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Comment by bsims | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else find it weird they included his social security number (page 5)? With the amount of detail they included it seems as though it would be fairly easy for someone to use any FBI file on a deceased person for fraudulent purposes, ID theft, or accessing accounts at companies who may not realize he is deceased yet.

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Your social security number becomes public record once you die.

The situation with the Social Security Death Master File (SSDMF) / Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is very similar to the situation with PACER.

List from Nov 2011, obtained legally by http://ssdmf.info/

https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7193029/Social_Security_Deat...

The SSA would love to insist that redistribution is illegal, because the price of the SSDMF is outrageous and a cash cow, but they don't have a legal leg to stand on. The SSDI is public record, and because it's a database with no creative element, it's not copyrightable even if it were compiled by someone other than the government.

Official sources for the SSDMF:

https://www.ssdmf.com/

http://www.ntis.gov/products/ssa-dmf.aspx

It would be really meta if Aaron had snarfed this one.

There is a database of deceased people with their SSNs available, it's called SSDI. All banks/credit agency should automatically flag these SSNs.

Social Security numbers are too widely used to really be regarded as secrets (how many government, bank, employer and call centre staff have access to yours) or to be used as authentication. They are a pretty good identifier of who is being referred to though.

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