The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Monday, May 13:

In North Carolina, a man recently was indicted for allegedly selling Social Security numbers on eBay. Another identity thief recently assumed the identity of a retired executive to exercise more than $200,000 worth of stock options. In California, a woman was wrongly accused of endangering a child after a woman who stole her identity gave birth to a drug-ill baby in a hospital.

Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the United States. An estimated 700,000 people are victimized each year, costing consumers and businesses billions of dollars. It’s a potential national security problem and weak link in the battle against terrorism.

The problem is multifaceted. The proliferation of mailed credit card solicitations makes it easy for crooks to intercept an offer and open illicit accounts. The Social Security number has become a de facto, though poorly protected, form of identification. Once obtained, a criminal can use it to assume an identity.

Likewise, the solution must be multifaceted. A Senate bill seeks to limit the use of Social Security numbers. A House bill would require states to issue driver’s licenses with computer chips or unique identifiers such as thumbprints or digital photographs. Attorney General John Ashcroft also has called for harsher penalties for identity theft.

However, efforts to combat identity theft must become more proactive and involve credit-reporting agencies, credit issuers and groups that use sensitive financial information.

For example, in testimony to Congress last year, Evan Hendricks, editor of Privacy Times, said credit-reporting agencies could do more to verify the legitimacy of a credit report request. He contends consumers would benefit from an automatic notification of new activity on their credit report, similar to the way credit card issuers call cardholders to ask about unusual charges.

Right now, notification is not automatic or even occasional, although at least one credit reporting service will e-mail an unusual activity report to consumers who subscribe to its paid monitoring service.

There is no foolproof way to foil all identity thieves.

Yet much more can be done without compromising consumer privacy or unnecessarily impeding the legitimate flow of personal financial information.

Tougher penalties and more aggressive law enforcement aren’t enough. Congress and the gatekeepers of sensitive financial information need proactively to attack this problem from a number of angles to prevent identity theft from becoming a national plague. Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

(c) 2002, The Dallas Morning News