[widebody911]

Another chunk of the blame goes to the 'information industry' - companies are hungry for every last scrap of data, but really never gave a rat's ass about the security of it. A large part of this is simply ignorance - the made the (incorrect) assumption that nobody could ever get to their stuff, much in the same way home users seem to be totally and completely oblivious to the fact that once they hook up DSL/cable on their PC, they're exposed. Efforts to

Yet another chunk of blame goes to the merchants. Frequently they do little verification when accepting credit cards or opening store accounts. They're either minimum wage grunts who don't care, or greedy salespeople who don't want to jeapardize a sale.

Then there's the consumers themselves, who in general are clueless until it's too late. Studies have shown they'll gladly give out tons of personal information in exchange for trinkets of marginal value.

And you can't forget the lazy architects of this whole system, who based everything on your social security number, and then printing it on everything. Any WTF do agencies use the SSN as some sort of 'password'? It's easy to find a bill or statement that has someone's SSN, address and and everything else on it.