Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Northwestern U. graduate student finds FBI searched tuition records
By Carrie Porter
Daily Northwestern (Northwestern U.)
09/18/2006

(U-WIRE) EVANSTON, Ill. — If you receive federal financial aid for your college tuition, the federal government may have accessed your personal information in an effort to root out terrorists.

Laura McGann, a Medill graduate student at Northwestern University, teamed up with the Associated Press earlier this month to release a story on the operation, known as Project Strike Back.

After months of research, McGann discovered three public references to a data mining operation involving the FBI and the Department of Education.

The agencies worked together to investigate the use of financial aid money for terrorist activities through the information available in financial aid applications.

"The information had been on public record, and so it was just Medill making the connection," McGann said. "The media neglected to report on it."

After she filed a Freedom of Information Act request and interviewed the Department of Education's deputy inspector general, both agencies acknowledged the program.

McGann later discovered a government memo, dated 10 days after her interview, that terminated Project Strike Back.

McGann's work on government data mining began with a class last winter on homeland security issues. The class examined data mining records in several different government departments.

She first became curious when she discovered the Department of Education's ranking at the top of the list of agencies that mine data.

She worked with a team of 11 other graduate students in the News 21 fellowship program offered by Medill and four other top schools: Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley.

Funded by the Carnegie Foundation, News 21 explores the role of hard news in a new era of media.

"What it really comes down to is a lot of digging by the students for information that is not easy to find," said Ellen Shearer, the director of Medill's Washington, D.C., program and the school's William S. Thomas Professor. "To get a big story you have to do a lot of work."

Shearer told Sandy Johnson, the AP's Washington bureau chief, about McGann's findings because Johnson has a special interest in government secrecy.

"We worked closely with AP editors and it was great experience for the News 21 fellows," Shearer said.

McGann insists that her success comes from simple investigative reporting on public information.

"The tree fell in the forest and no one heard it," said Kenneth Janda, NU professor emeritus of political science, referring to the minimal attention paid to Project Strike Back by the media.

Other News 21 fellows have produced projects on information tracking, Shearer said. Matt Ford turned a 20,000-word story into an game that allows players to visualize how the government gathers personal information and what information various agencies have.

Another team of News 21 producers, Meredith Mazzotta and Phil Stuart, followed one person for a day to see how businesses and the government tracked her activities.

Whether it's by swiping a gym card or buying lunch, readers can see how businesses record and pass off information to third parties while also making it available to the government.

The News 21 interactive packages and games, as well as research findings and stories, are available at www.newsinitiative.org.

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