WASHINGTON -- A national coalition of parents groups, privacy advocates and community organizations launched a campaign yesterday to dismantle a database of high school and college students built by the Pentagon to help target potential military recruits.

In a letter sent yesterday to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, more than 100 groups charge that the database violates federal privacy laws and is collecting demographic and other personal information on young Americans that could be misused by the government and the marketing firms handling the program.

"We are not in opposition to those who choose to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces," said a draft of the letter asking that the program be shut down. But "the creation of the ... database is in conflict with the Privacy Act, which was passed by Congress to reduce the government's collection of personal information on Americans."

The military, which is struggling to meet recruiting goals, argues that the effort is grounded in law and is essential to maintaining strong, all-volunteer armed forces.

The Pentagon is on track to spend $342.9 million on the controversial Joint Advertising, Market Research and Studies program.

The effort seeks to help recruiters discover and reach more potential enlistees and to develop advertising aimed at those who typically influence young people, including parents, coaches and teachers.

The money is being spent through a contract with Mullen Advertising Inc. of Wenham, Mass., that began in 2002 and can be renewed annually until January 2007. So far, the Pentagon has spent $206.3 million, a military spokeswoman said.

Under a subcontract with Mullen, BeNow Inc., a Wakefield, Mass., firm that specializes in gathering and analyzing personal information for target marketing, is compiling and maintaining the database. BeNow has been acquired by Equifax Inc., one of the top credit bureaus and data brokers.

The Pentagon program was little known until June, when the military issued a privacy notice that it was buying lists of all high school and college students to create a database that included birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.

David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said at the time that the privacy notice should have been issued sooner and that parents could request that their children not be solicited by recruiters.

The Pentagon has not yet made opt-out forms available on its Web sites, though it promises to do so by early next year. A member of one group opposed to the database, Leave My Child Alone, created its own opt-out letter and said 34,000 copies of it have been downloaded from the organization's Web site.

According to Pentagon documents, the information on roughly 12 million individuals is compiled from a variety of sources, including motor vehicle records, commercial vendors of personal information on students, and those who take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, which is given in many high schools.

The program also includes data from Selective Service registrations. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, the Pentagon also is entitled to entire public high school student lists, which it says are kept separately.

One goal of the opposition coalition, organizers said, is to make high school and college students aware of how much private data they give away.

"When young people are asked to provide personal information in hopes of receiving a scholarship or an academic honor, they may be giving up their right to privacy with nothing being given to them in return," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the groups spearheading the effort.

Other members range from national groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Republican Liberty Caucus to community groups.