How We Have Managed to Turn the SSN into an SOS

Data Insecurity
Part 2
In a purely physical world, if you lost your wallet, and your Social Security card with it, you had a pretty good idea that something was amiss, and could report the loss and replace the card, if needed. Today, in a relentlessly electronic life, the Social Security Number is the nether world's primary passport to the mounting scourges of financial account takeover, ID theft, and fraud. How such a contradiction came to be can be explained, but never fully justified. And this country's inertia over abandoning the SSN in favor of a truly secure national ID threatens to undermine the very foundation of its financial security. The explanation begins in 1936, when the SSN was created for the sole purpose of accurately recording an individual worker's contributions to the Social Security fund. Even then, some of the public as well as legislators feared that the SSN would quickly become a tool by which the government would track down and control the action of its citizens. And so the first action of the new Social Security Board was to stipulate that the SSN was for its exclusive use. By 1961, it became the ID for all taxpayers. Through the 1960s and 1970s it became the basis for setups on many types of financial accounts?from credit cards to bank accounts to mortgages. The Department of Defense began to put SSNs on everything from dog-tags to mess-hall rosters. By the 1990s, the SSN was the primary identifier for four out of five health-care accounts, and they began to turn up on the ID cards of university students. Before long, reasoning that the convenience of online access to official records served the public's need for convenience, countless county clerks and recorders around the nation merrily began to put up documents on marriages, divorces, real estate transactions, and myriad other legal proceedings on local Web sites?without bothering with redacting SSNs. By 2007, list-brokering companies that used to sell data on prospective customers to magazine publishers had morphed into sophisticated trollers of such private and confidential information from public sources, ready to peddle their information to pretty much anyone who will pay for it. At recent hearings in Washington, D.C., on the ID theft problem, one such company presented a list of nearly 4 million SSNs gleaned from public sources, including those of more than a half dozen members of Congress! So today, the going rate for voluminously available, fully compromised IDs, including credit card information, a bank account, a home address?and the core SSN?is now $14 to $18 (according to Symantec). And for $1800, you can buy a copy of the “Death Master File,” with SSN-based private information on 60 million deceased Americans, directly from the Social Security Administration. We've created a world where most of the transactional accounts and identifiers that comprise our existence can be set up, accessed, and modified?often online?by mere provision of just this simple, nine-digit, not-necessarily-unique number, where only the last four digits are randomly generated (the first three indicate the state where the number was issued, and the middle two signify the order in which the SSN was issued in that area). Worse, once an account is taken over, today's schizophrenic privacy protections bedevil efforts of the legitimate holder to find out what's happening to it and reclaim its legitimate use! Can this be the de facto national ID for the world's richest and most technologically sophisticated nation? Sure, it beats the alternatives. Driver's licenses are obtainable from 50 different jurisdictions?often with minimal substantiation or cross-checking ability. Birth certificates are easily obtainable from more than 3,000 unaffiliated locations. And passports, which are based on the other IDs, are expensive and?increasingly?hard to get. Moreover, converting all these account-provider legacy systems to replace the SSN as the core identifier will cost a bundle. But there are also substantial costs for keeping the SSN in its current and unintended role. First, there are the mounting financial and psychological costs of dealing with the cascading numbers of victims of account takeovers. And at a minimum, we would have to move immediately to supplement its every use as an identifier with another method of corroborating account ownership?perhaps with hardware or software tokens online. So more and more security experts now say it's high time to change course and move to a true, purpose-built, secure national ID? one that decidedly is not tied to a financial account. The technology to pull this off?especially smart cards and biometrics?has been around for years, and we know it works. And most law-abiding consumers appear ready, willing, and able to go along. Defying this logic, a shrill chorus of privacy advocates has once again emerged to oppose a true national ID of any kind. Some seem just to echo the nation's historic paranoia over potential government snooping and intrusions, and counter that it might create other problems?such as compromised physical identities. Others claim a national ID would discriminate against illegal immigrants. Still others fear that a national ID (like automated toll-paying devices increasingly used in divorce cases to track errant spouses) will be used to track people's whereabouts.… So once again, good policy seems to get caught up in irreconcilable politics. But the stakes here are way too high now to debate ideology. The very essence of how we are represented in the ways we interact with the core activities of our lives is threatened to the quick without a true, secure national ID?one that provides the privacy we actually have to have, rather than the invisibility some would like to keep. –Steve Mott