Senator's ID stolen

On purpose, that is. To see how easy it could be, Sen. Ted Stevens (R) of Alaska, chairman of the US Senate Commerce Committee, told his staff to steal his identity, and they did, the New York Times reports. The senator talked about the experiment in a subsequent committee hearing. A professor at Johns Hopkins University gave his computer science class a similar assignment: to see how much personal information they could gather with only $50 per group of 3-4 students and using only legal, public sources of information. "Several groups managed to gather well over a million records, with hundreds of thousands of individuals represented in each database" and layers of info on each individual. (One group discovered that 1,500 dead people were listed as active registered voters, and 50 of them "somehow voted in the last election.") Read the story to find out the interesting tactics they used, online and offline. Of course the Times points out the ease of access, but it also cites views on both sides of this debate and shows 1) how ambivalent we really are about personal info being so accessible and 2) how tough it would be find and maintain a regulatory balance between openness and privacy because, as the John Hopkins professor said, collectively, we don't know how much privacy or convenience we want. Another takeaway from all this: Our kids' tech know-how is good preparation for higher ed, careers, and contributing to solutions to this complicated problem.