An article in Friday's Wall Street Journal prompted EPIC's request, filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), for all documents related to the department's purchase of reports on student's surfing habits from a company called N2H2.

The Journal reported that N2H2 (NTWO), the leading provider of Web-filtering services to U.S. K-12 schools, is telling the department which websites students visit most while at school.

"We're very interested in knowing why the Department of Defense would want this kind of information," EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg said.

Other privacy advocates and foes of commercialization in schools expressed similar interest and concern. Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert -- a nonprofit group opposed to advertising and marketing excesses -- called N2H2 a "corporate predator" in a statement issued on Monday. He also sent a letter to new Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asking the department to stop purchasing Web traffic information from N2H2.

N2H2 filters Internet content for schools that purchase its software, called Bess. According to the International Data Corporation, Bess is the most popular Web filter with schools, with about 20 percent of the market. N2H2 says it filters content for about 15 million students nationwide.

But the company is not profitable, and it recently began selling the information collected by its filtering servers. N2H2 uses Web logs to determine the top 1,000 websites students visit each month and the length of the average visit to each site. Surfing habits are then divided according to age group, nine geographic regions and population density. For example, a subscriber to the database could learn where junior high kids in the rural areas of the Northeast click most.

This aggregate information is passed along to Roper Starch Worldwide, which packages and markets it as a product called Class Clicks.

While the notion of the military spying on kids makes privacy advocates shudder, N2H2 and Roper Starch say the concerns are unfounded.

"The fear that we're selling names or something like that is a lot of media hype," said Bob Pares, who markets Class Clicks for Roper. "We don't have that information. The concerns that people have are a bit overdone."

He also finds the interest of the Defense Department -- one of only two customers that have purchased Class Clicks so far -- less mysterious and ominous than privacy groups.

"Obviously, it's for recruitment," he said. "The prime thing they want to do is communicate opportunities to people coming out of high school. The military is interested in knowing how to talk to teenagers in new media settings."

Ruskin, who researches advertising in schools, notes that the military is a top advertiser on the closed circuit television service Channel One. The armed services' difficulty meeting recruitment quotas over the past several years has been well publicized.

The department couldn't confirm or deny if it had purchased the Class Clicks product. The Army's new ad agency, Leo Burnett -- hired to come up with a replacement for the retired "Be All You Can Be" campaign -- hadn't heard of it either.

Pares said the Defense Department had only subscribed to the service about a month ago, and thought it quite possible it hadn't yet been put to much use.

Assuming Pares is right -- the military is only trying to figure out where to place banner ads -- where's the harm?

Even staunch foes of any breach of students' privacy conceded that if the data provided in Class Clicks is as general as N2H2 says, it probably doesn't threaten students' privacy.

"In general, aggregate information doesn't raise privacy concerns. If it's not associated with an individual, or a group of less than about 25, it's not a privacy issue," said Jason Catlett, president of privacy advocate group Junkbusters.

Pares said the information in Class Clicks does not approach that degree of specificity. The Bess software does not require students to log on with a user name, and cannot provide any information on individual users.

"We're not even sure if these are boys or girls," he said.

But even if Class Clicks does not violate students' right to privacy, the precedent that N2H2 has set by choosing to sell information collected during filtering deeply concerns those who want to stop commercialism from penetrating schools via the Web.

The passage of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) last December has raised the stakes in that fight significantly. The new legislation requires schools and libraries that receive federal funding for computers to use filters like N2H2's Bess.

The crux of the concern is that, if filtering companies are allowed to sell their data, children will be unable to avoid monitoring by corporations who want to sell them stuff, or government agencies looking for a few good men. Kids have to go school, schools have to have filters and filtering companies can sell the information.

EPIC and the ACLU have promised to challenge the legislation as an unconstitutional impediment to free speech. EPIC's Rotenberg thinks N2H2's decision to sell the information on students collected via soon-to-be mandatory filters could be used as additional ammunition in their case.

"We might argue that it's another reason mandatory filtering imposes an unconstitutional privacy burden on school children," Rotenberg said.

N2H2 claims that most of the interest in Class Clicks is coming from educational content providers who want to improve their products. But they also say that they don't have any moral qualms about selling to commercial interests.

"We wouldn't have a problem selling a report to Pepsi," a company spokesman said.