Education Department Mined Hundreds of Students' Records as Part of FBI Antiterrorist Operation

By JEFFREY SELINGO

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The U.S. Education Department has given the Federal Bureau of Investigation information on hundreds of students who applied for financial aid over the past five years as part of the federal government's antiterrorism investigations following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The program, known as Project Strike Back, was aimed at finding out if suspected terrorists were financing their operations through federal student aid obtained by using other students' identities. The secret effort was uncovered by a journalism student at Northwestern University, Laura McGann.

Under the program, the FBI provided names to the Education Department to cross-check in the department's database of applicants for student financial aid. The repository keeps information on some 14 million students per year who apply for federal financial aid by completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, the standard application form that the federal government, state governments, and most colleges use to determine students' eligibility for financial aid. Included in the database are students' names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and driver's-license numbers.

Fewer than 1,000 names were checked in the database over five years, Mary Mitchelson, general counsel to the Education Department's inspector general, said in an interview today. The project was run through her office.

"It's not unusual for the inspector general to cooperate with law enforcement on a number of investigations," Ms. Mitchelson said.

Most of the program's work occurred in the months after September 11, Ms. Mitchelson said. Over all, fewer than 600 hours were spent on the program by the department, and fewer than 50 of them in the last four years. The project was stopped in June.

FBI officials would not comment on whether any official investigations were begun as a result of the project. Ms. Mitchelson said that, as part of obtaining the records, Education Department officials analyzed them for evidence of student-aid fraud, but no cases were opened on those fronts.

Catherine Milhoan, an FBI spokeswoman, said the project was started on September 22, 2001. "This project was just one of several utilized by the FBI in the process of investigations," she said. "In the wake of 9/11, it was the job of the FBI to connect the dots and conduct counterterrorism investigations."

Unit-Record Debate

News of the secret data-mining effort comes at a time when college officials are divided over a proposal to establish a so-called unit-record system to track individual students' education progress. The proposal is a key element of the final draft report issued in August by the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which was convened by the secretary of education, Margaret Spellings (The Chronicle, September 1).

Private-college leaders, in particular, are worried that not enough safeguards exist to ensure the security of the data.

"This is troubling, but not surprising," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. "It's hard to be surprised when the government is mining every single database. In the war on terror, there are no safe harbors."

Mr. Hartle called the Education Department's project a "perfect illustration of the dangers of the unit-record system." He pointed out that, to receive federal aid, students must either be U.S. citizens or have a green card. "This is about finding Timothy McVeigh," he said. "This is not about finding Mohammed Atta."

"This case is another example of Big Brother gone wild," said Michael D. Ostrolenk, national director of the Liberty Coalition, which consists of privacy-rights organizations across the political spectrum. "In the age of everything is a national-security issue, we are destroying the very liberties and privacy rights which make our country unique and great in the history of the world."

Last year an earlier proposal for the unit-record system drew fire from Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, then chairman of the education committee and now majority leader in the House of Representatives (The Chronicle, June 1, 2005).

The department's privacy notice on the Fafsa form alerts students that the data they provide may be sent to "a foreign, federal, state, or local enforcement agency if the information that you submitted indicates a violation or potential violation of law."

For the most part, the department is not covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, known as Ferpa, which bars colleges from releasing student records that include personally identifiable information without the permission of students or their parents.

Steve McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design and a leading expert on federal privacy law, said Ferpa "doesn't apply directly to the department, but it could apply indirectly" if a college added information to the federal student-aid forms.

"Any records we supply to the department carry Ferpa with them," he said.

For her part, Ms. McGann will begin a full-time job at Dow Jones Newswire in September. She graduated from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in June and was one of several students who were part of a new venture by the Carnegie Corporation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to revitalize journalism education. The Carnegie-Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism Education, in part, seeks to develop a national investigative-reporting team with students from five participating universities (The Chronicle, February 17). The students focused on a theme: privacy and civil liberties in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Ms. McGann said she found out about the Education Department project from a brief mention of it in a Government Accountability Office report about data-mining programs at various federal agencies. "It struck me that the Education Department was doing data mining," she said. "I thought that was sort of unusual."

She confirmed the existence of the program through a report from the Education Department's inspector general. In June she filed a request with the department seeking additional details of the project under the federal Freedom of Information Act. She received the information this month, allowing her to complete the article.

"I never would have thought in January that I would be working on a story about the Department of Education's role in the post-9/11 world," said Ms. McGann.