A little noticed provision buring in Bush's "No Child Left Behind" bill provides that secondary schools must provide military recruiters not just use of their facilities but also with private information about students. That means all an agent of the military needs to do is go to the school and ask, and he or she must be given a complete list of names, addresses and phone numbers of all students, or risk losing federal funding.

Not that invasion of private contact information is anything surprising or new, but it's usually not the government that's doing it. Often in the private sector, if your private contact information is going to be given away or sold, the entity doing the selling has to disclose what they're doing with your contact information. Somehow I doubt schools are sending home full disclosures of what they're going to do with students' private information.

According to MotherJones.com, "[t]he new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone -- leaving students without any say in the matter."

---Nick

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