Every American's Social Security number, address may have been stolen in hack
Hackers claimed to have stolen more than 2 billion records containing sensitive information including Social Security numbers, with some data reportedly leaked online.
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Yeah, the SSN system is the stupidest freaking thing ever for all the crap we use it for. but trying to implement a better system is met with cries of "GOVERNMENT OVERREACH, COMMUNISTS! OH GOD IN HEAVEN, MUH RIGHTS!!!1!". So....we haven't really done anything about it, and probably won't in my lifetime.
It's unfortunate that SSN has come to be used as a form of proof of existence as a person, but I'm glad at least that more effective means of formally tracking and quantifying us have been successfully fought back. Banks, governments, service providers and employers having some friction and uncertainty in whether their database entry accurately corresponds to you is itself a valuable form of privacy.
I've been reading the book Seeing Like A State and I think it has some pretty good points about how civic legibility and record keeping is established as a tool of centralized control and can be a dangerous double edged sword.
Any tool that is misused can be harmful, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. It just means you should regulate how it's used.
The tool is not the problem, the user is.
Well, partly. For instance you might be able to approach the problem of gun violence with a culture of responsible gun use. But it could also reduce violence if you got rid of the guns. The problem happens when multiple conditions are satisfied; both that the tool is available and that people are going to misuse it.
To quote an excerpt from the book I mentioned:
I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.
The other elements being "high-modernist ideology", an authoritarian state, and "a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans".
The problem is that, like with the guns example, "regulating how it's used" and avoiding all that stuff is a really precarious and difficult problem, and failure seems very likely, especially given the state of the US right now. For dangerous tools like effective identification schemes, I think favoring the added safety of resisting them is a legitimate choice when you can't really trust the people who would be able to use them.
Why do those numbers even exist? In my country we got ID cards and passports, plus some tax identifier that is used for social security and tax payments by our employer into the accounts, and that's that. All that's required for actual identification is a valid ID (including passport as long as you have a recent address registration). Their numbers change every 10 years, or you could apply to have it replaced earlier.
SSN isn't even meant to be used to verify identity, really. It's just supposed to be used to track people paying into the social security system. Somehow it got tied up in identity verification even though all it is is some essentially random number.
