Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID?

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Wed, 23 May 2007 11:21:40 CDT, Brian Loe said:
> Your SSN and mother's maiden name is so entrenched in the "security"
> of our financial institutions that it practically invites fraud.

Granted.  Notice that in fact, this is a *huge* problem and totally orthogonal
to the illegal alien problem.

> http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:YnR2EMUph6sJ:www.consumer.gov/idtheft/pdf/gao-d02830t.pdf+identity+theft+illegal+aliens&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Unfortunately, I'm dense.  I tried to read it, and I saw a lot of text that
read "there's a lot of identity theft of various forms, and we're not sure of
how much there is", and lots of "we've caught lots of illegals using forged
papers and similar" - but I'm totally failing to find anyplace where anybody
was willing to make a statement of the form "Over NN% of identity theft seems
to be driven by illegal aliens and the criminal enterprises that supply the
illegals with documents".

A moment's thought will show that *forged* documents are probably of more
interest than identity *theft*, and conflating the two does neither problem
justice. If you're an illegal Mexicano trying to buy a car, having fake
documents with your own name on them are likely more useful than documents that
say 'Sven Olafson' or 'Timothy Attenborough'.

So yes, there's a lot of identity theft. And yes, illegals will try to get
hold of forged documents.  But my question still stands - how big a chunk of
the former problem is the latter problem?   Is 2% of identity theft caused
by illegals?  20%?  75%?

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