I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why.
I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication...
I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.
> At 10:38 pm, SWAT entered the house and used a stun grenade to conceal their movements [...] During the next 10.2 hours, a Lenco BearCat was driven through the front door, tear gas[1] and 40 mm grenades were repeatedly launched inside, shots were fired upon the house, and explosives were detonated to destroy several exterior walls.
Just amazing multiple people (the authorities) were present and none of them stopped to think "gee, that house is somebody's home".
That said, I think it does probably make sense for there to be some sort of financial incentive for police to not create more collateral damage than necessary. Like maybe the damages should come out of the department budget initially and then they could get a judge to decide how much of that was the suspect's fault and recover that amount from them, assuming they can pay? Policing is a social service and I don't think externalizing the costs of social services onto innocent bystanders is a good idea; it makes the agency less accountable for the monetary costs they incur if those costs aren't tracked as part of their budget, and it's bad PR.
Whether or not police have any imperative to consider the impact of their actions, this situation was clear incompetence and reckless destruction. They're just as much doing their job by forcing drug tests on random people. The person may not have been on drugs, but all police would have to do is say they saw "erratic behavior".
> Like maybe the damages should come out of the department budget initially and then they could get a judge to decide how much of that was the suspect's fault and recover that amount from them, assuming they can pay?
This is just a different bad incentive; it incentivizes police to completely ignore situations or to find someone to hold accountable. Just extend the logic to the other expenses of an investigation- hourly pay, overtime, materials, forensics. Making a criminal pay for their own arrest is a terrible idea.
Police should pay for all the drug tests they demand, and for all the damages incurred in the process of investigating or arresting a suspect. Those things are not related to the crime itself, like a fine is. They are part of the cost of investigation and operation.
If the societal cost of enforcement exceeds the societal cost of non-enforcement, then perhaps they should ignore the situation.
> or to find someone to hold accountable
This is why it would have to be decided by a judge as part of sentencing. If they're actually accountable then why shouldn't they be held to that?
> Just extend the logic to the other expenses of an investigation- hourly pay, overtime, materials, forensics. Making a criminal pay for their own arrest is a terrible idea.
I don't necessarily disagree, but just to play devil's advocate: why? It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it? (One argument I can think of is that for small crimes the cost of enforcement may greatly exceed the bounds of reasonable punishment for the offense, but what about when that's not the case?)
> Those things are not related to the crime itself
I'd argue exchanging gunfire with police is definitely a big part of the crime committed in this case. The shoplifting that started the encounter is practically irrelevant compared to that.
> It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it?
How about transparency and uniform enforcement of the law? Fines should be formally codified, not implicit and variable depending on incidentals internal to that particular investigation. The legislature is always free to direct those proceeds wherever they would like.
I am more insinuating that it will lead to much more falsified evidence- something that is already a problem even while completely shielding them from consequences.
> why? It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it?
Because that isn't really accountability, practically speaking. The department funding is very distantly coupled to personal impact. When a division of a company does badly, they don't cut its funding as a form of incentive or punishment. Individual performance is done through the system of management and personal incentive. You don't want to fund the police based on how many crimes they solve- you do it based on how much crime exists. Likewise you shouldn't cut funding for bad policing- it's something that can also just be actively managed instead of simplified to a budgetary concern.
So Britain as a whole spends roughly half (in terms of percentage of GDP) on healthcare as the US. That includes both public and private expenditure. At similar health outcomes.
Now Singapore spends roughly half of what Britain spends (in terms of percentage of GDP), and our population is no worse off for it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
What you can see though, is a cluster that vaguely fits "spend more, better life expectancy", with two outliers:
1. The USA, massively outspending every other country, but having same life expectancy as China spending a tenth of what it does
2. South Africa, spending roughly as much as Mexico or Columbia, but 10 years less life expectancy. I suspect it needs more targeted spending with its HIV crisis, rather than measuring average spend vs average life expectancy
Public healthcare expenditure is also likely to be wasteful; governmental corruption and languishing infrastructure is a comparatively big problem there (compare power infrastructure, rail network, postal service), so the pure dollar value spent on healthcare is systematically off.
Thanks for the link btw-- I would not have expected such a clear trend in this, especially given how noisy metrics like life expectancy are; very interesting.
See https://www.econlib.org/is-the-us-an-outlier-on-health-care-... for a discussion.
Eg owning a car or cigarettes are very expensive here. But eating out starts much cheaper than in the UK. (There's no upper limit in either place, of course.)
On the other hand, there are EU countries such as lithuania and estonia, that spend less than half per capita of Singapore, and are ranked with a higher healthcare index.
Also perhaps our more enlightened policies are helping us achieve that higher per capita GDP?
Singapore’s GDP per-capita is likely fairly inflated as it doesn’t correct for the effect of multinational tax planning by large corporations on the GDP statistics , unlike say Ireland.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_gross_national_inco...
No idea why you are equating enlightenment to per-capita GDP. I don’t quite understand that equation. Singapore may have a high per capita GDP, but that isn't resulting in a higher median individual incomes. Given the extremely high cost of living, the purchasing power of an average Singaporean is actually comparable to that of someone in the less affluent EU countries that have 1/4 of the GDP per capita and equivalent (or better!) healthcare. So while the GDP figure looks impressive, it doesn’t fully reflect the financial reality for most residents. Is that your "enlightened policies" at work?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/275597/largers-donor-cou...
Imagine a fraction of that going back to citizens!
And of course the rest of the world finances the US economy and US debt by virtue of the US dollar being both the currency of international trade and reserve currency. And it is reserve currency by virtue of being the currency of international trade.
That is a far, far greater monetary value than the aid given out.
Which you can also tell by what happens to you if you start to use another currency for trade. "Would you like some regime change to go with that?" Or how the US fights the Euro tooth and nail, including sabotage.
You know that US citizens mostly donate to charities that help other US citizens?
A lot of the laws are at first pass related to psych - "harm to self or others". That earns you a free non-voluntary trip to the hospital. The part where it gets nasty is when words get twisted, when ulterior motives exist, when the accuser possesses some authority - such that an "unsafe to self or others" argument is put forth. Situations where the person needs help, but perhaps won't seek it out on their own, thus the state must intervene. In this narrative, our police officers said, "harm to self, drugs in digestive tract, may rupture and cause death, not willing to seek medical care for fear of losing drug transport and/or prosecution, please treat so they don't rupture"
The victim of such a crime now has a choice - pay a bunch of money to the hospital to clear the bill, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to get the police to pony up responsibility. It's happened to me too along the lines of "the government made big mistake and caused problems for you, you can take ownership of the false accusations, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to have them wiped". Often in our society there's the suffering of being a victim, then the victim tax on top of that
I duly do.
"So I went to the doctor earlier today. Had an issue. They swabbed me and told me I have an STD. So they did a full STD and blood test, we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, who did you cheat on me with?"
"Uh, nobody."
Back and forth, arguing, etc. Me insisting I'll go get tested.
The doctor rings back the next day. "We reviewed and looked again under the scope, and you do not have an STD, just a yeast infection."
Relationship relief.
A month later, get a call from the clinic: "So about this bill for $290 for a full workup and testing, can you pay that today?"
No. Not a chance. You not only misread a test, but you also gave my girlfriend factually inaccurate information that you knew was going to be controversial. On the strength of that, you told her, "If it wasn't you, you really need to get fully tested if you don't know where he's been."
And then you want to send me the bill for the battery of tests you ordered because you misread a culture? No.
I refused to pay for medical "services" I never asked for. They sent the debt to collections. Collections had no argument other than that they would really like it if I paid. My credit score was unaffected.
Mind if I ask what area he lived in?
Apart from all the other common sense reasons why this is absurd
https://reason.com/2013/06/17/supreme-court-rules-fifth-amen...
>In a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court ruled today that a potential defendant's silence can be used against him if he is being interviewed by police but is not arrested (and read his Miranda rights) and has not verbally invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.
Catch 22 you lose. She was sent bill by same hospital. I contacted her lawyers for my own purposes, they said they'd given up these cases.
https://holdcbpaccountable.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ce...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
The result wasn't what you're describing. The plaintiff was suing in federal court, with a constitutional cause of action. The defendants argued, and the court decided that the plaintiff has a medical malpractice cause of action in state court, which is appropriate for her to pursue (at least before a federal court will rule in her favor).
In general I find discussions of this topic very frustrating because everybody stops short of visiting the if and how of the fraudulent bills actually having an effect. I can certainly believe there are corrupt or dubious ways they get collected on, but those mechanisms need to be focused on and then eliminated as an obvious first step of healthcare reform.
I wonder if you could sue them for that? Reselling a debt that they know is invalid.
I cross out all that unilateral nonsense about being financially responsible (as well as other types of nonsense), and have never been balked at. Worst case is these days when they ask me to sign a contextless touchpad, and then they roll their eyes like it's some big imposition when I ask for a hard copy instead so I can "review".
So I don't think that paperwork is directly involved with how the medical industry has come to run on billing fraud shakedowns. Hence asking for actual mechanics / outcomes of what happens when people are "sent a bill" and don't do the implied thing of just paying it.
Also, have you ever talked to an attorney - especially asking them preemptive or against-the-status-quo questions? In my experience they generally tell you to just go with the flow. If they advise you to do anything else and it blows up, then they themselves could be on the hook.
What does that mean? They are either providing the services on behalf of the police, so their pseudo employer needs to pay them, or they are medical professionals providing a care you did not consent to or requested, in which case they should charge the party that requested the services, again, the police.
In both cases, you were not the contractual beneficiary of the services, so you own nothing. The fact that your blood and orifices are involved is purely incidental, any evidence resulting from this unnecessary medical act can only be used against you, so you would have no reason to want it.
Handing out civil infractions is basically the same thing but without the unnecessary extra party and steps.
What would have happened, to the hospital's part, if they had declared that you were not intoxicated and you should not have been brought to the hospital, and sent you on your way? Would the police have had to justify dragging you to the hospital, and pay for your examination? I suspect that going along with the police may have been the decision with the simplest and most profitable outcome for everybody (apart from you) and that the hospital side was incetivised to go along with police's story rather than against, but I am not sure how things there typically work in such cases.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/01/561337106...
Said unconscious patient later died, if I recall correctly, too.
The nursing board then used the warrants signed AFTER the nurses charts to shield nurses from my malpractice complaints. The board argued essentially nurses are performing a police search if told to execute a search, thus it's nonmedical search. However if you challenge the police, they argue it is medical care not a police search thus you can't challenge that angle either.
She lost as judges ruled doctors basically become deputized and are non medical unofficial police when directed to a warrantless search.
https://holdcbpaccountable.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ce...
Lawyers involved told me they'd given up and wouldn't take my case. The trouble is it is medical when you challenge the police search, and nonmedical when you challenge the medical care. The judges and police created a catch 22.
It's no secret that lgbt people and prisoners are being mistreated by medical professionals globally.
https://www.lexipol.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/polls-fav...
Because I don't see any way to get those numbers unless you basically just survey old people.
Sure, but there's a huge systematic bias in how a lot of surveys and research are carried out. If everyone is sampling from e.g. people who answer a phone call, their results will be consistent but hugely biased.
The general population in the US is very much in favor of law enforcement and the more "end of the world" news they consume the more they think there should be MORE law enforcement and they should have even more power.
I have, as it happens. But many people never do; the people who go to sports games might be a similar group to the people who answer phone calls, but they're not a representative sample of the whole population by any means.
Also, try finding the lawyers that ran the previous case. They may be itching for round 2.
Here is the real reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42924145
Then guess what we find out a few months later? Yep, her father really is having an affair, and her mother has just discovered it and is now filing for divorce over it
(Un)fortunately, there is a quite famous experiment
>The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted, but acted normally from then onward. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication.
How did anyone volunteer for this? Isn't there a risk of actually getting stuck at the asylum, or failing to clarify it was an experiment to have it removed from your records?
This won’t be corrected until there are penalties for political, legal, and administrative professionals who don’t do their due diligence.
Judicial cannot claim one party is lying or not, in fact it is impossible, given the fact its nearly always a "he said she said" deal (in this particular scenario). Quite literally, the judge was't there, lawyers weren't there either and they get a twisted version of truth no matter if they are prosecuting or defense.
It sucks, fully agreed, but there is no way around it. As long as the judgement is not too punitive is about the best you can hope for.
It's not though. Completely unprovable allegations by a single person have real consequences. That's just the way the system works.
That’s a very long shot but I now want someone to verify this claim too, in case he was also telling the truth.
Isn't that everybody now? Credibility is a strange thing in the age of social media.
Likely a metric fuck ton. The perceived quality of one's character plays an outsized role in getting people to believe you. Serial killers figured that out a long time ago.
Disordered thinking of the quality you’ve described is indicative of a serious psychological unwellness that, as the other commenter suggested, suggests paranoid schizophrenia or a related form of psychosis. But I don’t intend to seriously engage in back-of-envelope psychologizing.
Prattling on about irrelevant history and insinuating 9/11 conspiracy theories in a courtroom not at all concerned with either of those items does harm credibility, and I think rightfully.
For reasons of both family and personal history I am genuinely sensitive to the phenomenon of the “deemed crazy” person being consigned to permanent non-consideration of their words and expressions, their concerns, but I also recognize that such legitimate unwellness poses genuine issues for the believability of anything they claim.
Putting my extended aside aside, I would phrase it as “how many people are telling the truth about something, but aren't taken seriously because they're severely psychologically disregulated generally.”
It’s not necessarily outrageous for me to assert that I warned the FBI about 9/11 in June 2000. It seriously harms my credibility if I decide to bring up this grievance when I’m speaking to a judge about my undeserved traffic ticket in October 2024.
I mean, I wonder how many gold coins are laying in the forest? Surely there are many, and you can find ample news stories of people locating them out there, but I can confidently tell you that if you assembled a team an combed the forest for a year, maybe you would find one object worthy of a news story. And definitely you would wasted thousands of man hours that could have produced far far far more than what the object is worth.
If I searched ten thousand forests, I'd be hopeful for more than a single coin.
Or rather, you now seem to think it's pretty likely that lots of people have this happen to them.
In practical terms, it happens to virtually no one.
Hundreds of people win $10,000+ in the lottery every month. That is a lot of people. You can post a thread and will likely get comments from those who have won before.
But as a percentage of the population, virtually no one wins big in the lottery.
If you are foolish and think social media accurately portrays reality, you might quit your job to play the lottery full time - because hey, look at all the winners in the comments.
... probably all of them.
It's really absurd they didn't do something like this in the first place. I'm presuming there was no living family that could tell them which man is which.
I wonder if that is at all possible. Could there be someone alive today who has no blood kin ( father, mother, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins 1st, 2nd, etc )?
For example many who are in an orphanage has living parents, but the social services and the courts have decided to take them into care for their own safety.
Probably. That assumes that the father was still alive and of sound mind. Also assumes that the father had much contact with the son.
If they have become strangers to each other a long time ago he might not even be able to tell who is his real son, but his DNA still can provide evidence.
They probably didn't have much contact since he was homeless (otherwise he wouldn't be, I guess).
> On October 31, 2019, the District Attorney’s office filed charges of identity theft and false impersonation against Woods.
On December 23, 2019, Woods’s public defender expressed concern over Woods’s mental competence because he kept insisting that he was the real William Woods.
> On February 10, 2020, following an examination by a physician, Woods was declared incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a California mental hospital for treatment, including psychotropic medication.
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedeta...
There should be an NTSB for egregious acts of injustice, because the players in the system independently show no aptitude for reform and they all messed up badly. The way they defined their roles was wrong.
Well, Woods discovered the issue when he was age ~50, homeless, and 2000+ miles away in another state, so it's plausible to think there was some breakdown in relationships.
Bank are just a social construct that we pay alot of real money for.
I don't get the CVC number. Was it added becouse it was not copied by the old card receit copy machines? Like, it is just a number on the other side of the card.
Everyone in Canada brings a terminal to the table, you tap or do the pin, and my CC never leaves my hands.
And yeah - the CVC is just 3 more digits not captured on an imprint/swipe. Originally it was supposed to never be recorded, and only used during online validation. But that fell apart as the online/offline line blurred to invisibility. My
Your second sentence builds up two strawmen: 1. That the registry has to be "perfect", whatever that means. It doesn't, it just has to be canonical, and allow for errors in it to be corrected according to some well-defined process. (Not by pulling 20 random documents in front of a judge and suddenly legally become another person.) 2. That these registries are "mythical". It's very much a solved problem. You (I'm assuming you're American) are literally living the only developed country without a registry of who lives in it.
Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth, other countries have this registry centralized -- perhaps the U.S. would be best served by state-wide registries, though since migration across state borders is unregulated, I bet that would be very difficult to maintain.
As for the reasons not to have such a registry, I have yet to hear any convincing ones.
> Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth, other countries have this registry centralized -- perhaps the U.S. would be best served by state-wide registries, though since migration across state borders is unregulated, I bet that would be very difficult to maintain.
You're just describing birth certificates here. The US has those... very very few people don't get them. Getting access to them was an important part of Keirans's method of stealing Mr. Woods's identity. They will inevitably get lost or destroyed so you have to have some method of bootstrapping someone's identity and Keirans exploited that system through research.
It was designed around a time when it wasn't easy to acquire massive amounts of information about someone so it's not surprising that it starts to come apart a little bit in our digital panopticon.
That’s another thing the U.S. does wrong. If you hold a birth certificate for a child, what does that prove? It’s just an officially issued statement that a particular person was born to these particular parents. It’s completely useless as an authentication mechanism of identity.
The problem is not that birth certificates can be re-issued when lost. The problem is that they are trusted to mean anything about that person that possesses it.
Also that system doesn't seem to work that great, the numbers I'm finding show Japan has about 3 million identity theft victims a year. Lower than the US but only slightly lower per capita.
The biggest problem in this instance isn't that his identity was stolen it was that he wasn't believed, partially because he was homeless, seems to have some mental health problems per the article and they're a maligned group in the US, and the courts and prosecutors didn't take the relatively simple step of requesting DNA evidence to resolve the situation.
Japan is notorious for impersonation and false identities (especially children impersonating dead parents to claim their pensions).
> As for the reasons not to have such a registry, I have yet to hear any convincing ones.
The Japanese system is hugely cumbersome and also famously makes it difficult for people to escape from abusive family members (to the point there are e.g. dedicated companies for helping people move away in the middle of the night).
His problem is more that he seems to believe his (and all others') country's ID system is somehow impervious to abuse (despite being imperfect by his own admission). The more centralized things are, the less you have to hack to do a takeover. The less centralized things are, the easier it is to accumulate supporting evidence for a takeover. It's a necessarily complicated system that has certain holes, and the main thing that would've helped in this case was more benefit of the doubt for the person who was up against a lot of documentation.
That said, you’re contradicting yourself: am I saying my country’s system is impervious to abuse, or am I admitting that it is not?
My point is not that a central database of people makes identity theft a thing. My point is that by not having one (or any), you are making it a lot easier than it has to be.
In one country, this kind of abuse of identity happens all the time, and in others, it is exceedingly rare. Anyone should be able to draw their own conclusions from that.
I’m seeing a statistic online that says “33% of Americans Faced Some Form of Identity Theft at Some Point in Their Lives” — not sure if that’s accurate but it’s a scary number!
ID databases don't solve identity fraud.
That's not me contradicting myself, it's literally quoting you contradicting yourself. Because you've made both of those arguments.
At this point, you seem to have backed off basically all of your claims about your system actually being better, leaving me with the question of what point you're trying to make at all.
> not sure if that’s accurate but it’s a scary number!
Boy, you sound like you'd be a very educated voter, LOL.
I Googled "scandanavian id fraud rate" and got 36% for Finland and 45% for Sweden out of one of the top results. So what exactly are you on about?
Unless you are suggesting that the government take biometrics. Except that wouldn't have helped in this case, cause the identity thief would have shown up with ID and gotten scanned.
I think the victim should be entitled to damages from the state for that fault, and also for the false sentence he received.
The real problem here is the attempt to maintain permanent one-to-one mappings between ID numbers and humans. The legitimate purpose of a government ID is so you can e.g. go to the bank, open an account and then later establish to the bank that you're the same person who opened the account. If you want to get a new ID number and start over, you shouldn't have to steal someone else's in order to do that, you should just be able to go to the DMV or the social security administration and get a new ID under a new name that isn't already somebody else's.
The hypothesis that this would help criminals is pretty thin. They're already going to use an assumed name, which is why law enforcement uses photos/fingerprints/DNA to identify suspects rather than a government ID that people aren't actually required to carry regardless.
Forcing people to have a unique permanent barcode is primarily of use to authoritarians.
Getting an SSN for your child isn't compulsory, so the system also isn't expected to hold every person.
For the majority of people, it's 1-to-1. But it's not guaranteed that an SSN identifies a person (if it's been replaced) or that a person has an SSN (if their parents were lazy or are sov-cits)
"UNIQUENESS. The SSN is not a unique label. More than 4.2 million people, by the Social Security Administration's own estimates, have two or more SSNs. More serious, although much less prevalent, are the instances in which more than one person has been issued or uses the same SSN."
Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39938005 - April 2024 (377 comments)
I think you've identified why I don't particularly like his videos. His takes are usually interesting and they are usually interesting cases, but he spends 10 minutes talking about something that is worth 2 minutes at best.
I thought Charlie Brooker might have a useful segment on it, but all I could find were the not-quite-on-point, but nevertheless excellent two related segments below: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BBwepkVurCI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI
There are a number of channels that I have put in the "don't recommend from these channels" because it's two minutes of content five times over (I'd rather watch a 2 minute short form on the mater). It's content that I'm potentially interested in... but that particular format irks me.
Many creators have complained about the 'requirements' but if they don't do it, they don't get views.
And ask yourself as a consumer of the videos-- what are you getting out of it? Literally just stop watching (and defending) videos with inflated runtimes; they do nothing but waste your time. Creators and/or the market will adjust or die out (or if enough others continue watching them, then they can keep doing their dumb thing while you seek out and support people doing it better, so everybody wins).
when i first saw this i thought maybe it was immigration etc but seemed like both are americans of european descent the US is usually amenable
Then
> Prosecutors in Los Angeles asked the judge to order Mr. Woods not to use his name.
because as far as the court and the prosecutors had deigned to investigate Mr. Woods was in fact the identity thief.
i wonder if it was a temp thing or planned this way
why not switch to a new identity after that instead of charging crazy story so many questions to both parties
If you couldn’t take out an ID card using a birth certificate and proof of residence (electricity bill etc weak measures), maybe this con would never have begun in the first place.
Almost every developed nation in the world has this problem solved.
I am from a european country, and when I had to renew my id card I had to prove my identity through answering questions about a part of my family tree my immediate family and I have been no-contact since ever. I had no idea about the names of these people, and the police officer was visibly frustrated. Nothing bad happened in the end but I can imagine if I was acting weird it could have had, because the whole id process was actually a failure.
My experience with other european countries is not much different either in terms of the process, likeprevious residence addresses, people you live with or similar info they have on you, most of which is not very private. Or a witness to testify which actually is the easiest. That's nothing that would have prevented a case like this on its own, without further investigations.
Could a bad actor put some sort of coating or prosthetic on their fingers to successfully impersonate someone else?
Ugh, biometrics...
I guess something like this would resolve the situation. Two persons to confirm your identity.
But you do realize that even the government of each state does not know who lives at what address? The only exception being around the time of each census.
It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
Only when you look at it as sending to a person. Really what you do is send it to an address the post office doesn't get a damn what you put above the street address, they just deliver it to the specified location.
In my country (Sweden), the post office is able to forward mail to your new address after you move, because they can look up your address in the public registry. (Of course, they charge a fee for this but it's quite small.)
https://moversguide.usps.com/mgo/mail-forwarding-instruction...
Do you know that our voter registration, which is organized by state and ultimately administered at the county level, does include that information?
Also, have you considered how a mapping to an address would have helped in this case between two homeless people?
> It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
Did a quick web search because this seemed dubious. I think you're referring to a neighborhood that uses PO boxes. They absolutely can and do still "get their mail," they just need to go down the street for it instead of having it dropped 10 feet away from their front door. Less convenient, but not as if the system isn't there, and it would be trivial to have a mail carrier fill in that last half-mile if it made since for that community.
If you're a citizen, and you're correctly registered to vote. Additionally, for various reasons, US voter register quality is relatively poor - one study estimates that there's 6.1 million voters who have their name registered in more than one state (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/double-registration-and-strat...).
There are lots of people in the US who are not registered to vote. A few reasons:
* They are non-citizens.
* They are children.
* They are convicted felons and live in a state where they are not eligible to vote (either while serving their sentences or after).
* They are eligible, but have chosen not to register.
I'm sure there are other categories of people who are not registered to vote. But even just these represent more than a hundred million people, a good third of the population, at least.
You’re trying to put the cart before the horse with this argument. A voter registry under the current US system is not going to get higher quality data than the other existing government databases; in other words, it’s equally susceptible to fraud and abuse because it relies on weak authentication measures like phone bills or birth certificates.
The USPS is not a private business. They are the ones who "run" PO boxes. The acronym literally stands for "Post Office box," and they are in post offices.
I happen to know about this because I know someone local. They also told me about their new place, also on Hawai'i, where the mail instead arrives at a UPS office. (Not USPS. UPS.)
My point is that this new item (and others) make identity theft seem so extremely easy in the U.S. You just have to be determined. Doesn't take any particular skill to forge an electricity bill, doesn't take any skill to give someone else's social security number (which many apparent morons presume are secret), etc.
By moving the posts from "trivial" to "somewhat challenging", I think the U.S. would be better off.
As an example: If I wanted to assume a new identity in Sweden, to get rid of my criminal history, I'd have to make a very convincing fake I.D. card, and make sure to find a "victim" who is not going to sound the alarm when they notice. Basically, as soon as you register their name on your address, a confirmation letter will be sent to that person, which makes it so they can dispute it.
You could probably get away with it if you can find someone who moved abroad and forgot to notify the authorities. Even then, you'd have a really hard time getting a new passport or ID card in their name. It might work if you look a lot like them, and can drag their spouse, parent or sibling to the police station and have them vouch for you (with a valid ID card). I admit it's not impossible! But it certainly is not a thing that you ever hear about on the news.
That doesn't seem relevant to the homeless man in question.
I don’t know how common it is for someone to want to impersonate a homeless person, though, considering in Sweden you’d probably have to pay up that homeless person’s debt…
Ok, I’m slightly kidding here, but really this kind of long con is not a common mode of identity fraud in Scandinavia, probably because it’s harder to get away with.
The more common identify fraud here would be to assume the identity of someone with a stable economy and then try to take out payday loans in their name. Which a homeless person would be declined for, of course.
It gets rather involved and usually involves phishing the victim into signing something malicious using a digital ID. Not to mention no bank would agree to pay it out in cash. So it requires not only determination but skill as well.
"I don't know how common it is... not really a common mode of identity fraud... the more common identity fraud here would be..."
It was a homeless victim in this article. It seems like the improvements you're suggesting are entirely off-topic if you admit they wouldn't have helped here.
And if they'd moved to e.g. Finland[1], it wouldn't even have mattered if they'd forgot that -- the Finnish (tax etc) authorities would inform their Swedish counterparts when they register as a resident of their new country.
Source: Got a letter from Swedish Riksskatteverket (tax authority) after I registered at Helsinki Maistraatti (municipal registrar) telling me I'd been moved to "Emigrated" status, back in 1995 when I moved here.
[1]: Probably all the Nordic countries before then, all EU ones now.
Had Woods not been charged with identity theft in the first place Keirans' crime would have been victimless.
Oh, sure - misrepresenting who you are to businesses, law enforcement, potential partners. Regular victimless stuff.
It appears that the ongoing modern use was completely harmless except for the fact that the real owner of the name was brought into the legal system over it. But why did that happen?
You don't have to agree with my view on the identity theft to recognize that the question of why the real Mr. Woods was put under the thumb of the law is an interesting and relevant one.