The Department of Defense is creating a database of high school and college students in order to identify potential military recruits, according to the Washington Post.

The database will include, among other things, birthdates, Social Security numbers, courses and majors, grade point averages, email addresses and ethnicity.

Social Security numbers? Ethnicity?

Normally the Privacy Act would prohibit this sort of thing, but the government is working around that by having a private company, BeNow Inc., create and maintain the database. We’ve been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately, where the government will work around a restriction on what it can do by having a private contractor do it for them.

Supposedly anyone can “opt out” of the system, but in order to do so, one would have to provide the Pentagon with all the detailed information they would already be gathering, ostensibly to match it against the database and prevent solicitations for military recruitment.

It’s just typical of how voracious government is when it comes to personal information. Defense is an area where government has a legitimate responsibility . . . but there are a lot of data fields they don’t need and shouldn’t be keeping. Ethnicity strikes me as particularly inappropriate. — James Harper, Cato Institute

Don’t you worry. Your database is perfectly safe in the hands of the government. They would never use it for anything other than its stated purpose of military recruitment. No way. The U.S. doesn’t do that sort of thing.