April 24, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
media@aclu.org NEW
YORK -- The New York Civil Liberties Union brought a lawsuit against the
Department of Defense in federal court today, charging the Department with
violating American high school students’ privacy rights and federal law by
maintaining an unauthorized database of personal student information for use in
military recruitment efforts.
“We knew that our military was
desperate for soldiers and that recruiters had gone to great lengths to pressure
students to join the ranks,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. “But
we could not have guessed that the Department of Defense would pursue a
recruiting tactic that would so completely disregard the boundaries that
Congress had laid down to protect student privacy rights.”
When
Congress passed the law in 1982 authorizing the agency to create a database of
information about American high school students, the lawmakers intended to
assist the Department in recruiting students for the military. But the law also
set important limits to protect students’ privacy, Lieberman said. The lawmakers
specified that the Department must collect only basic contact and educational
information, must refrain from collecting information about students under 17
years of age, must store the information for no more than three years and must
keep the information private.
But last year the Department
announced that it had created a database that flouted these restrictions. The
new recruitment database seeks to index a wide variety of private and personal
information about every American high school student, including gender,
ethnicity and Social Security Number. It includes information about
16-year-olds, in defiance of the mandate that it only include students 17 and
older. The Department has also announced that it will keep the information for
five years, rather than the three allowed by the statute, and that it will share
the information widely with law enforcement and other agencies and individuals,
rather than keeping it private.
The NYCLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of six 16- and 17-year-old high school
students who object to the Department’s inappropriate collection, maintenance
and distribution of their personal and private information.
“Our
clients don’t wish to join the military, and they don’t want their genders,
ethnicities and social security numbers collected and distributed by the private
company that the DoD has charged with building and maintaining this database,”
said Corey Stoughton, an NYCLU Staff Attorney and lead counsel on the case. “We
hope that this suit will bring the DoD into compliance with the rules that
Congress put in place to protect the rights of high school students
nationwide.”
Hope Reichbach, a senior at Hunter College High School
in Manhattan, contacted the NYCLU and became a plaintiff in the lawsuit after
trying and failing to have her name removed from the lists and databases that
have subjected her to repeated phone calls from military recruiters.
“I opted out to get my name off their lists, but they contacted me
anyway,” Reichbach said. “I got involved in this lawsuit because I want them to
leave me and other students alone.”
The NYCLU filed the case,
Hanson et al. v. Rumsfeld et al., in the Southern District of New York. Named
defendants are Donald Rumsfeld in his official capacity as United States
Secretary of Defense, and other Department personnel. NYCLU Associate Legal
Director Christopher Dunn is co-counsel on the case.
The complaint
is available online at: www.nyclu.org/pdfs/milrec_dod_suit_filing_042406.pdf
