With infuriating credulousness, the BBC has taken as its top story (on radio as well as the web) the launch of a report from the 'All-Party Committee on Identity Fraud':

The All Party Group on Identity Fraud said a tsar was needed to co-ordinate the work being done by the government, police and private sector. The MPs also called for the government to make the public and businesses more aware of identity fraud and how they can avoid becoming victims. [...] In their report the MPs also recommended police are given the resources to employ dedicated identity fraud officers. They said tougher sanctions should be placed on organisations that put people's personal information in danger.

(Such as the Identity and Passport Service, local planning authorities, the Department of Health, ContactPoint, DVLA...and all the other branches of the caring data-sharing state? Just asking.)

So far so hopeless. The usual call for for more officials and more powers rather than any attempt to analyse the problem. The committee itself is not quite that stupid, even if it has not taken a particularly fresh look. It rightly blames the indifference of institutions and the foolishness of the public for much of it.

What is really damaging to the BBC's credibility and to the honesty of public debate is what is next.

The crime costs the economy about £1.7bn a year, according to government estimates, with 171,488 cases coming to light in the UK during 2006. Recent surveys suggest as many as one in four people may have been affected by identity theft.

"Surveys" by whom? I wonder if the reporter knows. I can guess: Experian. But I can not readily find where this headline comes from. It appears in a more nuanced version on the National Identity Fraud Prevention Week site as...

"A quarter of the UK population has been affected by identity fraud or knows somebody who has."

My emphasis. Not remotely the same thing. I know several Catholics quite well. My catechumenacy is a distant unlikelihood.

YouGov did a proper poll a year ago on behalf of NPower and found one in ten claimed to have been a victim in some way - without themselves providing a rigorous definition or checklist. The difference ought to indicate to anyone with the remotest curiosity that something is screwy about all these figures. You have to be suspicious of anything described as a "survey" - do BBC reporters not learn that in training?

And worse, they persist in quoting the entirely spurious "government figure" for identity fraud of £1.7bn a year. Anyone working in this field ought not just to ask, "What is the source for this figure?" and then check it. They should know that the Home Office report has been utterly discredited...
See here, or, in more detail, here.

... but it keeps coming back time and time again, as if you can make a fact by repeating a lie often enough.

There is no agreed definition of 'identity fraud'. There are few useful figures, and in the circumstances there can hardly be. Meanwhile several interested parties - Experian, the only organisation linked to from the story on the BBC site, being one, and the Home Office being another - are engaged in a sustained campaign of hype for their own benefit. That is a scandal in which you would expect the news media to take an interest.

It is (at least) disappointing that the BBC apparently uses no critical judgement or background knowledge - or even Google - in reporting these things, but sees fit to reprint the gush of press-releases, as if it were a cheap fashion magazine handling a cosmetic company's announcement of the latest face-cream. For all its admitted corporate culture problem in editorial matters, this is one of the world's most widely trusted news sources (which, unless you take Fox or Xinhua to be gospel, you may say only shows how appallingly untrustworthy the others are). But it is starting to give the impression of not caring about the integrity of basic, readily-checkable, facts.