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5/25/2006: Identity theft?

The phrase "identify theft" continues to bother me the more it's tossed around. As we all know, it's come to mean theft of credit cards or various financial records, or the keys to those records such as social security numbers.

Since when has our credit information become our identity?

Sure, it's a pain to notify banks, credit card companies and other related parties if your numbers go missing, and even more of a pain to fix it all if someone's been spending by using your info. But is it really a matter of tracing and replacing your identity? I'd hope not.

Identity used to be defined - and should still be, in my opinion - by either stats or personality. Someone can't steal your physical stats - most are apparent to anyone who sees you walking down the street. Personalities might be stolen in the occasional movie plot, but in reality it's pretty rare.

So how and why did the thieving of financial info become termed "identity theft" rather than say, "credit theft"? It says a lot about our times and our society that "identity theft" is now a term in very common usage, and that everyone knows immediately that it regards financial information. It seems to indicate that we are now indeed defined by our finances and credit rating, and that's pretty sad.

And now there's a new flurry of worry as 26.5 million veterans' names and social security numbers have gone missing. This story sounded fishy from the start: a VA analyst was taking the information home - against the rules - and his computer containing the info was apparently stolen one day. The news leaked out via office gossip, and the VA office didn't notify anyone about it until they were questioned as a result of further gossip leaks two to three weeks later. Now the fact that they didn't make an immediate announcement of the alleged theft has become the focus of investigations, while vets are being told via the news media to "check their credit reports." That will just give the credit rating agencies a nice income boost as a few million people pay their $15 or whatever to see if something's going on with their accounts.

VA Secretary Jim Nicholson said today that the VA is leaving it to the news to get the word out because "We can't send 26 million letters simultaneously."

Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield, who'd been carting the records back and forth from office to home, didn't let his bosses know when his computer was stolen on May 3. Further, even though taking the information home was against the rules, he'd been doing it for three years. In any other job, a blunder caused by breaking an employer's rules that could possibly affect 26 million of the company's customers would have resulted in his being fired immediately. But things are different for government workers.. he's still on the payroll.

Meanwhile vets are up in arms about it and the news media is fueling the frenzy on a daily basis, even though the odds that any one individual's data will be used are pretty slim.. I think 1 in 26 million is about the same odds as winning the lottery. You take a bigger chance by handing your Visa card to a minimum wage waiter or clerk who walks off with it for processing.. but apparently that's not a worry compared to the VA issue, at least according to the media.

The black market sale of social security numbers is what the news has honed in on now. They claim social security numbers for sale on the internet are up 158% today over average, although they "can't confirm a direct link" to the missing vet info, adding it could take "6 months, a year, even two years" to sort it all out.

So if there are ways to measure the numbers of social security numbers being sold on the web, why aren't there ways to nail the sellers? Even Paypal requires true identity information for customers - meaning name, address, and so forth - and ISPs and website hosts obviously require the same in order to bill their customers. "We can't catch them all" is probably the official line for that question. I would have to ask, if it's such a huge problem, why don't they start one at a time?

Or maybe the whole veterans info theft story is a hoax of some sort, for some reason, to take our attention away from something else they don't want us to find out too much about. Call me a crackpot, but I feel the same way about threats that bird flu is going to kill everyone.