Student loan data searched for terrorist clues

WASHINGTON – The Education Department acknowledged Thursday that, at the request of the FBI, it had scoured millions of federal student loan records for information about suspected terrorists in the five years since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The data mining – known as “Project Strike Back” – was aimed at determining whether terrorism suspects had illegally obtained college aid to finance their operations through identity theft or other means.

Authorities said the program was limited to “fewer than 1,000” persons who were considered witnesses or “subjects” of federal terrorism investigations. Most of the searches were conducted in 2001 and 2002; the program was ended in June 2006.

The project – first disclosed by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University – is similar to sometimes secret arrangements the FBI made with other federal agencies, such as the Social Security Administration, to gain information about terror suspects since Sept. 11.

But the idea of the government trolling through massive databases containing information on ordinary citizens has concerned privacy advocates. The sleuthing comes against a backdrop of even more aggressive moves that U.S. terrorist hunters have made since Sept. 11, such as the monitoring of citizens’ phone calls without a court order.

The FBI said the searches were triggered by intelligence indicating that terrorists were exploiting student visas and loan programs.

“This was not a sweeping program, in that it involved only a few hundred names,” said FBI spokesman John Miller. “This is part of our mission, which is to take the leads we have and investigate them. There was no attempt to conceal these efforts, in that they were referenced in publicly available briefings to Congress and the (Government) Accountability Office.”

Under the program, the FBI gave the names to the Education Department’s inspector general, who conducted the searches. The searches were limited to “names of subjects already material to counter-terrorism investigations,” Miller said.

The FBI declined to say how the information was used or whether it led to arrests or prosecutions of suspects.