Hardly a day goes by without a new hacking or computer intrusion news story. (On the day of this writing, the Albany Times Union reports the Postal Service was hacked, potentially compromising employees’ Social Security numbers and other confidential data).1 Any reader who has not yet had a credit card compromised should start taking a more careful look at their statements, because it won’t be long before it happens. The statistics on financial losses from personal identity theft are truly astonishing—in 2012, 16.6 million people experienced such theft in the United States, with financial losses of $24.7 billion. This was over $10 billion more than the combined losses from all the other property crimes measured in the National Crime Victimization Survey.2
The FBI provides urgent warnings, noting that identity thieves exercise extraordinary ingenuity to obtain personal information, running the gambit of dumpster diving, old-fashioned theft, “phishing” schemes, and other forms of high-tech online hacking.3 There are existing statutes that public court filings not include Social Security numbers,4 but court files remain a logical trove for identity thieves, because they contain so much detailed information on the parties and others.
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