Since I last blogged about the hacking outrage that allegedly took place in the backrooms of the News of the World newspaper, layers of the scandalous story have continued to be peeled back like a rather oily onion skin. Authorities now suspect that not only were the cell phone messages of celebrities, politicians and other public figures tapped, but, according to ibtimes.com, there were anywhere from 4,000 to “tens of thousands” of people who had their private digital information plundered.
And it’s looking like that single British tabloid may not have been the only news organization allegedly doing that sort of digital sneak-and-peek stuff. According to the Austrailian Broadcast Corporation, “Reports from the U.K. say investigators working for the Sun and The Sunday Times used hacking to obtain personal details about former prime minister Gordon Brown, even extending to the medical records of his son, who had cystic fibrosis.”
Now it’s easy to shake our heads at the Brits who went astray. But the fact is we can look around our own neck of the woods and find plenty of electronic privacy invasion and identity theft to fret over. Even as the News of the World story has trundled on, more and more statistics about our electronic vulnerability have started pouring forth. Summed up, those stats seem to be saying that each new “progressive” step we take exposes our soft information underbelly all the more.
When you carry your smartphone around, for instance, you are “essentially carrying a tracking device,” Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The New York Times. Turns out that the phones report back to the carriers and can potentially give digital voyeurs info on where you are, or have been, at any given time.
And how about that new credit card in your wallet? You know, the one with the electronic chip that lets you wave the card near a scanner and grab your coffee and danish in seconds rather than—well, a few more seconds? Now, according to foxprovidence.com, crooks with an inexpensive little gadget tucked away in a handheld folder can walk up next to you and snatch your credit info just as easily. And you don’t even have to take the card out of your wallet for a wave.
I could go on and on with these kinds of things for quite a while, but there was one surprising, not so little, stat that I really wanted to mention. Research company ID Analytics just released a report stating that as many as 140,000 identity frauds are perpetrated on children every year. That’s where someone slips into a family’s computer or electronic files, finds a kid’s Social Security number and starts running up bills in their names, without any connection or fear of ever having to pay it back.
The big kicker about this form of theft is that it can be an almost perfect crime, since the credit-granting system isn’t set up to verify the accuracy of ID info jotted down on an application. They just check the Social Security records and hand out the card. And the kid whose ID and name is being misused usually won’t find out about it until he or she turns 18 and wants to rent an apartment or something, only to realize that they mysteriously owe thousands to a collections company.
Imagine, 140,000 kids a year. It’s enough to make you flat-out growl. And the most frustrating thing about it is that guarding against the criminal element seems to get tougher and tougher. You can’t just lock all your doors, buy a big dog and sit on your front porch with an old man “don’t step on my lawn” grimace. It’s a whole new world. And we have to be diligent in new ways.
But here … I’ll give you one solid old man grimace for good measure.
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