oh that went off topic fast, sorry havent slept well lately

Oh, the supreme court annulled the decision, so I assume the documents would still be avilable, or they resolved it in some other way.

http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/19 98/7/article11.en.html

They tried that same tactic around 93 in the US, when some of their most secret documents became part of the public record during a lawsuit. It didn't work then either, which is how the world learned about anxiety being caused by aliens in jumbo jets harvesting souls or whatever.

Social Security was never supposed to function this way, and I believe there was even some federal laws that prohibit using it as identification, but it just kind of became the defacto primary identification though use over time.

The problem with this leak isn't so much the SS numbers, but the information those numbers come bundled with: Everything a person could ever need to answer any challenge. The report is confidential because it contains key pieces of information banks and creditors use to check who you are.

There's your social security number and your name, but also:
Current address(es)
Past Addresses
Current phone numbers
Past phone numbers
In some cases family members
Educational affiliations

plus more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head probably.

A lot of these things are publicly available if people know where to look, but it costs money and/or takes effort to put together. The number of identities you could steal this way is somewhat naturally limited. You also need a way to 'get onto" someone, by knowing them or stealing their mail or finding something with their name on it.

The leaked info is a one stop shop for everything you'd need, neatly organized with all of the dangerous and/or costly legwork done for 150 million targets.

"A lot of these things are publicly available if people know where to look, but it costs money and/or takes effort to put together. "

Actually, not anymore. There's a bunch of sites that aggregate this information now. Mylife used to be the big one, but there's others now. It would list all of your past addresses and phone numbers that were ever in some public record, and even provides links to any relatives it could link to you with the same information. People can basically navigate your family tree and get public info on everyone. I noticed some sites even gather info from places like Facebook or LinkedIn, so they start compiling e-mail addresses and online profiles and the like. Pretty much anything that's public is going to be aggregated now.

Yeah, this stuff is already out there but what makes this especially problematic is that it's now out there as one massive dataset and it wouldn't be that hard for someone (or some government) to, say, write a relatively simple program that automates the process of opening credit cards using the data, and then transferring funds from them to some kind of offshore account.

Or more likely, just sell it.

Remember folks, internet memes made by racists and manbabies said you can't use a current year argument, so those whose entire mentality are shaped by memes will you when you can and can't use accurate arguments.

That will show all those people who were posting current year argument comments oh wait