, such as a "Hispanic audience.''

Things are looking more 1984 every month with this administration.