Big Brother wants you to be all that you can be

The Defense Department has hired a private marketing firm to create a database of college students and all high school students ages 16 to 18, to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches, the Washington Post reports.

"The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates,"" Jonathan Krim reports. "The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying."

Why stop there? With the Patriot Act, the government can also find out what books students are reading and make them part of the data base. Someone reading "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" might be interested in flight school, while a student reading "The Monkey Wrench Gang" should probably be detained and tortured, or at least re-educated about environmental issues like global warming.

And wouldn't this data base come in handy if and when the draft is reinstituted? AP poll: 70% oppose draft.

On another note, it shouldn't be too long before the data is compromised and their identities are stolen and sold. Want to be 18 again? Here's your chance. Post story.

UPDATE: Sen. Russ Feingold and others ask Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to knock it off and quit collecting the info on young people. Release