Education Dept.
Shared Student Data
With F.B.I.
By JONATHAN D. GLATER, NYTimes on the Web, September 1, 2006
The Federal Education Department shared personal information on hundreds of
student loan applicants with the Federal Bureau of Investigation across a
five-year period that began after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the agencies said
yesterday.
Under the program, called Project Strikeback, the Education Department received
names from the F.B.I. and checked them against its student aid database,
forwarding information. Each year, the Education Department collects
information from 14 million applications for federal student aid.
Neither agency would say whether any investigations resulted. The agencies
said the program had been closed. The effort was reported yesterday by a
graduate student, Laura McGann, at the Medill School of Journalism at
Northwestern University, as part of a reporting project that focused on national
security and civil liberties.
In a statement, Mary Mitchelson, counsel to the inspector general of the
Education Department, said, “Using names provided by the bureau, we examined the
Department of Education’s student financial aid databases to determine if the
individuals received or applied for federal student financial assistance.”
Information collected on federal financial aid applications includes names,
addresses, Social Security numbers, incomes and, for some students, information
on parents’ incomes and educational backgrounds.
Generally, only United States citizens and permanent residents are eligible to
apply for federal student financial aid.
An assistant director of the F.B.I., John Miller, said in a statement:
“During the 9/11 investigation and continually since, much of the intelligence
has indicated terrorists have exploited programs involving student visas and
financial aid. In some student loan frauds, identity theft has been a
factor.’’
Mr. Miller said the Education Department was asked to “run names of subjects
already material to counterterrorism investigations” to look for evidence of
student loan fraud or identity theft.
“No records of people other than those already under investigation were called
for,” he said. “This was not a sweeping program, in that it involved only
a few hundred names. This is part of our mission, which is to take the
leads we have and investigate them.”
Mr. Miller said that the effort was not concealed and that it was referred to
publicly in briefings to Congress and the Government Accountability Office.
A spokeswoman for the bureau, Cathy Milhoan, said the Education Department had
provided financial aid information on fewer than 1,000 names in connection with
terrorism investigations.
The information sharing was disclosed as the Education Department examines a
proposal by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, established last
year by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, to create a national student
database that would follow individual students’ progress as a way of holding
colleges accountable for students’ success.
“This operation Strikeback confirms our worst fears about the uses to which
these databases can be put,” said David L. Warren, president of the National
Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents 900
institutions. “The concentration of all this data absolutely invites use
by other agencies of data that had been gathered for very specific and narrow
purposes, namely the granting of student aid to needy kids.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation would not discuss the specific criteria it
used in seeking information on students but said the program was narrowly
focused.
“People are trying to turn this into something that it wasn’t,” Ms. Milhoan
said. “We are not out there arbitrarily running student records for the
sake of running them.”
Ms. Mitchelson of the Education Department said a review of the files of the
people named by the F.B.I. had not led to any cases that charged student loan
fraud.
Ms. Mitchelson said the information sharing was possible under a law that
permits a federal agency to release personal information to another agency “for
a civil or criminal law enforcement activity.”
She said the department had spent fewer than 600 hours on the program, including
50 hours over the last four years.
Ms. McGann, the journalism student who reported on the program, said she saw
data sharing mentioned, but not described, in a report by the Government
Accountability Office that she reviewed in the spring as part of a research
project after a seminar on investigative reporting.
“I thought that was pretty unexpected for the Department of Education,” said Ms.
McGann, 24, who graduated this year from Medill. “So I decided I would try
to look into that a little more.”
She said she found another mention of the program in a report from the inspector
general’s office in the department.
In June, Ms. McGann went directly to the Education Department.
“Eventually, I did an on-camera interview with a deputy inspector general there
who did comment on the program,” she said.
She said his name was Michael Deshields.
“After that,’’ Ms. McGann added, “I decided I should file a Freedom of
Information Act request.”
Last month, she received documents in response to her request that were heavily
redacted, she said. Among them were Education Department memorandums
describing F.B.I. requests for information on specific people whose names were
blocked out and an internal memorandum dated June 16, 10 days after her
interview, stating that the data sharing program had terminated. The name
of the author of that memorandum was also redacted, she added.
“I learned that getting information from a federal agency you need to be
persistent,” Ms. McGann said. “And I learned that public documents are
really a wealth of stories.”
She said she had accepted a position at Dow Jones Newswires in Washington.
Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting from Washington for this
article.
|
