Half the Country

You might as well publish your own social security number online—at least then you’d know where it was. But 143 million Americans just had theirs stolen by Equifax, which is the joke. Equifax is a security company. A security company got hacked in the most basic, humiliating way possible.

The hackers got social security numbers, names, birthdates, addresses. The foundation of identity. Plus about 209,000 credit card numbers and an unknown number of driver’s licenses. Everything you need to become someone else. And they got it from the one place that’s supposed to be safeguarding exactly that information.

The numbers are staggering. Yahoo’s breach was bigger in raw count—over a billion accounts—but this is different. A social security number is the closest America has to a permanent national ID. It’s how the government tracks you, how creditors verify you, how you prove you’re you. A billion email accounts? Annoying. 143 million social security numbers? That’s 143 million people whose entire financial identity is now for sale.

Half the country is compromised. The other half will be, eventually. Every year there’s a breach bigger than the last, systems more integrated, more points of failure, more ways for something to go catastrophically wrong. We built this digital world to make things easier, faster, safer. And now the safest option is to assume everything will be stolen, everything will be exposed, and there’s nothing you can actually do about it.

Maybe that’s the point where the old system wins. Paper records, filing cabinets, no network to hack. You couldn’t access your information from anywhere, couldn’t do anything instantly, but you also couldn’t have it stolen by someone on the other side of the world. The security through obsolescence of the analog world. Not foolproof, but at least you could watch it.