Today's Washington Post has a page one article blaming online government databases for making identity theft so easy. (See "Online Records May Aid ID Theft.")As is often the case, the Post has hit the wrong target.
The problem--and it's a big one, with an estimated 8.3 million identity theft victims in 2005--is not the easy availability of people's social security numbers in various online databases. Rather, the problem is with the banks that issue credit cards and the credit agencies that facilitate the whole process.
Social security numbers were never intended to be used to issue credit cards. Those numbers are not designed to be kept secure, and as a practical matter, they can't. And one can hardly expect that with the automation of billions of records and the easy availability of such information in otherwise handy online services, that they would be kept secret.
Nonetheless, banks decided to make social security numbers the key to their credit card operations. Now that's it's clear that doing so poses a huge security risk and exposes millions of the banks' customers to expensive and time-consuming identity fraud scams, the BANKS should reform the system.
Yet, it's obvious the banks don't want to, having successfully passed on most of the costs of identity fraud to their customers. So CONGRESS should get in the act and force the banks to reform.
In any event, don't blame databases for the problem. Blame the banks.
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