With ominous rumblings about vaccine passports, perpetual contact tracing, and other means of government and corporate surveillance, totalitarian spying on U.S. citizens seems closer than we could have imagined. Now the Senate has stepped in – again – to ramp up surveillance in the realm of higher education.
For several years, even so-called conservative Republican senators have pushed bills to allow the feds to track and compile data on any student from any institution of higher education (IHE) for the rest of his or her working life. The excuse for this startlingly intrusive initiative is twofold. First, lifetime tracking will allow prospective students to see what jobs people get and how much money they make after studying at particular institutions. Second, tracking will enable the federal government to evaluate its massive student-loan programs.
The short answer for excuse number-one is that no one has the right to demand surveillance of his fellow free-born citizens, regardless of whether the resulting data might theoretically help in his decision-making. To excuse number-two, any government program that requires dragooning citizens into a lifetime of governmental surveillance, without consent, is a program that should be abolished. This is one of a multitude of reasons the federal government should relinquish control over student loans.
But “conservatives” in Congress don’t see that. This year’s iteration of the surveillance bill is the College Transparency Act (CTA), recently reintroduced by Republican senators Bill Cassidy (LA) and Tim Scott (SC) and Democrat senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI). Strange bedfellows indeed – and two of them are either being shamefully hoodwinked or are shamefully hoodwinking the voters who sent them to the Senate.
Here’s how CTA will work. First it will require any IHE that enrolls students with federal student loans – that is, almost every IHE in the country – to compile an enormous amount of student data and send it to the federal Commissioner for Education Statistics. The data must cover “enrollment patterns, progression, completion, and post-collegiate outcomes, and higher education costs and financial aid.” All the required data elements are specified in the bill (age, race, “gender,” full-time or part-time status, veteran status, program of study, etc.), but they’re just a beginning – the Commissioner may add others later when the mood strikes. And don’t think the voracious federal government will stop with the data requirements currently included.
Second, the Commissioner must share all this personal data with multiple other federal agencies. After all, the point of the new Chinese-style system is to track every student’s life choices, “including earnings, employment, and further education,” forever. So student data will be matched to data in the IRS, the Treasury Department, the Defense Department, the VA, the Census Bureau, and the Social Security Administration, among others.
CTA would apply even to students who don’t receive federal aid. So merely by the act of enrolling in higher education, every student will now have an official government dossier that will be updated as he progresses through life and career. There’s no requirement that the student consent, and there’s no opt out.
And this is individual, personally identifiable information that can be matched to particular students. In fact, Cassidy and Scott’s CTA would repeal current federal law that prohibits collecting “personally identifiable information on individuals receiving” federal student-loan assistance. It should be unthinkable that constitutional conservative senators would mandate government surveillance of individual, identifiable Americans, but the universe of the unthinkable is shrinking by the day.
Our political overlords do allow IHE’s to “provide notice to students outlining the data included in the system and how the data are used.” Students will star in their own Truman Show, but at least they’ll be told about it. And they’ll even be allowed to peek at their data and “request corrections to inaccuracies.” The bureaucrats won’t be required to actually make those corrections, but the peasants shouldn’t be too demanding.
Another assurance is that these dossiers won’t be kept in a “single-standing, linked Federal database at the Department.” Apparently students are to be comforted that bureaucrats will have to click several times, not just once, to access their highly personal information.
Even if “transparency” justified obliterating the right to privacy, what about the more pedestrian problem of hacking? Cassidy and Scott are on it. Under CTA, data matches among the various federal data troves will have to be “secure” and to comply with the same protocols that have created scandalously insecure data systems at multiple federal agencies (see here, here, and here). Feel better?
Not only bureaucrats but also “researchers” will have access to this highly sensitive data trove, but only “vetted” research will be allowed. Who will do this vetting and according to what criteria remains unspecified. And though the data given to researchers will be de-identified, with “direct [not indirect] identifiers removed,” anonymity won’t be guaranteed. Tech-savvy researchers who are told a citizen’s education history and job titles and earnings and whatever else any government agency may have collected on him over the years will find the absence of a name on the records merely an inconvenience, not an obstacle, to re-identification.
Americans who actually believe in freedom, privacy, and limited government are growing weary of “conservative” politicians who ignore the ramifications of what they propose. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen Republicans in Congress spearhead the imposition of radical “action civics” that will teach future generations to hate their country. Now Cassidy and Scott are pushing a government surveillance system that, if they bothered to think about it, should make them recoil in disgust.
These are not difficult issues. From a constitutional perspective, there are right and wrong answers. Why are politicians on the right so often choosing the wrong ones?