Thousands of people used it as their Social Security number, Liptz recounts. Exasperated SSA officials were left scratching their heads as they tried to locate and educate a long line of workers who were using the same wrong number. Earnings credits that could not be correctly matched ended up in a suspense file for uncredited earnings records. But privacy, not confusion, is the biggest citizen concern involving the SSN, say civil libertarians. Virtual identity theft occurs when someone takes over another person s account or opens a new one in another consumer s name.
Credit bureaus report thousands of calls per day relating to identity theft.
Nojeim warns of the paradox of the SSN s rapid transformation into a national identifier. Stephen Moore, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, warns of a growing fascination on Capitol Hill with national ID cards to address issues from deadbeat parents to illegal immigration to Medicare and Medicaid cheating to chronic bad drivers. It s a very dangerous trend, he says, because it clearly is an invasion of privacy rights that could be used as an instrument for evil. The SSN was used by the federal government during World War II to track down Japanese citizens for relocation to internment camps, he points out. From Dumpster diving, in which personal information is retrieved from discarded bills and statements, to stolen purses to mailbox pilferage, identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the United States, affecting more than 500,000 victims in 1997.