Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

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What kind of stupid comment is this? "Identity theft" has caused people to be chased by collection agencies, to be prosecuted for or imprisoned for crimes they had nothing to do with, and credit ratings ruined.

Case in point: a copy of a guy's id card here was used when signing a lease for an apartment. Apartment was later found to contain marihuana plantation. Public prosecutor claims the guy is the guy behind it all, and has him arrested several times until 2 years later, at trial, the judge decides 'well it can't have been this guy, given all the circumstances'. In the mean time, he lost his job over it, was so stressed and depressed that his relationship fell apart, and was in financial ruins.

He handed a copy of his id to a temp agency once before this thing happened. Probably somebody there copied it, or there was a break-in there and somebody took it. There was no way to hold them responsible, nor were the actual people who rented the house ever found.

How can you say that 'identity theft' isn't real?

The problem is that the term reverses the arrow of causality. It indicates that there is some specific "identity" that an individual possesses, and thus implies the individual has a responsibility to protect it from being "stolen".

> There was no way to hold them [the copier of his ID card] responsible

With the term "identity theft", one concludes that his damages come from being the victim of the copier, and that this crime was never solved. However, every harm that befell him was actually due to other parties that operate completely out in the open, but they manage to escape your blame!

> prosecuted for or imprisoned for crimes they had nothing to do with

The real crimes are the utter incompetence of the prosecutor and the extrajudicial punishment from merely being targeted by that system.

> people to be chased by collection agencies

The collection agencies are committing harassment and extortion, rooted in negligence.

> credit ratings ruined

Libel and tortious interference by the credit bureaus.

In all of these cases, the term "identity theft" primarily serves to obscure the root of the problem, which is the utter lack of diligence by creditors and the unearned importance given to the results of their sloppy process. The parties responsible for the above transgressions seek to pass the buck by glossing over their glaringly simplistic assumptions, because any actual fix would make their job much harder.

On point: http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2014/03/mistake_by_newark_...

This is one of the most brilliant comments I've read in months. How can we make this perspective more mainstream?

It is? It reads like a mix of truth and sophistry. If somebody frames you for murder, you may well blame the prosecution for being incompetent, but the main guilty party is certainly the one who planted the evidence in the first place.

Yes, the murderer is still guilty of murder, just like the fraudster is still guilty of fraud.

But this doesn't account for the additional damage caused by complete reliance on "evidence" that shouldn't even pass a sniff test. One would very much fault a prosecutor for continuing to press a murder case with the sole piece of evidence being a typewritten note saying "I, John Smith, committed this murder".

(If I understand the original argument) a better analogy would be being framed for murder while the guy who framed you cashed out a life insurance policy on you. You neither took out the policy nor benefited from it - yet the burden is on you, not those who paid out incorrectly, to prove your innocence.

The prosecutors aren't being blamed here (by OP), but those who profit by blind prosecution are.

I really don't know, besides just stating the truth and hoping people recognize it. I think the disconnect is ultimately due to a precession of the model - as a system gets taken for granted, people analyze things in terms of its paradigm and its failures become seen in terms of the system's abstractions rather than the underlying reality.

On the other hand, when I'd write comments like this five years ago, they'd generally get a net negative reception. So it seems like widespread belief in manifest human inventorying and tracking is hopefully wearing off.

mind boggles

A word is a word is a word - you can make it your pet peeve to redefine common terms to mean something that better fits your ideology, that still doesn't make it relevant to us here living in the real world. Whatever you call it, people impersonating themselves as other people are a real and tangible threat to those being impersonated.

You can go blame others and make grandiose accusations of 'incompetence', 'the system' ('holding us down' too, presumably rollseyes ), 'harassment', 'extortion', 'tortious interference' - that just shows you have no idea of the law, sociology, history or the realities of emerging behavior in human relations.

What is your point, exactly? Are you saying the problem will go away if only everybody except the criminals doing the identify theft would... I don't know, what exactly?

These are just common feel-good anti-intellectualisms about individual words and phrases I wrote, which ignore my actual points.

So I'll try to put it plainly:

Most of the problem will indeed go away if everybody, not just the criminals, stopped relying on the concept of "identity" as if it were infallible.

In your example, the negligent prosecutor is responsible for the sheer majority of harm to the victim, by failing to evaluate the quality of the evidence. By perpetuating the term "identity theft", you are giving that prosecutor a shield to hide behind instead of them having to change.

He's doing a shitty job of pointing out that "negligence on the part of financial institutions" has been re-branded by the industry as "identity theft" so they can transfer part or all of the liability to the customer, and even get you to pay to protect yourself from their negligence. If he'd spoken plainly and not tried to mimic one of a hundred libertarian web sites that rail on such things it probably would have been clearer.

I wasn't trying to mimic anything, and was primarily saying things that derive from longstanding principles. Your wording is a bit more straightforward, so please chime in with further improvements.

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