On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 07:26:53AM -0500, St. Clair, James wrote: > As long as somewhere along the way to this "totalitarian" government, we > figure a way to protect my identity from thieves in this country and the > outsourced credit offices in India and elsewhere. > > 750,000 complaints are expected concerning identity theft in 2003, far more > than the number of people who can expect "loss of liberty" under the patriot > act. Initial useful steps would be asking our elected representatives to try to follow the European Union's lead and enact useful privacy laws. The EU forbids personal data collected by companies in the EU to be exported to foreign companies in nations without similarly strict privacy laws. This would automatically prevent the outsourced credit offices in India. (Though it would likely only provide reasonably huge penalties for the recent New York case involving the identify theft of 30,000.. Hopefully, also for the idiotic company whose policy of not revoking old passwords when employees left the organization allowed this to happen.) It is my opinion that the Patriot Act is in direct opposition to useful privacy laws. So I'd argue that reversing the Patriot Act would be a necessary step to reducing identify theft. -- http://sardonix.org/
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