Defense Dept. Settles Suit on Student-Recruiting Database

In response to a lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Defense last week agreed not to collect certain kinds of information about high school students, and to clarify what young people must do to remove their names from the military’s recruitment database.

In a notice published Jan. 9 in the Federal Register , the department outlined procedures that were the key to settling a lawsuit filed against it last April by six New York City high school students. The students argued that their privacy rights were violated because the military had collected more information about them than was permitted by a 1982 federal law and had allowed other agencies and companies to see it.

Military recruitment of high school students has drawn renewed debate and scrutiny amid the war in Iraq and because of a provision in the federal No Child Left Behind Act that threatens schools with loss of federal funding if they do not give the...