The Failure of the President’s ID Theft Task Force

On May 10th, 2006, President Bush signed an executive order to create an Identity Theft Task force in order to identify concrete steps to reducing the identity theft problem.

On Dec 26th, 2006, the task force put out a public call for comments

on ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of federal government efforts to reduce identity theft.

For the record, I responded with this article about implementing Credit freeze laws and halting data rape.

I was please to discover that the interim results of the task force included language about Credit Security Freezes! The problem is, the press release of the same doesn't.

I looked back into the data on their website and these recommendations were made long before their call for comments. Now that I know, I want someone to tell me why they took the language out in the first place, and if they plan to ignore my comments that they asked for.

Here is the relevant paragraph from the interim recommendations:

For residents of states in which state law authorizes a credit freeze, consider placing a credit freeze on their credit file.7 This option is most useful when the breach includes information that can be used to open a new account, such as SSNs. A credit freeze cuts off third party access to a consumer’s credit report, thereby effectively preventing the issuance of new credit in the consumer’s name.

This simply says what I've been saying all along, credit freezes are the best tool for preventing ID theft in the form of someone opening credit in your name. It all but makes it impossible for someone to do so! But they stripped this out!? What political horse hooey resulted in this?

Why won't the FTC, who has begin a massive consumer education initiative to help deter ID theft bother to publicly recommend THE MOST EFFECTIVE ANTI-ID THEFT TOOL AVAILABLE!?

How exactly is the FTC doing their job? Everyone cries and moans about ID theft with the veterans breach, the TJX breach, the IRS laptops, again, and again, and AGAIN!

And what's the normal response? Fraud alerts. Great. Now some comissioned salesman somewhere will be staring into the face of an identity theif who he's just spend two hours with selecting an extremely expensive and high paying home theater system as he runs their credit, see the fraud alert flag, thinks about it a moment, thinks, "The ID looks real enough, this is the right person", and then punches the GO button. That's oh SO effective in preventing ID theft.

Even better, I might get Credit monitoring for FREE! Well, whee! That's just great. Thanks for paying for my worthless monitoring service which will tell me in horrific real time that I'm being ripped off rather than actually do anything to stop it.

Meanwhile, we have the FTC's and the President's custom task force who recommended what people need to hear, but the information was supressed. Well, at least we now know for sure that neither the FTC or the President are actually interested in curbing Identity Theft.