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Comment by snicker7 | Hacker News Reader

Apparently, the SSNs were all embedded directly in the HTML file. Like … what?

When I was a student at DeVry University (a national for-profit college with 40 campuses) your SSN was your student ID. This wasn’t corrected until 2002 or 2003. :(

Your SSN was your driver's license number in 29 states until 2004, when Bush outlawed the practice.

Many, many institutions in the USA are built on it being a high-trust society. Now that it's falling into a low-trust state, we can expect those institutions to fail, and perhaps the state to as well.

They weren't supposed to be used as any kind of important, general ID number. It took various governments and institutions a long time to wake up to the reality that, because we really, really need such an ID and the government has displayed no intention of ever creating one, social security numbers had been forced into the role by necessity.

> Many, many institutions in the USA are built on it being a high-trust society. Now that it's falling into a low-trust state, we can expect those institutions to fail, and perhaps the state to as well.

Not enough people understand this, but I'm encouraged whenever I hear from those who do.

This raises the question of how we start planning now to build more appropriate institutions to avoid societal failure.

Locally, generally. Remember Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is inevitably found to have evolved from a simple system that works." Also much easier to rebuild trust in a smaller community.

I'd kinda love to blog about blue-sky social theories, but I suspect that without grounding in actual working social systems, they would remain theories.

Kind of a nitpick, but presidents don't outlaw things. Laws passed by Congress do that, and you're right, it was in 2004. Bush signed the law, but it passed by a huge majority.

https://www.ssa.gov/legislation/legis_bulletin_010705.html

I'd initially phrased it "Bush signed a bill that outlawed...", which is much more correct, but is also an awkward sentence construction to read. Figured people would understand what I meant.

...this is also an apropos discussion for this topic, where the Missouri governor is framing this discussion in a way that's technically false but is going to score points with his constituents.

Using your SSN for your driver's license would have been fine in a society where the SSN wasn't also being treated by banks etc. as a way to authenticate you for credit/loans/accounts.

This was common at many schools.

My high school rolled out an ID system in 1998 using SSNs printed on every ID (staff and students). About a week later, they realized this was a bad idea and reissued 1000+ IDs without the SSN.

I still don’t know what the point of the ID cards was. They were just laminated paper, no RFID, magstripe, or barcode to open doors or to buy things from the cafeteria or school store. You didn’t need it to check out books from the library and no one ever asked to see it. And we got a new one every year.

I guess some vendor convinced the school that they needed ID cards and so they got them.

Irving Campus ? I was there for those years.

    </tr><!--- {{ str(row) }} --->

I don't find it TOO much of a stretch....

(I don't know what it actually looked like in the html, just saying I could see it happening pretty easily)

If they were using a server-side rendering framework then what probably happened is that they used HTML comments instead of template engine comments to "remove" the SSN <td />s without understanding the ramifications.

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