To Catch a Mockingbird This is where it gets tricky. In attempting to express my disdain for those cretins who engage in identity theft, I fear I may cross some line or other - the kinds of lines which always seem to be drawn more clearly and sharply under Republican rule. The barnacled edges of the First Amendment are nothing new around here, and I have the scars to prove it. Identity theft, though, is a tremendous problem in the United States, and in Arizona more so than in most other states. We've all read the horror stories about how the blue-collar (and even the white-collar) set has been burned time and time again. You know, some scavenger pilfers your information from your mailbox or garbage can, or you get suckered into giving up too much information on a website that isn't clean, or... Just as there are so many ways of assuming another's financial wardrobe, there are also more uses for a spare identity than one might initially think. To their credit, the banking industry hasn't been too awful about helping torched consumers get off the hook for purloined debts; it is the insecurity (not to mention the hassle) involved with identity theft that can be so unsettling. As usual, law enforcement agencies and the politicians that write their playbooks have been a bit slower on the uptake than the banks have been. For all the gusty rhetoric out there, that remains the case, and so there is still plenty of reason to fear identity theft and the sticky web in which anyone can suddenly find themselves entangled. I witnessed my first case of identity theft in college. It actually wasn't a theft, but a loan. One of my roommates (no names, now, because the perpetrator in this case probably reads this column) was just a bit anxious to reach the ripe old age of 21 before his time. It's understandable. So he got ahold of another roommate's birth certificate and Social Security card and toddled off to the Department of Motor Vehicles, which issued him someone else's drivers license with his picture on it. This empowered him to buy beer, which helped him get through school. The system worked flawlessly until he ran into a store clerk who happened to know the other roommate well enough to realize that the pending transaction was nothing short of fraud. This is a perfectly benign and totally harmless example of how easy it is to slip into someone else's skin. While it smarts to have some crook racking up the retail in your good name, there are more worrisome scams afoot. Your identity is much more useful to a common criminal than that. Suppose someday you get stopped for a traffic or equipment violation, and the peace officer discovers that you have a warrant or two, or three, or more, because some louse has been forking over your ID every time he or she posts bail. Or suppose someone who can't legally obtain a job gets one under your SSN, and doesn't pay any of the taxes. Whose problem is that? Moreover, a thief can walk into any hospital in America with stolen credentials and rack up the kind of medical bills that would make Bill Frist blush. Maybe those who are owed can make allowances for criminal activity, but what about the stone-hearted bastards at Experian and other credit reporting bureaus? In short, identity theft is a nightmare, one worthy of the government waging war against it. But we don't see that. Like I said, this is where it gets tricky. I should pose this idea to you as a work of fiction, but instead I offer it up as a raw piece of American meat. As bad as this is, it demonstrates that broken laws result in sharp edges on which anyone may be cut. If someone is running around with a stolen identity, the aggrieved could simply hunt down and do away with the thief, and nobody would know about it. It's not so hard a vision to conjure up. Just because the cops won't track these con artists down doesn't mean it can't be done. A teenage girl in Great Britain caught an identity thief in a chat room, for Pete's sake. It can't be that hard to do. Somewhere out there in the world is the next Bernard Goetz, just waiting to be robbed. The self-justified killer could leave the gun right at the scene, registered in his own name, because it's not just his name anymore. It would look to the cops like the bad guy had committed suicide with a gun he had just purchased under false pretenses. Why not? It's the shortest distance between two points. Case closed. Chilling effect imposed. It's a chance the lawbreakers take. They don't think about those who they've hooked. They don't know the victim before electing to walk in his or her shoes. They don't care, and they are not alone in their apathy, which is why the opportunity exists in the first place. The American people are largely left to their own devices in fighting identity theft. It may well take a village to kill a mockingbird. Paul Heller 9/26/05 << back to the archives
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