-NPR.org, July 6, 2009 by Christopher Joyce
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106324377
Chris Hoofnagle, a technology lawyer at the University of California, Berkeley, says computer criminals don’t even have to get the whole, exact Social Security number to create a “fictitious person” and secure a credit card, something he calls “synthetic identify theft.” They can do it with a fake or partial number.
-ScienceNOW, July 6, 2009 by Karen C. Fox
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/706/1
“Using Social Security numbers for both identification and authentication is no longer tenable, because possession of the number—unlike a fingerprint—offers no verification of identity.”
-Wired, July 6, 2009 by Hadley Leggett
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/predictingssn/
Privacy law expert Chris Hoofnagle of the University of California, Berkeley, says the response must be drastic. “Their paper points to a radical solution: Perhaps we should stop trying to protect the secrecy of the SSN, and just publish all of them to prevent their use as passwords.”
-KGO-TV, July 13, 2009 by Terry McSweeney
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/technology&id=6912260
“If you know where someone was born and the month they were born, you can decode at least part of the Social Security number,” said Prof. Chris Hoofnagle, director of Information Privacy Programs at the University of California Berkeley.… “Even if you guess incorrectly, you still may be able to steal identities through a new form of identity theft known as synthetic identity theft, and in this form of the crime you create a new person, you create a fictitious person, using a similar kind of guessing game of Social Security numbers,” said Hoofnagle.