President’s Identity Theft Task Force

Last week Washington released a 120 page manifesto about all the ways identity theft is affecting all of us. A little late to the table? The Bush administration made mention of it briefly in 2003 and I believe they became preoccupied with a bigger fish called Saddam.

Well now that he’s fertilizer, they can get back to what’s on the minds of the American people. So it took them four years, and significant year over year increases in this crime ever since, for them to return to the topic.

This action is a result in the uproar being made by the public and this being covered by media all of the time, especially when a major data breach occurs.

Lost in all this public reaction is the fact that people are still engaging in high risk behavior when it comes to protecting their identity, and many still feel it will never happen to them. No amount of legislation will help them until people start helping themselves. At the end of the day the best defense is self defense.

We can’t expect the government to stop all of the gaps so we can continue as in the past leaving ourselves wide open. They can only protect you so much, the rest is up to you. You must realize that it is individuals (not the government or businesses) who will lose the most and suffer the biggest hardships financially and emotionally from this type of crime.


If Identity Theft continues to grow, as it has in the past few years, it will eventually start to have a major economic impact and the federal government is foreseeing this as very real possibility in the very near future. Statistically we all stand a good chance of getting impacted by identity theft; it will be the ones who have built up the best defense who will be impacted the least.

Don’t wait for it to happen to you!