U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: President's Identity Theft Task Force report out

We have yet another Strategic Plan to combat identity theft. Government likes issuing strategy papers. Unfortunately the tactics proposed are inadequate to protect ordinary Americans from hassles created by the sloppy data practices of the public and private sector. Identity theft is booming partly because it is a simple skill that can be taught to thieves still in short pants who are not destined to become rocket scientists. Until we improve consumer rights to compensation from the companies that lose our data to their simple schemes, the firms will continue to be negligent about protecting it better.

And while the government may be trumpeting the increased penalties recently enacted for committing "aggravated identity theft," I would note that recent news stories suggest that these penalties are being used more to threaten individual undocumented low-wage immigrants than to hold identity theft kingpins to account.

As I repeatedly told government officials in meetings and conference calls over the last 18 months of the development of the report, its failure to recommend adequate restrictions on private sector uses of Social Security Numbers means it won't work well. Further, despite the stunning record of over 40 state governments in enactment of security freeze and data breach identity theft protections since passage of the federal Fair and Accurate Transactions Act (FACTA) of 2003 (which allowed stronger state identity theft laws), the report refers to the usual pejorative "patchwork" of state laws and calls for uniform national standards to preempt stronger, or newer state security breach notification efforts. Even worse, nearly every such federal proposal I have seen would not only establish uniform national breach law standards, it would also broadly preempt other state privacy efforts. Proposing yet again to preeempt the states, and taking 50 important tools out of the democracy toolbox, shows that the conservative principle of federalism doesn't matter to this President.

For more on the government's position against stronger state law health and safety protections, see this brief commentary Safety Last by law professor David Vladeck in The Nation.