New techniques of identity theft pop up almost every day, and identity snatchers are becoming more prolific and smarter. They can copy your voice from a few brief words on the phone or recording, clone your whole appearance using AI, change your checks, change your address and phone number, and probably steal your health records and income tax returns in order to laugh about them.
It seems that thieves can take any scrap of information about any of us – such as our social security number or golf handicap - to discover all the rest of our personal details and fabricate a completely parallel identity. Using this doppelganger, they can dip into our bank accounts, discover our e-mail secrets, and buy all sorts of things we wouldn’t think of buying ourselves, like Rolex watches and video games. But they don’t follow through and live the other half of our lives. They don’t pay our bills for example, or take out the garbage, or feed the cats. What they are looking for is not the thrill of strutting around in the local post office pretending to be me, but money.
Identity Theft is what used to be called simply fraud, and has been around forever. The stolen or faked identity is a plot that goes all the way back to ancient Greece. Many entertaining books have been based on it – The Return of Martin Guerre and Brat Farrar, to name just two - both based on real events, and of course, Shakespeare’s plays are full of false or mistaken identities and disguises. Most identity thefts in fiction are personal dramas involving the pursuit of an inheritance. Now, the business has gone wholesale.
We have been warned about identity theft for more than thirty years, ever since we all became entangled in the stifling embrace of the Worldwide web. It has become a kind of universal permanent neurosis, and identity protection (sometimes real, sometimes false) has become an industry in itself. In the literal sense, identity theft is impossible. We are who we are. But it sounds deeply sinister, like those old science fiction movies where aliens take over people’s bodies. Unlike the old-fashioned body snatchers, it’s not your body they want – you can keep that – it’s an ethereal string of numbers, links, and passwords that lead to your money.
The assaults are so continuous and so cunning that it seems hardly worth the effort of protecting your identity anymore. It means living in a world of passwords, fingerprints, multiple identification checks, and permanent paranoia. At home, we started shredding documents as anxiously as if we were living in the White House. It might be better to have no identity worth stealing, or no identity at all, but only the homeless and the penniless are so lucky.
If someone steals your identity, it seems only fair that a caring government like ours should provide you with a new one, like a person in the Federal Witness Protection Program. This opens the doors to fantasy. I’ve thought about who I would like to be, and I’ve decided on a historical character, Michel de Montaigne. He lived a peaceful life in a chateau near Bordeaux in 16th-century France, with cats but without computers or passwords. He was one of the finest essayists who ever lived. If radio had been invented in his time, he would certainly have been on NPR. Nobody could steal his identity, because he was unique. That’s who I’d like to be.
