FBI Had Student Data Searched

The L.A. Times reports:

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 intended to determine whether terrorism suspects had illegally obtained college aid to finance their operations through identity theft or other means.

Is this a dry run for national health care data mining against political opponents?