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New Jersey DMV Employees Caught Selling Identities
phaedrus5001 writes "Ars has an article about two New Jersey DMV employees who have been accused of selling personal information they routinely had access to. The NJ prosecutor's office claims (PDF) their investigation 'uncovered that two employees of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission were providing the names, addresses, dates of birth and social security numbers of unsuspecting residents that they obtained through their employment. They were charging as little as $200 per identity.'"
I wouldn't pay more than $200 to be from New Jersey, either!
50,000 characters used to live here.
Why can normal day to day employees even view plain text social security numbers? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to hide that information like banks do with credit card numbers?
Also, I find it ironic that these two relatively low level criminals will get the book thrown at them, but when the DMV legally sells that information to marketing companies everyone is happy. I guess they don't sell SSNs but still, thin line.
I didn't realize that our identities were so worthless. Whether it is attributed to evil, or a lack of humanity on the part of the two employees, this represents a fundamental problem among people today: "Doesn't affect me, so I don't care."
I believe that will destroy us even faster than bank collapses or political corruption, in a sense because those maladies are results of the "I don't care" problem. "I can buy these horrible securities, if it goes bad, it doesn't affect me, so I don't care", "My constituents want this, sure it'll put 100,000 people out of work, but it doesn't affect me, so I don't care", "Hell I'll sell peoples identities, sure they'll be plagued by this for a matter of decades to come, but it doesn't affect me, so I don't care."
People need to care about things that don't affect them or else this world is very very doomed.
Experian? Other credit rating companies?
I'm sure I could come up with a lot of others that disprove your hypothesis. There are lots and lots of private companies that we have to do business with. We have no choice in the matter.
Obviously the government shouldn't know your Social Security number...
The solution that someone much smarter than me (Bruce Schneier) has repeatedly proposed is this: When doing something that involves sensitive data, you don't verify identity, you verify transactions. For instance, if you want to transfer money from your bank account, the question is not "Are you smpoole7?", it's "Does smpoole7 really want $150,000 to go to an account in Pakistan?". A smart bank will use alternate ways of contacting you (if they're really worried, they might even ask that you do this in person) to confirm that it is in fact your intent.
This has a lot of ancillary benefits that probably make it worth the expense. For instance, it helps catch errors by the actual owner of the account.
I am officially gone from
No DMV (and no vehicle registrations, or safety regulations, or license plates, or insurance?)
The following licenses I have, or previously held, none of which are "IDs" requiring SS number:
ham radio license
GROL
former private pilot license (maybe this has changed to photo now?)
former fishing license
several former military operators licenses including really weird stuff like immersion heater (I kid you not) and RTFL rough terrain forklift
my library card is functionally a license as opposed to an ID card
my old non-photo college ID card (I guess those are mostly photo "real forms of ID" now?). It was mainly used at the library and to pay for photocopies.
My temp drivers license when I was 15 until I passed my formal DL test had no "id" properties, it just gave me permission to drive with a parent in the car supervising me.
Functionally American drivers license functionality is merged with ID card functionality, as if any separation is impossible, but its certainly not required. None of the stuff you listed requires ID directly, although registration title transfer is gonna require the services of a notary, and the notary will demand an ID, or the DMV personnel could operate as notaries, ending up right where we started...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A credit check is increasingly becoming part of employment screening, and is entirely necessary for both renting and purchasing a home (unless buying the home for cash). Being homeless rises above "inconvenient."
Providing a social security number is also required to open a bank account, the lack of which is also a bit more than "inconvenient."
Actually it is forced on you. Just try going through your entire life without ever having credit pulled on you. Want a phone? Credit check. Internet? Credit check. Car insurance? Credit check. Rent an apartment? Credit check.
Or how about a job? Credit check.
None of these involve providing credit, and all of them are part of a normal responsible American lifestyle. Yet you still get a credit check.
Our ID card here in Portugal is a smartcard with a key pair. When connected to an appropriate reader, it can provide copies of the public key or sign stuff with the private key (without ever copying it to the machine).
You don't need a smartphone, a data plan or know what is a key pair or even that your card has one.
If you want to authenticate when physically present, just insert it in their reader and input the PIN (as said, the private key will NOT be copied out of the card, so it's safe).
If you want to authenticate online with it, you just need a $16 reader (available on big retail stores) which is supported by IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, using PKCS#11 or similar.
Again, no need to understand how it works - the follow the simple steps on the site.
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