Loophole Ends the Privacy of Social Security Numbers
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This wouldn't be a bad thing if we didn't also use the SSN as proof of identity. Numbers as "usernames" for individuals are fine. But they should not also serve as "passwords." That particular cat is already out of the bag. The list of people who know or have access to your social security number includes dozens of bank personnel, medical professionals, standardized testing agencies, previous employers, and government employees. It is entirely possible for malicious actors, given any other personal identifier (a unique full name, or any full name plus address), to find the associated social security number.
We simply cannot expect any SSN - let alone its last 4 digits - to be known only by the person to which it was issued.
That last part is the part that keeps me up at night.
And, of course, SSNs are already a de facto national ID system. It just happens to be one that wasn't designed for ID purposes, and so it's very suboptimal (but any government abuses you could do with a proper ID, you can also do with SSN).
I used to respect this, but as time has passed, I think crooks and scammers get more benefit out of the lack of ID than most of the public gets out of these rudimentary guards. Anyone remotely serious (nation-states and bigcorps) can ID me if they want.
I laminated my card because it was flimsy. It's still OK over 40 years later. My card has the following words on it:
FOR SOCIAL SECURITY
AND TAX PURPOSES --
NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION
Yes you are right. That ship sailed way back in 1972 when the SSA removed those words.[1]
The only way to stop the practice is issuing a more convenient identification.
https://faq.ssa.gov/link/portal/34011/34019/Article/3786/Can...
Back in the old days there were no security features. The name was hand typed onto the card. Here's an earlier example than mine, note that the text at the bottom is different: http://www.elvispresleymusic.com.au/pictures/img/elvis/50s/5...
Can any of you young whippersnappers (whatever that means!) tell me who that person was? :)
That's the thing. I understand why that was the prevailing mode of thinking back in 1930s (?) when SSN was first introduced. There were plenty of people without any form of ID back then.
But it's just not so today. Vast majority of people in US have some form of ID, and it is extremely difficult to impossible to do even the most basic things (like, say, getting a job) without some form of ID. Even if there was some valid reasoning behind the desire to not have ID, this ship has sailed decades ago.
The best that can be done now is to acknowledge the actual situation for what it is, and fix the bureaucracy and overhead of dozens of different incompatible IDs. Have one national photo ID, with a guaranteed unique identifier, prominently featuring citizenship / green card status, and with a chip providing crypto for signing purposes and guaranteed secure communication with the government (say, submitting tax returns). Issue and re-issue it for free, using some existing federal government owned infrastructure - USPS seems like the most obvious choice here. Make all federal agencies use this ID for all purposes that require it - taxes, social security, immigration (i.e. replace green cards with it) etc.
States can do whatever they want with their own IDs, but I suspect that most would simply reuse national ID numbers on their driver licenses, concealed carry licenses etc. That would conveniently make all those IDs readily substitutable for most practical purposes.
I also don't see a national ID as a privacy thing in and of itself. It creates a record of you that the government has - sure, but so does your birth certificate (or immigration paperwork for naturalized citizens). The potential violations of privacy begin when government starts demanding ID for activities that didn't require it before, or even just for regular spot checks. But that is a different fight.
But it's worth mentioning that organizations from the ACLU (which I support) to Rand Paul are on the other side of this issue:
https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/r...
http://thehill.com/regulation/legislation/306969-rand-paul-a...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/08/03/...
Voter ID, by itself, is not racist, classist, or anything. It is a reasonable and prudent measure to ensure that only those eligible to vote can vote. We can argue whether it's really necessary or not based on how much voter fraud there is in practice, but if you do have a national ID anyway, there's no particular reason not to use it for voting.
The problem with US voter ID laws is that they are not coupled with an actual national ID system, and instead rely on existing IDs, which aren't free. On top of that, the laws are written in such a way, and also combined with other policies (e.g. closing DMVs that issue IDs in certain areas), so as to make vote suppression a deliberate side effect. It is entirely possible to implement voter ID without such side effects, though.
Even on the assumption that everyone has the moral right to vote, and that therefore the check you mention is a crime against humanity, voter ID is still an important and prudent measure to ensure that people vote no more often than they're supposed to.
To some extent, this is symbolic. In most developed countries, and especially in US, resident non-citizens - especially permanent residents - have most of the legal and economic rights and the advantages enjoyed by citizens. Political rights, including right to vote, is one of the few things that are reserved for citizens alone. If it is to mean something, ensuring that it is only exercised by those who have it makes sense, even if you don't actually catch any miscreants - you could consider it an honor guard of sorts. But, by the same logic, it is crucial that those who do have the right to vote can exercise that right.
If a state wants to show that it isn't, then make changes that make the number unsuited to being a national ID number. Let people pick their own number or reduce it to a 4 digit number.
I'd want to read the actual decision because on face value, this seems ridiculous. Basically every agency can just get around the Privacy Act saying "uh child support!". It should be up to the child support or taxation authorities to go around and find people not paying and deal with them appropriately.
Unfortunately, especially with people used to modern databases, I don't think many people are used to thinking that the government's job should sometimes be a bit more difficult.
LOOK AT YOUR DL from your state, does it show your SSN?
In some USA States we still can have our SSN not listed on our DL in some other states we cannot
But rest assured that every state will attempt to maintain such a link, and will sell access to it for the right price. That's why you should treat every request for your driver's license number as a request for your social security number, even though it is probably not governed by the privacy protection laws as it might be if the request was for a SSN directly.
IMHO, the idea that it's a secret number has been shot for years now. Fretting over who can find your SSN is pointless because the answer is anybody. It's ok as long as you don't give any special privileges to someone just because they know another person's SSN. It's no more special than your full name.
Well, I didn't _have_ to; the gentleman asked me for a single proof of residence and my SSN. When I said "I don't want to give out my SSN, you can't ask for that as ID" he replied, "yes, you're correct. In that case I'll need three proof of residence documents from this list and two identification documents from this other list".
I had a passport, a mortgage and a phone bill so I just caved and gave him my SSN.
Of course. You're right.
My point still stands though. It is a federal ID number and I don't really get the opposition to it (other than the religious objection).
If the feds want to deny that it's an ID number, they should take steps to ensure that no number is linked to a single individual.
Read some history of how national ID was used and abused by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to find reasons other than (but also including) religion as the basis for objection.
My big objections with SSN is that they are a quasi-secret thing. They are the key to so many things yet they really are public.
The Wikipedia article makes the same point as the parent poster: "the Social Security number has become a de facto national identification number".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Exhaust...
http://www.witn.com/home/headlines/Duplicate__111371029.html
- People born in various New England states have social security number overlap with number ranges issued by the social security systems in Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall islands. Those territories get services from Federal programs which causes issues.
- EINs and SSNs are issued by different departments and can overlap. People in various scenarios will provide the number in the wrong context.
- Millions of people use the wrong SSN without fraudulent intent.
- People frequently and fraudulently use the SSNs of children and older people.
- Hundreds of thousands/low millions of people have multiple valid SSNs.
- 40,000 people used a real SSN included as a sample in a wallet in the 1930's.
- Some populations have a higher incidence of mistakes, fraud, multiple valid SSNs or other problems. One dataset that I was acquainted with had IIRC a 7% known exception rate for SSNs.
Remember that there are 320M US citizens with all sorts of improbable stories. You have people born abroad, native americans on isolated reservations, people born at home or with irregular birth certificates, people with scummy parents committing fraud in their child's name, etc.
When New York implemented facial recognition on IDs, over 100 people were arrested for having multiple driver's licenses. Stuff happens!
Add in the fact that some not-as-rare-as-you-would-hope people can have multiple SSNs and you just can't say for certain "this SSN means this person".
SSA may say numbers don't get reused, but that is a straight up lie and they know it. I've seen it happen in databases I've ran. Dead people occasionally get their SSN reissued.
Off hand I don't have a source I can cite on that, only that in past job (mostly health care claims) I've been involved with some quite hard work to ensure not to build systems that use an SSN as a individual ID as much because there are some very weird edge cases out there, especially if you have old, dirty, and/or large enough datasets, as because it's not a good idea in the first place to rely just on SSNs for anything other than a Tax ID.
I don't know which is worse: The cock-up that is the Real ID Act or the stupidity surrounding the SSN being a de facto ID number for anything and everything.
And because of that design decision, some states were fairly close to running out of SSNs: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html
Today, SSNs are randomized: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html
Considering the numbering system was created in the 1930s, their idea of what constitutes a unique, private (i.e. hard to remember) number is a bit less relevant today.
Enumerating and precisely identifying citizens is the basis of mass surveillance. For most every societal use, a name and a birthday is good enough identification. Individuals should not be perfectly legible to the government, because then the rulers are further tempted into demanding that reality conform to their whims.
Of course now that government-cum-computer has entrenched and precessed, there are many areas where precise identification will help preserve one's rights. If one shared a name and birthdate with a wanted criminal, they certainly would want to be distinguishable!
But such situations are really due to the system asserting that its abstractions are airtight. For example if someone applies for credit in my name, the crime that has occurred is fraud and I am not involved. But the system (within-abstraction) diagnoses the situation as me being a victim of "identity theft", transferring blame to the individuals affected by its own shortcomings! Further cementing the abstractions further strengthens belief in them, making these failure modes even harsher.
Another practical problem in the US is that the government fails to prohibit the use of such identifiers for private purposes, under a half-applied theory of private contract (or really just money talks). So we end up with the double-edged sword of the free market combined with a government mandate, which destroys individuals' sole power of exit versus otherwise unaccountable corporate entities.
Plenty of people want the program gone. Nobody's going to say it in public if they want to get elected, though.
I think that the GP was referring to national ID.
https://faq.ssa.gov/link/portal/34011/34019/Article/3821/Are...
The syntax around the requirements creates ambiguity but:
"Meet the following requirements: Be a member of a recognized religious sect conscientiously opposed to accepting benefits under a private plan or system that makes payments in the event of death, disability or retirement, or which makes payments towards the costs of or provides for medical care (including the benefits of any insurance system established by Social Security); Be a member of a religious sect that makes a reasonable provision of food, shelter and medical care for its dependent members and has done so continuously since December 31, 1950;..."
By my reading, the first bullet point would mean that you couldn't be involved in any health insurance plans. The second bullet point seems completely arbitrary; that the sect must have been active since 1951?
There's absolutely no disgrace about the SSN system: it did the job quite well decades before the invention of the computer. The disgrace is that no system has come to replace it in the last 80 years.
The US Post Office sent out a RFC suggesting that they're contemplating a national-identity system btw, complete with PKI infrastructure and cryptographic proofs. They're probably the best agency to verify the identities of millions of Americans (any American with a home / post office address can be verified by a Post Office employee).
But that's all speculation. I don't recall any news suggesting that the US Post Office has actually been approved to roll out this hypothetical identification system. (But honestly, I do think its a good idea and would support such an initiative)
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In any case: Social Security Numbers aren't a problem. We all need to be tracked by the social security system so that we get benefits.
The problem is that every government agency is using SSNs as if they were good identifiers. I mean, yeah, its good for the government to "save money" here and recycle the Social Security Administration's hard work in listing all American Citizens. But this is definitely an area of the Government where I'd prefer more money were spent on a "proper solution", as opposed to the minor cost savings of centralizing it all on the shoulders of the Social Security Administration.
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Repurposing the US Post Office would serve multiple purposes:
* The US Post Office has been downsizing recently. IE: Lost jobs, fewer benefits, losing money. Etc. etc. If the US Post Office took on more work and did something essential in today's computer-based society (aka: if they were the gatekeepers of a National-identity PKI certificate), it'd give all those Post Office workers a job in an age of declining snail-mail.
* Very large agency with a staff who specializes in physical contact with a huge number of Americans. There are very few agencies that have the size, scale, and connectivity of the US Post Office.
* A PKI-based national identity certificate would replace SSNs as the national identifier of choice. With proper security / proper certificate handling, it would be significantly safer than SSNs. Proof through physical access + identifiers (ie: Government-issued ids, like Passports + Drivers Licenses) is a solved problem with the Post Office. Post Office employees are regularly trained to verify Birth Certificates, Drivers Licenses, Passports and so forth. They know how to verify identities physically.
So much this. Especially with all the data breaches knowledge of an SSN has become meaningless. The practice of taking it as an identifier should be outlawed. It's time people start suing the organizations that enable identity theft by practicing this.
It would if one would require a Post Office employee to be present whenever an identity has to be verified, but in practice, people would have a passport or identity card with a photo/fingerprint/DNA scan.
The only effect might be that the Post Office will have to handle more ID cards, but even that is doubtable, as almost everyone already has a driver's license, passport, or similar.
And who would verify the passport's authenticity? That takes training.
Every state has a different drivers license format: including watermarks and other security features. Post Office Employees in Texas will know how to read the Texas Drivers License (but not necessarily one from New York).
Valid documents for identity include: * Birth Certificates (differs from state to state) * Most Drivers licenses (differs from state to state. Some states are not federally valid forms of ID btw) * Passports * Social Security cards (uuuhhhhh... we probably should stop this one) * etc. etc.
The same way you verify ID now: for low risk (relative to your business) things, you judge a person and the quality of whatever piece of paper they present, for slightly higher risk, you limit that to a set of more official documents you recognize (say passports and driver's licenses of nearby states), for more official things, you go to a notary.
I fail to see what group of transactions falls between "It is OK to follow common sense and your gut w.r.t. the validity of the documents someone presents to check identity" and "you have to go to a notary" that visiting a post office would cater for.
"Every state has a different drivers license format: including watermarks and other security features. Post Office Employees in Texas will know how to read the Texas Drivers License (but not necessarily one from New York)."
So, post office workers, at least currently, cannot help solve that problem.
A nation-wide ID that almost everybody can show would help there, but it also would make people more familiar with recognizing it, decreasing the probability that one will think "I need help handling this kind of ID"
Also, a decent modern nation-wide ID could have electronic ways for relative laymen to verify it, for example a chip that allows one to query 'does this passport ID go with this name/city of birth/photo?'
TLDR: how often is the desire to verify identity so great that it warrants visiting a post office or paying a post office employee to visit you?
You pay post-office once for a $100 PKI-based certificate / smartcard with strong federally mandated identification regiments.
From there on out, the smartcard serves as your national identity, and can be used for like 10 years on any smartcard compatible system.
That's the kind of system I'm envisioning. The Post Office won't visit every single time you use the card, you visit the post office once every 10 years.
With 300 million Americans, that still 30-million hard identity checks per years. That would require an agency of massive size.
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And to answer your question: every time you use a SSN for identification (applying for a job, opening bank accounts, etc. etc.) would be a time to use this PKI-based smartcard verified by the US Post Office.
Back in the day, your student ID at California State schools was your SSN. It was on your ID card, which you had to present to do anything at the school.
I suppose ideal final state would be some combination of a cryptographic certificate and a rotating security token ala RSA SecurID. The token is enough to verify that you possess the certificate, but has no unique value in-and-of itself.
The big problem is that the SSN is completely, utterly a bad idea in the 21st century, but nobody is working on a superior replacement because things aren't "that bad yet".
When I read that The Hackers have my SSN again I'm not really that worried having lost count.
But if we had a Federally issued Secure ID, when (not if) that got hacked I would worry a lot.
Not so great an example of secret information …. TFA is useless, I think, unless you are allowed to pick the question. (Or, of course, you can give site-specific nonsense answers to repeated questions, but most people don't do that.)
Secret questions are still just something you know, therefore not a second factor from passwords. Secret questions are often worse than two factor because they also violate the "only you" part of the security factors by often asking mostly the equivalents of public record information making them generally only about as useful as tertiary usernames/IDs. (Which is why the advice these days is to treat them as passwords and give them pseudo-randomized phrases, unconnected to actual answers of the stated question.)
You are right. I was going along with what I perceived as my parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509768 )'s identification of 'secret' questions with TFA, but I shouldn't have. Thank you for the correction.
(Also, although surely there aren't many such people around here, for anyone who doesn't get your reference: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/WishItWas-TwoFactor- .)
Decisions of which law supersedes another are more often than not up to judges, and sometimes juries, in cases like this. Other laws can be written which try to settle the questions, too, but by and large it's the court cases which settle precedent.
This is why who gets to be a judge is such an important question. At the end of the day, the decisions of individual people who are judges can hold an incredible amount of power... and so long as their decisions are well reasoned (or well rationalized)... they can determine how we can live (or not live) our lives.
(edited for clarity)
So the more specific rule of "States may ask for SSN's for tax purposes" would override the general rule of "States may not ask for SSN's". And the exception was presumably enacted after the general rule, since otherwise there would have been no need to make an exception.
I think you might enjoy:
THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW
The SSN is a username, not a secret password. I fail to see how it can be more of a privacy concern that authorities (or other people) know your SSN, than that they know your middle name?
We would be better off if we stopped pretending there is any form of federalism here as the states contribute nothing to the aggregate whims of the national government as it continues to tolerate their mentally challenged courts, useless evolving body of opaque case law, and patch work of redundant executive departments. Literally the only things states do is adversely affect interstate commerce.
The national government has complete leverage over every state, and will just as well sanction any one financially just as fast as it would sanction a foreign nation state, when it becomes interested in an outcome such that the 10th amendment is null and moot.
The consequences, politically, are very minimal, as these bankrupt states are reliant on the teet of the national government that long ago granted itself the authority to regulate all nuances everywhere.