A recent piece in the Washington Post described how researchers at Carnegie Mellon ("CMU") conducted a study in which they found that it is possible to guess many -- if not all -- of the nine digits in an individual's Social Security Number using publicly available information, great.
Now before the days of the Web I figured one could pull off the aforementioned. But 20 years ago or more, gathering the information one would need to piece a respective 9 digit number together appeared a challenging but ultimately, criminally uneconomical exercise.
However, the Web certainly appears to have made it easier to assemble the information needed to begin to successfully deduce the SSN of an unsuspecting victim or victims for villainous purposes. And of course this recent Carnegie Mellon study freely spells out the "recipe" for best employing the web to deduce most of the numbers of said SSNs and for identifying the remaining digits by "playing-the-numbers" with various credit application submissions.
Problem I have with all this is: Do I want to be reading about this "news" in a major -- or any -- publication?
My answer is definitely no!
Frankly, the fact that I am reading about it suggests that the Obama administration -- an administration that I admittedly voted for -- under-values the potential impact that the release of this information could have on the national security of the U.S.
Let's say I was a bad guy under the care and feeding of a power averse to the U.S. What if I took my time over the next year, allied with numerous other bad guys and together we correctly deduced millions of SSNs.
What if we then employed these SSNs for the purposes of opening millions of new credit accounts under the names of their rightful designates -- a year long, "long-game" process painstakingly undertaken to rattle U.S. consumer confidence. And what if "this" along with other nefarious financial activities set the stage for our foreign power's larger, still economy-focused attack on the U.S.
And what if our sponsoring power's larger, "short-game" "attack" violently, simultaneously struck all seat-holders on the NYSE, all NASDAQ operational centers, the floor of the Chicago Commodities exchange, the heart of Silicon Valley, and major universities supplying all the personnel working therein.
The rest of the international community would probably "button-up." And perhaps the U.K. would offer some snickering assistance to those it now termed its bedraggled "neo-colonists."
Of course, the U.S. would attempt to stealthily leverage its various military appendages in return for international "considerations" during its time of great, financial reconstruction. But alas, the better managed world would now potentially see the U.S. less as "policeman" and more as "unemployed-security-guard" -- a mere "bankrupt," "bully-for-hire"
But I digress.
Personally, I would have advised that the U.S. "sit on" the Carnegie Mellon study and that it similarly "sit on" all university or research organization activity of a similar nature for a period long enough to allow domestic, commercial interests to transition to use of a different identification system. And I certainly would have rewarded CMU and others research institutions for refraining from letting their studies see the light of day.
(I'd like to, however believe that the fact that CMUs report was released indicates that the U.S. is "ahead-of-the-game" enough to allow such a release to happen)
