LOS ANGELES - Over the last several months the ACLU of Southern California has been working with countless parents, students and teachers who are deeply concerned about extreme efforts to recruit their children to the military. In order to meet its goals, the government since 2002 has required public high schools to turn over students' personal data to the Pentagon as a condition of receiving federal funding.

Now it has been revealed that the Pentagon is working with a private company to create a behemoth database that contains even more highly personal information including children's social security number, ethnicity, grade-point average, age, e-mail address and even the courses they are studying.

Parents concerned about the strong-arm tactics the military is using to send their children to war have been calling for a more fair approach where they help decide the appropriate path to take after graduating from high school. The Pentagon's latest action recklessly disregards this and instead mandates the collection of ever-more detailed dossiers of American teens' personal information.

Also, the Pentagon in its Federal Register notice about this "system of records" has reserved the right to share these student dossiers for numerous purposes that have nothing to do with military recruitment, including law enforcement. That means sensitive information about the lives of millions of innocent students - including the keys to identity theft like social security numbers - may now end up in the files of not just the Pentagon but a host of public and private parties.

We understand the Pentagon is not meeting its recruitment goals, but collecting such information about high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students is an egregious violation of privacy and personal freedom.

LOS ANGELES - The ACLU of Southern California strongly objects to a City of Los Angeles proposal that would effectively end civilian oversight of six law enforcement departments and agencies. The Police Commission is expected to vote on the plan Tuesday.

The move would transfer security services of the Departments of Recreation and Parks, Library, Convention Center, Zoo and El Pueblo Historic Monument Departments, and the Community Redevelopment Agency under the direction of a newly-created Office of Public Safety in the General Services Department. Currently the agencies all fall under the watch of public commissions, but General Services does not.

In a letter sent to the Police Commission today, the ACLU of Southern California asked that the plan be reconsidered as civilian oversight is inherently important to public safety. If created, the new Office of Public Safety would include "Special Officers" who will be trained like LAPD officers and will be certified to carry firearms, make arrests and use force when needed, but the public would not have a method to monitor the actions of these officers as it does the LAPD.

"The creation of a secondary police force in the City that is not subject to similar review flies in the face of the letter and spirit of the City charter, which clearly establishes the value and need for civilian oversight of the LAPD," said ACLU/SC Criminal Justice Director Ricardo Garcia in the letter to the Commission.

The absence of public scrutiny if the new department is created is at the heart of the problem, not the idea of consolidating the security agencies, said ACLU/SC Executive Director Ramona Ripston.

"We should not diminish checks and balances in the police department, especially when the public's safety is in peril," said Ripston. "The Police Commission must not vote to move armed officers out of their supervision, where important oversights exist."

LOS ANGELES'The American Civil Liberties Union and United Airlines announced today that they have reached a settlement in a lawsuit brought on behalf of Assem Bayaa and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), charging that the airline discriminated against Bayaa by removing him from a flight. While United disputes Bayaa's and ADC's allegations, the parties agree that settlement of this claim is in the best interest of all.

United has previously worked, per a settlement agreement reached with the United States' Department of Transportation on a similar subject, to develop and administer comprehensive training to its employees on the topic of Equal Treatment of Customers. ADC and its affiliated organizations, ADC Research Institute and the ADC Law Enforcement Outreach Program, assisted United in developing the content for the training. The American Civil Liberties Union applauds United for the message it is sending its employees on this important topic through the Training and has recommended to its clients, Bayaa and the ADC, to resolve this case in recognition of United's industry leading efforts in this regard.

United is committed to providing service without discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion or national origin.