Mark Klien’s statement given under seal has been reported by Wired News and mirrored by James Duncan. Kudos to Wired and Mr. Duncan for helping to ensure public awareness of this NSA domestic intelligence program. This is important, and so I am mirroring Mr. Duncan’s post and the original PDF file as well.
The crime we call “Identity Theft” consists of someone using nefarious means to gather enough personal information about a target individual to fradulently represent themselves as that target with a goal of establishing and/or using credit in the target’s name.
End result: some innocent gets a huge bill, a credit hit that takes a long time to resolve, and all the stress that goes with those things. Yep, it sucks.
But calling it identity theft is just plain foolish: it’s fraud. Yes, criminals are using fraud as a means to commit theft — they are stealing funds from creditors by pretending to be someone they aren’t. That part is, in fact, “theft by fraud“.
The term identity theft, though, implies that the victim’s identity is stolen; that’s insane, since the definition of steal includes depriving someone of property. If I’m a victim of this type of fraud, my identity may have been compromised, but it hasn’t been stolen — I am still the person I was before the crime, and I can still prove it.
TIME has a nice article on the Nintendo Wii unit they were able to preview. The article is partially interesting because it deals with videogame culture. Choice quote:
“Video games are an unusual medium in that they carry a heavy stigma among nongamers. Not everybody likes ballet, but most nonballet fans don’t accuse ballet of leading to violent crime and mental backwardness. Video games aren’t so lucky.”