Much of the push towards compulsory ID cards, and, in general, towards huge nationally co-ordinated databases of information of every imaginable sort about individual citizens, is based on the wholly fallacious belief among those with no direct knowledge of how these things work that the information in all these databases is automatically going to be correct. Not even a terrorist with million dollar back-up will be able to diddle his way around, say, a policeman demanding to see his “papers”.
It follows, then, that any newspaper story which reports that any such databases might be repositories not of truth but also of falsehood is, to use a favourite phrase of mine here, “White Rose Relevant”. In fact I may start calling it just “WRR” for short.
This story, then, from the New York Times, is very WRR indeed:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — About 3.3 million American consumers discovered within the last year that their personal information had been used to open fraudulent bank, credit card or utility accounts, or to commit other crimes, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s first national survey on identity theft.
The commission, in a report issued today, said these cases had collectively cost businesses $32.9 billion and consumers $3.8 billion.
In addition, 6.6 million people fell victim to account theft in the last year. Unlike identity theft, in which the criminal uses personal information to open and use accounts that are in the victim’s name, account theft entails using stolen credit or A.T.M. cards, or financial records, to steal from the victim’s existing accounts.
Such account-theft cases, the survey found, caused $14 billion in business losses and $1.1 billion in consumer losses. The vast majority of these cases, almost 80 percent, involved credit card fraud.
Though account theft and identity theft are often lumped together in popular perception, data from the survey showed that the consequences of identity theft were more severe. In identity theft, which accounted for nearly 10 million of the 27 million cases of both types in the last five years, the financial losses were greater, and it took victims longer to resolve the cases.
It is not just the fact of falsehood here. It is the scale of it. (Note the number of uses of the words “million” and “billion” in the above paragraphs.) Clearly, for certain sorts of people with certain sorts of friends, this kind of thing is not hard to do.
