Medill graduate student Laura McGann writes:
For the past five years an office in the Education Department has scanned through its databases of millions of students’ federal financial aid and college enrollment records in search of terrorist names supplied by the FBI.
The effort, dubbed “Project Strike Back,” was created by the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to expand the office’s mission to include counterterrorism.
The program ran from September 21, 2001 to about June of this year. McGann notes that the program ended just 10 days after Medill reporters interviewed the person in charge of the program.
USA Today and the AP have similar stories today, about two weeks after McGann’s story was first posted. Although the program formally ended in June, the AP says the FBI continues to do a small number of requests.
This story was broken as part of a larger News21 project:
Laura McGann broke news of a secret data-mining program run out of the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General that ran names provided by the FBI against student records and financial aid records. She uncovered this information by looking at public records, conducting interviews and making Freedom of Information Act requests. “We named the project the ‘data dilemma,’” McGann said, “and it is a true dilemma. On the one hand, there are privacy issues involved in giving the FBI records of people who potentially did nothing wrong. On the other hand, it is information that could be used to fight terrorism.”
Her Facebook states that her summer break plans are News21. Description? “muckraking.” Indeed.
News21 is a collaboration between multiple journalism schools; each summer they do an investigative project. Medill’s this year was a multimedia presentation called “Data Dilemma: Privacy in an Age of Security.” You can read about all the participants, students and faculty, here – Professor Rich Gordon was involved, among others.
More as things develop…
4th UPDATE: Hello New York Times.
3rd UPDATE: I’ve been tracking the word “Medill” on Google News, Topix, and Technorati for weeks… this story is getting played everywhere. Most are versions of the AP story, but here’s an original article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Education Department Mined Hundreds of Students’ Records as Part of FBI Antiterrorist Operation.”
2nd UPDATE: McGann replied to an e-mail saying she’ll be on CNN to talk about it tomorrow morning. That’s so cool. Expect to see her in the 9 a.m. hour, ET.
UPDATE: Found McGann’s original story, called “Studying Students.”