Odds someone else has your SSN? One in 7

[Jim Johnson]

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/12/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-in-7.html

...two U.S. courts ruled that using someone else's SSN is not an identity theft crime...

[John]

About 6 years ago I started a campain to get people to stop saying "my taxes" because they are not your taxes. They are the government's taxes.
For several years, I was very frequently getting up on my little soap box (personal conversation, forum discussion, talk radio calls, etc.) and seem to have had some success. These days, I frequently find myself commenting to folks and thanking them for not saying "my' when they talk about taxes.

Today I start the campain to get people to stop saying "my Social Security Number." It is not "my" number. It is not your number.


side note from the article:

..."One agency he doesn't blame: The Social Security Administration."

Certainly, they know there are problems. They are the first to understand this," he said. "It's not a problem of them issuing numbers.  They were never intended to be a unique identifier ... but in the past few decades, businesses have used it because it's easy."

[Lloyd Danforth]

When I started basic training, they had us memorize an 7 digit id number.  About half way thru that, very training period, the DOD realized that every male 18 who didn't come from a farm already had a number specific to him, the SSN that had already been assigned to him.
From then on, we used the ssn as our id number.

[Jim Johnson]

The US army stenciled my full name and a ssn on a 3 1/2 foot long bill board. Then they had me carry it around airports and bus stations.  They called it a duffel bag.  I called it heavy.

My full name and a ssn were the things I was supposed to give freely to anyone who asked.  Especially enemys of the United States who captured me.