D4, HW3, Draft WP#1

Jared Zucker
9/20/2007
WP#1

Identity Theft

Identity theft is an uprising crime, perhaps some of you have been victims of it. In the early 90’s it wasn’t too uncommon to get mugged walking down the street, having your driver’s license stolen, a couple of credit cards, or maybe even your Social Security Card if you were gutsy enough to carry that on you. In today’s society, this has gone even a step further; identity theft over the internet is vastly becoming one of our most common crimes. Family members of mine have been victims of identity theft, much like most of yours probably have been as well.

My research question: What can the U.S. Federal Government put in place to aid in the fight of identity theft?

The only way to truly fight crime, is by putting in place some sort of restriction here and there. This is where the true controversy comes into place. Some people would rather things such as the internet be practically on lockdown than have to really worry about crimes like identity theft over the internet. Others would rather the U.S. Government leave the internet alone because it is all a form of freedom of speech and should not be regulated. So, what should the U.S. Government do? This is where the controversy gets twisted and complicated.

A school I was doing a work program through ended up getting burglarized in the middle of the night. Some of their computers were stolen and were some broken windows. The computers that were stolen had all the personal information of many students, I was one of them. My social security number was stolen, and now I have to have an ongoing fraud alert on my credit report. My brother-in-law was mugged in Los Angeles once, where his whole wallet was stolen. Ten years later, he has a maxed out credit card of $25,000 spent in a state he has never even been to, where the person even had a cell phone in his name. It took him over a year to get everything cleared out and to prove he had been a victim of identity theft. When my parents first moved out here, they also became victims. The investigation took almost three months, and during this time their checking account had to become frozen since that is where the theft was from. My father had direct deposit from his work, and with all his money in his checking account, he was left with nothing until his next pay day which could not be direct deposited because the account was frozen. You can see how this can create an instant hard ship and is never fun to go through. This also passed and was fixed.

Even though the controversy, I feel the government has to take action and step in. If we were to let the internet not be regulated, we would have even more crimes than we do, ones not even linked to identity theft. There is always a new story out about child molesters trying to meet new young girls online or something of that sort. If not for the government stepping in on situations like that, the number would be even greater. We need to have a happy median of the government getting involved but also staying back, however we are far from that point as of right now.

My audience will be the U.S. Government, in hopes that they will be able to see what changes need to be taken care of so we can get closer to stopping these criminal acts.