Student financial-aid records have been helping to fight the war on terror for the past five years - but without students' knowledge.

The Department of Education acknowledged last week that one of its offices had been running a program, which was discontinued last June, that searched for evidence of terrorist activity via financial-aid records.

Under Project Strike Back, the FBI provided DOE with the names of individuals under investigation for terrorism. The department would then search for these names in databases containing federal financial-aid records of 14 million college students.

Penn officials declined to comment on whether student information could have been accessed, citing national security concerns.

Mary Mitchelson, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said that Project Strike Back ended because it was no longer being used very much, with less than 50 hours of work in the last four years. Only several hundred names had been investigated via the department's databases.

She said DOE couldn't reveal whether any FBI cases resulted from the program.

Through the program, the FBI had access to a variety of personal information compiled from Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, including Social Security numbers, family income and investments and tax returns.

FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said in a statement that the program began in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the FBI discovered that terrorists have exploited programs involving student visas and financial aid.

While the FBI and DOE have maintained that Project Strike back was legal and had not been secret, the program has raised questions of privacy. One of the main concerns is that information collected by one government agency for a specific purpose was used by another agency for another purpose.

Roland King, a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, an advocacy group, said that he could understand "heightened sensitivity" to Project Strike Back, since a number of other federal agencies have been troubled by data theft in the past few months.

Nevertheless, he said that his organization was "ambivalent" about Project Strike Back because "obviously the war on terror is serious and demands the support of higher education."

Roland said the association did not take a stand against the program because the FBI didn't obtain records of all students on financial aid, only those of individuals already under investigation.

This made the program more defensible, he added.

Civil liberties groups are more critical of Project Strike Back, however.

Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy watchdog, said that the FBI and DOE should not have undertaken the program.

She added that governmental agencies should only use data for the purposes for which they were collected and not open their records to other agencies. Doing so increases the risk that such information will be misused, she added.

Coney said that the disclosure of Project Strike Back is "just one more revelation of how broad the net was cast to collect personal information on citizens" after Sept. 11.

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