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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KyrosL who wrote (4944)	3/22/2006 12:58:18 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 219950

On your next trip to the United States, you'll have to explore the steps needed to apply for credit. Regardless of what security features your favoured ID has, the credit granter merely wants you to write in the number of that secure. There is no one looking over your shoulder or asking to authenticate your highly secure ID. All I need is your ID number, I don't need to even know what you look like. I can write down the number of your highly secure ID onto my application for a home equity loan or a credit card as easily as you do, with my Rent-a-box address, and then sign your name and mail it in. I'll be able to obtain credit in your name, even though I don't have your secure ID with your full-body x-ray digitally encoded into its memory with a confirmatory copy of your DNA. You imagine this magic highly secure ID card with flashing lights and siren will protect you from identity theft, but it clearly will not. The only thing that will protect you from identity theft is a change in the law placing the loss for lending to someone else using your identity squarely on the lender. The very moment that law goes into effect, lenders will take the reasonable care needed to make sure they are lending to the right person. Even for those applications where a national ID would be helpful, all security is hackable. The security for the latest smart chip Visa cards has been broken, leaving Visa with major problem even before the card has been widely introduced. A secure national ID would likely secure the nation against people playing harmless pranks - those sort don't have the time and resources needed to break the security. But the national ID card security would fail when faced with terrorists, spies, and people intending to commit major financial frauds who have the motivation and resources needed to counterfeit the needed cards. Naiveté is not a successful approach to security. A "highly secure" national ID card will provide a windfall for the vendors supplying these services to the nation, but will provide Americans with little other than false security. When I had a problem with ID theft, my postman swiped one of my 1099 forms from a bank account. This contained my social security number, name, and address, and the added information that I had $100k in that account. With this information alone they applied for a home equity loan, credit cards, and cell phone accounts. My highly secure ID would not have prevented this. The bank didn't even bother to check to see if the property they were lending on was in my name - it wasn't. P.S. -- My postman and his accomplice are in prison, with my compliments. .