The Mandelbear's Musings

From The Blog of M'Gath we get a link to this article by Michael Tiemann decrying the fact that AT&T wants your SSN so they can do a credit check before they activate your iPhone. I hate to tell you, folks: this is nothing new. They've been requiring a SSN to set up an account for as long as I can remember.

We have a national ID -- we've had it for half a century or more. It sucks, but I don't think it's practical to put that particular genie back in the bottle. The best we can do is patch the system so that identity theft isn't a simple matter of getting hold of a single number that's not all that hard to obtain.

No, I don't know how to do that.