Data Mining
Granted, the Nation has been described as “The Flagship of the Left” so if you’re allergic to politics, I promise that you’ll be alright. Just bear with me for a few minutes.
Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."
Maybe they crosslink with the FBI to see if they also like falafel?
Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit records" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.
Sounds like a whole barrel of fun.
It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. The Defense Department has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the department has partnered with private marketing and data-mining firms, which in turn sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.
No real surprise here folks. NCLB has a nice little provision that also allows the Military to have access to student records.
Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information (Title IX, Part E, Subpart 2, Section 9528), requires that each LEA receiving assistance under NCLB must, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, provide: • access to secondary school students names, address, and telephone listings, after a parent has the opportunity to request that the information not be released; • the same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to post secondary educational institutions or to prospective employers of those students. • A secondary school student or the parent of the student may request that the student’s name, address, and telephone listing not be released without prior written parental consent; and • the local educational or private nonprofit school must notify parents of the option to make such a request and must comply with any request. (P. L. 107-110, section 9528).
I’ve worked with plenty of database applications and the only thing that limits the power of a database is the availability of information. As more data is entered into the system, the system becomes much more powerful. Crosschecking data from other databases (imagine a database that stored your educational records and talked to say, Facebook or MySpace) is the next step for information technology.
Textbooks already talk about “cleaning” and “transforming” data in order to store in a data warehouse.
Modern Database Management, 7th Edition. by Jeffrey A. Hoffer, Mary B. Prescott and Fred R. Mcfadden. Published by Prentice Hall.
What is to stop someone from developing an ETL tool that scrapes data from social networks?
Researchers took anonymized usage data from Netflix and were able to strip away much of the anonymity by crosschecking ratings made on INMDB. That’s the kind of power that can be harnessed.
It’s not a matter of viability or practicality, it’s a question of control.
For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world.
William Ross Wallace: The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Is The Hand That Rules The World