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Preventing ID fraud The Pearce household is getting a paper shredder to cut up all those documents: old bills, etc, that can be used by thieves to steal a person’s identity. It is, as this BBC report shows, a major problem. I do not imagine for a second that identify cards will significantly reduce this problem. In fact they may merely open up a whole new avenue for fraud. So, I am getting a shredder.
This looks like a decent website on where to get these machines.
(Those more fortunately blessed with space can of course just chuck this stuff on the bonfire.)
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As an avowed enemy of ID cards, biometric sub-cutaneous chips and the whole damned thing, I say, ‘Hear, hear,’ to the shredder idea.
But will your shredder take an ID card?
1) Make sure it is a crosscut model (it is too darn easy to rebuild documents otherwise).
2) always move the confetti into a large garbage bag and shake, and then move half into another bag, and dispose of the bags in two locations. It sounds paranoid, but if you’re serious about security.
Some of the biggest problems in security/privacy are people fail to understand basic principles of security. Here is some food for thought:
1) Security can and will be broken. It is not a matter of if, but when. best you can do is slow them down, or annoy them enough, that they go attack the poor schmuck who hasn’t thought about security.
2) More keys of different types, and values, layered to form multiple levels of security are ALWAYS better than a ‘better’ key.
3) keys are:
a) what you know (password/pin)
b) what you have (card/fob/key/ip addr/etc..)
c) what you are (biometrics)
4) biometrics are not only not infalable, they pose a whole set of possible security holes that people haven’t even started to consider. i.e what happens if you secure something with a retinal scan, but then by an accident lose your eyes. What happens to the stuff if you die. Etc….
5) never put your eggs in one basket. limit the potential of a security breach, by strictly limiting the access and resorces that lossing any one key, will give to an attacker.
6) change keys on a regular basis. It rightly bugs my credit card company, but every two years I without warning get them to issue me new card numbers, I change my locks, re-encrypt my data, and change any other pins, etc… that I don’t already change on a quarterly basis. It takes me a day to do all this, but I’ve never once fallen prey to any sort of fraud.
7) don’t get a key if you don’t need it. I carry 6 cards in my wallet, how many of you can say that? I have my drivers card, health card, three bank cards, and my VIP pass to the local strip club. I don’t carry (or have) any store credit cards, customer cards, etc….
Johnathan if you visit a Maplin shop they have some pretty good cross cut shredders for just under 20 pounds. Even better they can easily be taken apart and fixed when they get jammed up. If you really want to be secure the resulting waste composts quite well 🙂
Viking Direct do some good ones. I use a Fellowes PS-45c cross-cut shredder (£29.99) and works just fine, even cuts through staples etc. and does plastic cards just fine, so yes it will do the ID card.
I’d just like to say that I’m in favor of anything involving fire.
I have had a Fellowes Powershred 60cc for a few years now and am very happy with it. It has even digested CDs on a couple of occasions.
No doubt ID fraud is bad, but it is also necessary to keep a weather eye out for nonsense in reports like this.
The BBC reporters have forgotten (if they ever knew, or understood), that the Government figure of £1.7 billion “ID fraud” is worthless bollocks produced by the Home Office in order to set the scene for its own theft of your identity. See here for a deconstruction. See here [pdf] for the original “estimate” in all its absurd, unsubstantiable, innumerate glory.
There were a few bits that caused raised eyebrows here – such as the comments on offenders taking utility bills & bank statements during burglaries… So what precisely are we supposed to do with them? Putting every single tax, financial or related document in a safe seems somewhat silly at best. Similarly, not having address details in wallets – what, like a driving licence?
It’s been about 12 years now since anything with printing identifiable to me has been in any of my rubbish bags. It is all destroyed (usually fire) – and that includes things like barcode labels on couriered packages. When I started, people regarded me as nuts. Now…? Now they regard me as nuts for different reasons 🙂
If you can stand getting your hands gooey then homemade paper is also an option for your shredded material – using a (spare) food processor will mulch the shreds into even smaller pieces.
My second best option is to burn identifying material
(p.s. don’t forget credit card till receipts).
Guy, indeed. I am not going to parse the exact size of the BBC fraud figure, but I do hear genuine horror stories, and given the amount of paper flying around, it pays to be careful these days. One of my colleagues got badly done over a few days ago.
I feed all my sensitive documents to pigs. I then slaughter them and cook them, making them easier to mulch up in the logshredder I made out of an old Fiat Uno and a four Qualcast lawnmowers. After this I dry the remains and then crush them into a fine powder with crystallized japanese monk skulls, thereafter sifting them into four seperate Kevlar-bins which I then have jetisoned into space via certain ESA officials (who shall remain nameless) in Kazakhstan, of whom I have some very interesting webcam footage stored on a USB-drive I keep under a porno mag in my unlocked desk-drawer on the first-floor of my crap-town council-estate house at all times.
You just can’t be too careful these days.
emptymirror: your thoroughness is an example to us all.
I can’t find a price online for the Fellowes (Royal) Orca 9512x shredder I pulled out of a dumpster, but a set of replacement gears would cost $49 US. It will chew up the envelopes containing sample credit cards awaiting approval which I get several times a week. Another dumpster in the same office park once yielded a PC with an auto-login for a Certified Public Accountent’s Novell network.
This is a bit silly. There are ID cards all over the world without any of these problems you keep inventing in England. In fact, the ID card are really very useful. It replaces a lot of other documents and it serves as passport to travel to several countries around the world. I can’t understand what’s the point of your campaign. Just a question of staying in the other side, maybe.
Yes it is, it helps the state keep complete track of all that you do, where you go, what’s wrong with your health, when you drink, when you shop, when you go away on holiday, where your children go to school, how you vote (ok, maybe), how much you earn and a whole horde of other really joyful things you really do not want assorted public servants to all know about.
It’s very useful and very helpful indeed … so long as you are an authoritarian civil servant … but personally I favour forcibly embedded long-range RFID tags in the populace, its much easier to track them.
If someone else has any luck with our credit rating, they’re welcome to it. They can only improve our credit scores.
But, because we have employed people and have documents with social security numbers and wage information, we shred quite a bit.
That, and Kim takes a lot of our garbage to the city dump himself.
Following on from Pham’s posting:
1. If you have a compost heap/bin, put one of your bags of shredded paper in and stir vigorously.
2. Destroy old CDs/DVDs you’ve burned – especially obsolete backup discs. This means scraping off the topwhere the silver/gold/other coloured bit is and leaving clear plastic. If you’re doing this manually, e.g. using a cheap CD destroyer, do it inside a plastic bag or you’ll get little flakes everywhere.
3. Never, ever, get rid of a computer hard drive inside unless you’ve used the Gutmann method to completely wipe it. Avoid any disk wiping program that promises to use “US DoD standards” – this isn’t a snipe at the Americans, it’s because the oft-quoted standard is for memory chips and not hard drives.
It is because of people like this individual that we have the kind of intrusive state we now have. If ID cards really are as useful as this person claims, then they would and could exist in a free market. If I wanted to have one piece of plastic with all my details on it linked to a central computer, then presumably such things might be commercially viable.
But of course that is not what the ID card is about. As for claiming that there are “no problems” with these cards, that is complacent nonsense. At the very least, such systems cost money, which might be better spent on other things.
Of course, ID cards are not necessarily the biggest threat to liberty, but in my experience, the virtue of opposing things like ID cards is that it provides a strong symbol of what powers the state tries to exert over us. And the history of ID systems – as in Germany in the past – is a reminder that keeping close track of a population has significant costs for liberty.
I routinely destroy all documents relating to my identity. Alas I have done it so thoroughly that when I woke up the other day I couldn’t remember who I was.
I used to work at a law firm that was founded with the proceeds of a large lawsuit against a bank. The case went very well when a shredding vendor employee appeared in our lobby one day and said he had seen a news item about the case and perhaps we would like a file he had NOT shredded when he had been hired by the said bank. The file had lots of “smoking guns” to help us.
Needless to say when we hired shredding vendors we had someone in house stand over them.