A Mother Jones article, to be sure, but this is a little questionable in my mind. It seems that the No Child Left Behind Act entitles military recruiters not only to the names of all secondary public school children, but also their full contact information. You apparntly can opt-out: but why should it be anyone’s duty to opt out of unsollicited recruitment?
Excerpt from article:
"Recruiters are up-front about their plans to use school lists to aggressively pursue students through mailings, phone calls, and personal visits – even if parents object. “The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman,” says Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York. “Or maybe if the kid died, we’ll take them off our list.”
After getting two unsollicited phone calls from Laura Bush and one from Lautenberg’s daughter, I can’t imagine having to fend off military recruiters as well.
We can’t all be bothered with the unimportant trivialities that the Supreme Court trifles with, or people’s privacy in general.
It doesn’t bother you that, for instance, Verizon promotes a special service to stop telemarketing calls… while at the same time aiding and abetting telemarketers by selling them lists of their own customers and giving them special rates to pester their customers?
It’s just one of many strings on federal funding for education.
Remember all those kooky conservatives not wanting the federal gov’t to get into the education business (instead leaving it to the states)? Maybe we should have listened to them.
When I want privacy from telemarketers, I don’t need the Supreme Court to hang up on them for me.
Your “Verizon” thing doesn’t bother me in the exact same way that it doesn’t bother me that Kroger sells both junk food and weight loss aids. Kroger’s there to sell product and make money; so’s Verizon.
How is this different form the current system? I and every other male high school graduate I knew was aggressively recruited by the military - even those who hadn’t yet registered for the draft. Not coincidentally, we all received new Gilette razors. Where do you think those names, addresses, and phone numbers came from?
As per my understanding, the military gets those names from schools already - high schools. I could be wrong. I do know I got a selective service post card exactly on my birthday.
Just tell your kids to tell the recruiter that they plan on taking illegal drugs when they turn 18 so they wouldn’t even pass the drug test, that should stop them.
Well it bothers me, but not because its yet another telemarketer bothering me at dinner time.
I don’t think this should be just shrugged of as if it were just another company collecting consumer information – this is the federal government, and I think it raises a more serious privacy issue than if it was a private company.
Also, the consequences of some gullible kid being convinced by a telemarketer to switch long-distance carriers is probably going to have less of an impact on his life than if he, after being aggressively recruited, is talked into signing up for the Army.
The government is going to recruit a minor even after their parents tell them not to? That definitely seems wrong to me.
As was said earlier, this is the payoff that is extracted by the Federal Government for “supporting the schools”. What, we thought they were doing it out of altruism?
But even then, having the boy be “marketed” the military is still (to me) vastly superior to having them just be able to haul him off to Basic shortly after his 18th whether he likes it or not. HOWEVER the one thing I find objectionable is the “even if the parents object” bit. If that’s accurate, it really sounds like overstepping the bounds – I wonder if former recruiter Tranquilis could be summoned to provide some insights on that?
(obligatory red-tape and inefficiency rant)
Pffft.
My parents kept getting recruiters calling after I’d joined the military. You think something as trivial as death is going to stop them from trying to recruit you?
Incidentally, I was sitting in the office a couple weeks ago and overheard two secretaries in my high school talking something like this over. Apparently, the military had been asking for a list of all the men in the senior class, but the one secretary had been reluctant to give them anything. The senior secretary told her that school was legally obliged to provide pretty much any info the government wanted. I lost track of the conversation there, but I do recall hearing that the marines are really interested in athletes.
Might be disturbing to some, but I don’t see what the big deal is. It takes people to fight wars, and it’s better if recruiters find individuals who are willing to soldier.
Yes, it’s correct that the armed services get the contact info, but then we’ve been getting it for decades now. The most recent laws just continue that fact into the future. Future legislation will do the same.
The contact info is tied to Federal support for state schools.
The simple fact is this: The armed services provide a product: National security. Without qualified, quality personnel, that product doesn’t get delivered, and things like Peacekeeping missions, manning the lines in Korea, responding to Al Quada, rescuing American nationals in war-torn countries, meeting treaty obligations, and all the other things the populace expects our government to do, don’t get done. The contact lists allow Recruiters half a chance to fill the empty bunks. Without resorting to a draft.
Don’t fool yourselves… If the Recruiters can’t recurit, the draft will return like a bad dream.
"SEATTLE (AP) — Verizon Corp. has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s tough new telephone privacy rules, saying they are out of step with regulations the Federal Communications Commission adopted last summer.
"The rules, set to take effect Jan. 1, bar telephone companies from selling customers’ calling records or using them to market anything but telecommunications services without customers’ permission. "
When I was in college, I briefly took a job at the university hospital as a courier. Late '97, I’d say. During the hiring process I was informed that I wasn’t registered for Selective Service - that’s how they got me. If I hadn’t been so hard up for cash at that point, I would have probably gleefully gone on being illegial. It was a below-average survival job at best, too.
Until that point, I’d never seen a SS card. I vaguely remember military recruiters setting up in the high school cafeteria once, but I was a skinny bespectacled wimp who used lunch as a excuse to roam campus or get in more programming time when the lab was empty.
I graduated from High School in the early 80’s and got calls through my Junior year of college. These were about the only telemarketing calls that I got in those days and they called like once a month.
For a typical prospect, once a month is about right, until they cross out of the target market.
Target market is reasonably heathy 17 - 21 year-olds, highschool diploma graduates with minimal legal and drug involvement. Then, they have to pass a moderately straight-forward aptitude test.
You’d be surprised how few actually meet these modest standards.
As for recruiting the dead, unqualified, or already serving… Sometimes leads come in as a prank. A rather sick prank. Sometimes, leads come in from a school, or gov’t agency that hasn’t purged it’s files. Sometimes, the service itself has failed to purge the files. Those leads are supposed to be flagged and deleted as soon as fuond, but sometimes, when you’re dealing with millions of names, a few slip through. Once, I called two dead guys in a row… I had to take a long break to get my head bolted back on straight after unintentionally rubbing salt into the wounds of two grieving families. It sucked almost as bad for me as it did for them.
When I was in high school, the entire junior class was required to take the ASVAB (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), regardless of whether you had any interest in military service or not. Afterwards, I got multiple recruiting calls from all four branches, the most persistent being the marines. They finally quit calling the night my mom happened to answer and started laughing hysterically when the recruiting said she’d like to talk to me about military service.
