Today, AG Gonzales and FTC Chairman Majoras held a press conference, reporting on the progress of the ID Theft task force. The probably most interesting takeaway for me was the fact that the DoJ is creating a dedicated federal ID Theft Law Enforcement Agency. This agency will focus on ID crimes, especially cases of mass ID Theft. Along with this comes legislative initiiatives that will adjust current law to the challenges that those new crimes pose and also require federal agencies to discontinue the use of social security numbers, where possible.
This is really interesting, especially in the context of privacy and government agencies. Take the RealID act for example: in its current form and planned implementation it will aggregate a lot of consumer/citizen data in central repositories. From a privacy perspective this is not exactly ideal, especially when there are no explicit provisions in the law about protecting privacy. With the new ID Theft TF mandates itseems quite reasonable to review the current plans for the RealID implementation.
I have a little video of the press conference that I will post later.
tag: Identity Theft, FTC, Identity