Originally published July 26 2005
Identity theft: A history and a reality check
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
In an article for The New York Times, Joseph Nocera goes over the history of credit fraud and identity theft -- including great steps taken by Senator William Proxmire in the 1970s -- and gives a realistic overview of the situation we face today.
In the early 1970s, Senator William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat who was the scourge of the banking industry, decided something needed to be done about the chaotic state of the credit card business.
Credit cards were still relatively new, and all over the country, banks were peppering Americans with unsolicited cards --- sending them not only to the heads of households, but to their children, their dogs and their dead grandmothers.
Four years later, he pushed through another bill that limited consumer liability to $50 if a credit card were used fraudulently.
The current ''identity theft'' crisis --- in which we're learning, daily it seems, that large institutions like Bank of America, ChoicePoint, Citigroup and many others have allowed our personal financial data to be lost or stolen --- is fundamentally an outgrowth of our dependence on credit.
The vast majority of modern cases currently classified as identity theft are really just old-fashioned credit card fraud, easily dealt with.
In the end, it doesn't matter if the problem isn't new or the risk of being hurt by a data theft is small: the fear is palpable.
Is it any wonder that, according to recent surveys by both the Gartner Group and Forrester Research, the percentage of people who say they have stopped using the Internet to pay bills has risen substantially?
''When people ask me what can the average person do to stop identity theft, I say, 'nothing,''' said Bruce Schneier, the chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security.
''If we're ever going to manage the risks and effects of electronic impersonation,'' he wrote recently on CNET (and also in his blog), ''we must concentrate on preventing and detecting fraudulent transactions.'' And the only way to do that, he added, is by making the financial institutions liable for fraudulent transactions.
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