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OMB Website Exposes Thousands of SSNs
msblack writes "The New York Times is reporting that an Office of Management and Budget website accidentally exposed at least 30,000 social security numbers publicly online. As many as 100,000 to 150,000 individuals may have been affected. The cost to taxpayers just for notifications and credit monitoring is estimated to run $4 million. 'While there was no evidence to indicate whether anyone had in fact used the information improperly, officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau removed the Social Security numbers from the Census Web site last week. Officials at the Agriculture Department said Social Security numbers were included in the public database because doing so was the common practice years ago when the database was first created, before online identity theft was as well-known a threat as it is today. '"
The credit reporting companies, banks, and data brokers might howl, but too bad.
Yes, too bad. It's obvious by now that the market is not going to come up with a solution for this on their own as long as they can use the SSN as a crutch. It's time to yank that crutch back out. The SSN should be discontinued and replaced with a tax id that should only be used for two things: reporting income to the government and paying your taxes or getting your refund. If someone steals my SSN, they're more than welcome to paying my taxes for me, and if they try to hide their income in my tax id we'll find out about it at the end of the year when my tax forms don't match the reports. And if I don't get my refund, well...
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The entire social security program is absurd. Ignoring the economics of the retirement portion of the program, using SSN's for identification is a terrible idea. The program was never initially designed for the numbers to be used as ID's, but the need for one was so overwhelming that people started accepting them.
Scrap the entire Social Security program. If you think the government ought to force people to prepare for their retirement, withdraw money from their paychecks and put it in a personal account for them. Hell, even a bank account with 1% interest would give you a better return than social security, and it guarantees ownership of your money, instead of allowing the government to waste it building bridges to nowhere when you die.
Once that's done, let's design a proper identification system, so it doesn't matter if someone gets your ID number.
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What else do I need for ID theft exactly?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
'Umm... This is really an odd statement, here. What do you care that someone can convincingly file any sort of transaction under your name (SSN and Mother's Maiden Name). What do you care that someone could borrow $150,000, and put up your house as security.'
These are all problems for someone with good credit and/or assets or maybe even money. For the majority of the population this is not the case. Most of us don't own a home or even a decent car. Most of us have no credit worth mentioning and probably bad credit besides. What difference does it make if the number you owe on paper grows? It isn't like you could have paid what was there anyway. A few more collectors harassing you? That is why you got a machine years ago. Time in court? Please, you can't afford to file bankruptcy, especially if the only purpose it serves to erase an imaginary debt (I say imaginary because the only chance it has of being paid or collected is in the imagination).
'What do you care that someone could use your info to launder money, with a trail leading right to you when the feds look into it and an onus on you to prove it wasn't you?'
The burden is on the feds, not on you. Someone must have gained access to your information, you never went to those places and conducted business. The guy on the bank security cameras wasn't you. The information and picture on the ID the bank photocopied doesn't match yours. How about proof of address? What did they use for that? If they used your address then you would have been sent paperwork before that became an issue. And even without any of that, a claim that someone else used your information is easily within the realm of reasonable doubt. The feds would have to prove not only that my information was used but that it was me who used it. That is of course assuming that you can manage to force your public defender to go to trial instead of plea bargaining. Typically they have enourmous case loads and often are regular attorneys who don't want to waste time on the freebie case.