Students with loans typically receive a barrage of solicitations for loan consolidations and other services in their mailboxes, and they often wonder how the advertisers got their names and addresses. Recent reports suggest they may have come from the U.S. Education Department itself.

As first reported in the Washington Post, lenders have been improperly using the department's National Student Loan Data System to gain access to student loan information, including names and loan balances. Congress authorized the creation of the database in 1986 to keep track of the way loans were being awarded and repaid. Lenders are prohibited from using it to gather information for advertising.

"They're using it for things that they're not supposed to be using it for," says Stephen Burd, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation...

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