A few Christmases ago, my mom got me this dinky little top-heavy paper shredder. She’s very concerned about identity theft and worried that my neighbors would steal some important numbers and flee into the night with my identity and destroy my not-imperfect credit history.
Seeing as my university still uses social security numbers as student ID numbers, and at least twice our cracker-jack administrators got their laptops stolen (Dear KISAEN, KYSO: It has come to our attention that blah blah blah your name blah blah better throw a fraud check on your credit files blah blah sorry for the inconvenience. Love, Your University) I was less than concerned about OxyCotin addicts rifiling through my trash-there are better ways for smarter people to fuck me, against which I am virtually defensless. Thanks, government.
This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing gum wrappers and baggage tags, cast off by some weary traveller, when I first laid eyes on it just over a month ago.
The traveller’s name was Mark Broer. I know this because the paper – actually a flimsy piece of card – was a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub, the small section of the pass displaying your name and seat number. The stub you probably throw away as soon as you leave your flight.
The problem, basically, is that the government wants all the identifying information about you it can possibly get, but doesn’t reallly feel like keeping it at all secure. Private companies do most of the data mining and storage, so of course you know where this is about it go.
“This is terrible,” he said. “It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn’t enhance our security; it undermines it.”
I keep all of my boarding passes as keepsakes (yes, I am that much of a dork)-little did I know that that was my first and best defense against being completely and totally fucked…
not only that, but largely accountable for my own fucking! Clever bastards:
“The problem here is that a commercial organisation is being given the task of collecting data on behalf of a foreign government, for which it gets no financial reward, and which offers no business benefit in return,” says Laurie. “Naturally, in such a case, they will seek to minimise their costs, which they do by handing the problem off to the passengers themselves. This has the neat side-effect of also handing off liability for data errors.
“You can imagine the case where a businessman’s trip gets delayed because his passport details were incorrectly entered and he was mistaken for a terrorist. Since BA didn’t enter the data – frequent flyers are asked to do it themselves – they can’t be held responsible and can’t be sued for his lost business.”
That’s right! Not only do I have to give the govenrment all kinds of information to get on the flight, but I get to assume responsibility if the info is fucked up and they’re not responsible for keeping it safe! Under this system, I get the convienence of being bloody likely to miss my flight with that of increased risk of identity theft in one package! The only way it could possibly be better is if the airport hires someone to stab my luggage repeatedly with a machete after its been checked.
Seeing as my university still uses social security numbers as student ID numbers
GAWD, they still do that? I had such an issue with that when I was in college.
I love how when you get your SS card, they say, DO NOT -thunder clap- EVER give your SS # to ANYONE! And then just about anywhere you go, you have to give your SS# as a indentifying thingie.
I keep all of my boarding passes as keepsakes (yes, I am that much of a dork)
Oh, good to know I’m not the only one.
That’s right! Not only do I have to give the govenrment all kinds of information to get on the flight, but I get to assume responsibility if the info is fucked up and they’re not responsible for keeping it safe!
See… this is the kind of shit that makes me go, “I left Russia and came to this country for WHAT exactly? Same kind of stuff but with McDonalds?” I thought USA was supposed to be all, like, respectful of an individual’s rights and shit. Ha! And they say that Russians are being told all sorts of sullying lies about US.
oh, also – Yay for HHGG reference title ^_^
I should have used something from The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.