It's not clear what the original source for the Social Security number was. Youens kept a Web site in which he detailed his plans to murder Boyer. But making credit headers private won't stop identity theft, investigators said. And it won't save lives. Most of the information in the header, or the information in other databases that it unlocks, already is public, she said.
Phone numbers are in the phone book.
If credit headers are shielded from the eyes of legitimate investigators, it will make finding people a lot more expensive, Mitchell Barnes said. There are other ways of finding people, he said, though he wouldn't elaborate. But they take longer and cost more. But he scoffed at the notion that the information is somehow sacred.