John Theune wrote:
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.

you are making two erroneous assumptions; the first, is that
the SSN is guaranteed to be unique, it is not. That fact
has been widely documented and discussed. The second is
that banks and insurances and such need a unique *common*
identification, this is flat wrong; your bank has no legitimate
reasons to cross reference your banking info with, say, your
health care info, or the list of phone calls you made; it is none
of their business;

the problem is both the use and abuse of this number and the
fact that all the entities to whom you entrust your personal
information make no effort to keep it private, and worst,
actively trade and/or exchange it; this fact with the ability
to cross reference information -- not always correctly, the
SSN being a lousy identifier -- is what creates the problem.

It might not have been as much of a problem at a time when
large scale data mining was not as easy as today, but it is
becoming scary. If you are amongst the folks who complacently
think that they have nothing to hide therefore what is all
this fuss about, you do not deserve the freedom you are
currently enjoying (not for long though as things are evolving)

Your bank wants a unique number to identify their client? sure,
let them have their own system; so does your insurance, and
phone companies, etc. I have no problem with that, so long
as each have their own separate system. Besides their is
perfectly good enough means of identifying yourself as far
as commercial or other companies are concerned: your name.

--Sylvain