Seisint (LexisNexis) is now reporting that 310,000 consumer profiles have been, in data protection parlance, repurposed. I haven't been keeping track, but the announcements seem more frequent and involve larger cohorts of compromised consumer profiles than at any time in the past five years since I started work in data protection (the W3C P3P 1.0 Spec and similar works). That leakage data does not include end-user profile capture by commodity operating system exploits, and as drone armies are known to exist as large as the Seisint leak, it seems safe to assume that on the order of 10^^7th consumer profiles will be compromised in the US in 2005.
The Republican members of House Rules Committee, voting on party lines, killed an amendment to S-256, the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005", offered by Representative Adam Schiff of Pasadena, which is the home of Cal Tech and the Jet Propulsion Lab. Representative Schiff's amendment created an exemption where bankrupty arose from criminal acts by third-parties, negligently concealed or facilitated by financial services entities, where the modus of the crime is financial exploitation of identity theft.
There is a class of persons that is of the same order of magnitude as the Seisint consumer profile class of persons who endure significant economic diminuation of their wages and fluctuating economic conditions and who are confronted with very unusual and complex employment contracts and who are , as a matter of law, denied collective barganing rights. This class of persons does not appear to be diminishing over time.
The Republican members of House Rules Committee, voting on party lines, killed an amendment to S-256, the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005", offered by Representative Marty Meehan of Lowell, where working-class women first entered the wage labor force in the mills, requiring financial services entities provide free credit counseling services to men and women who have recently left the military after serving in combat zones. Another amendment to protect disabled veterans who have developed financial problems due to their combat service met the same fate.
There is a class of persons whose medical costs total more than 50% of their annual income. The Republican members of House Rules Committee, voting on party lines, killed an amendment to S-256, the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005", offered by Representative Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, to protect persons in this class.
I make that to be between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 human tragedies per year made worse in so far as material want can make any human tragedy worse, affecting nuclear and extended and separated families, peers and up and down generations, just to put a few more percent of profits on MBNA's books.
It is why every day I forward my mortgage and credit card spam to Olympia Snowe (olympia@snowe.senate.gov).
Oh. Mssrs. Hastart's and Delay's House will vote on S-256 tomorrow.
Posted by EBW at April 13, 2005 09:24 PM | TrackBack