JUSTICE
: Crime & Scandal | March 21, 2006
BACKED
BY
BIG
MONEY,
CONGRESS
MAY
GUT
IDENTITY
THEFT
LAWS
By
Douglas Drenkow, Editor of "Progressive
Thinking"
As
Posted in DailyKos,
OpEdNews,
Comments
From Left Field, and BarryTalk
and to be Published by Core Media Group
As I sit here writing
this, my ATM/Debit Check card (from a bank of America that shall remain
nameless) has been blocked. After receiving the official notice a few days
ago, I hurriedly made other arrangements for my automatic payments, as for
the Internet service I used to research this article and email it to my
editor; modern life runs on digital money.
Of what crime was I
guilty, to receive such punishment? I had the gall to claim an identity.
Apparently, my account (and God only knows how many more) "may have been
compromised at a third-party location." I am reassured that my card is
covered by "both zero liability and next day refunds guaranteed credit"
(subject to dollar limits) but I am also told to carefully review my "statements
and report any unauthorized transactions" ... although I may be (and
indeed am) "temporarily unable to access Online Banking" (The last time
something like this happened, three years ago, I caught the problem online
before the bank did, and before the rent check bounced ... and I bounced
out on the sidewalk). I await my new card, said to arrive within five
business days ... as of a week ago.
Sound familiar? Odds
are you or someone you know has suffered the same or worse fate. According
to the Federal Trade Commission, there are nearly 10 million identity
theft victims each year; that’s about 19 every minute! Far from a
victimless crime, identity theft costs the businesses, financial
institutions, and consumers of America billions of dollars a year.
Earlier this year, the
FTC levied the largest civil penalty on record -- a $10 million fine plus
a $5 million restitution fund -- on ChoicePoint,
a "data broker," or credit-reporting service, used by over 50,000
merchants and landlords for credit checks on potential customers and
tenants: In 2005, ChoicePoint became the poster child for lax identity
protection, by allowing an organized ring of identity thieves to gain
access to over 160,000 personal records; hundreds of individuals became
victims of identity theft.
Remember, too, that the
9/11 hijackers left behind piles of credit cards in their rooms; identity
theft is a weapon of choice -- a "weapon of mass financial destruction" --
for Al Qaeda terrorists worldwide.
So naturally, the
federal government must be doing everything in its power to crack down on
this crime wave, this threat to national financial security, to ease the
burden upon us innocent victims of this crime that has turned countless
lives upside-down (To paraphrase the Bible, it’s easier to pull a camel
through the eye of a needle than it is to restore bad credit).
Don’t bank on it.
The ChoicePoint debacle
was brought to public attention not by some federal regulation but by the
strict identity theft laws here in California, which call for notifying
victims of almost any breaches in security -- not just those that the
financial institutions themselves determine to be "reasonably
likely to result in substantial harm or inconvenience to the consumer" (as
the
new federal legislation would mandate) -- and which freeze the
accounts of potential victims: As a representative of the Consumers
Union has said, "We
shouldn’t have to wait until an identity thief has already bought a
Lexus in your name in order to have the right [to] protect yourself."
The same sort of strict
reporting requirements and account freezes are found in the
anti-identity-theft laws in several other states that will be gutted
like a dead fish by the legislation that was just voted out of
committee last week by the House Committee on Financial Services.
And to me, that stinks
like a dead fish. Actually, it is the smell of money, and lots of it.
In particular,
according to the
Center for Responsive Politics, fourteen of the twenty members of the
House who receive the most campaign contributions from the commercial
banking industry -- whose interests are not served by letting the public
know their security has been breached, let alone by making good on the
losses -- serve on the House Committee on Financial Services: Eleven
Republicans, including the Chairman, Michael G. Oxley (R-OH), and three
Democrats.
And the six remaining
House members out of the top twenty getting the largest contributions from
the commercial banking industry are hardly ill-placed to influence
legislation: In addition to Henry Bonilla (D-TX), the first Hispanic
Republican elected to Congress from Texas, the big bank money goes to
Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Speaker of the House; Roy Blunt (R-MO), House
Majority Whip; Tom DeLay (R-TX), indicted former House Majority Whip; Eric
Cantor (R-VA), Chief Deputy Majority Whip; and David Dreier (D-CA),
Chairman of the House Rules Committee.
In particular, the
Rules Committee is notorious for keeping legislation from reaching the
floor of the House, in what longtime observers have found to be the most
partisan chokehold on the democratic process in memory. As the
Boston Globe reported in its groundbreaking investigation in October
of 2004 (and things have gotten only worse), "the Rules Committee, the
all-powerful gatekeeper of the Republican leadership, ... has sidelined
legislation unwanted by the Bush administration, even when a majority of
the House seemed ready to approve it."
But who would want this
current legislation, H.R. 3997 (identical to S.2129, in the Senate),
laughingly called the "Financial
Data Protection Act of 2005" (but I’m not laughing), just voted out
of committee, to ever get that far? Who in their right mind would ever
want passed what the U.S. Public Interest Research Group has called "the
worst data security bill ever"?
Maybe
those in big banking for whom it would become the best data security bill
ever bought ... at all our expense.
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