Jose wrote:
there are far too many people who
demand this number even though they have no legitimate
reasons to know it.


Not to mention all those that have "just the last four digits". Most of
the rest of the digits can be reconstructed by anybody who knows how the
system is set up.

Jose
I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen any
mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single
identification number to tie together the various parts of people's
information. Banks and insurance companies have a need to be able to
gather the complete record for a person for giving credit or giving out
payments. If you don't want this single identify to be a SSN, fine then
what would you have it be? You want to come up with a different number?
It will have the same issue as the SSN number. If it falls into the
wrong hands then ID theft may occur. If you want to attack ID theft,
that's a different story. Make the number tie to something that only
you can provide. Some sort of biometric identifier might work. In a
perfect world we would not need a single identifier but given todays
computer system and silos of information we need a way to tie the
systems together.

John