White House Task Force to Release ID Theft Plan

It's taken almost a year, but a special task force appointed by President Bush last May will release a plan on Monday to combat the growing threat of identity theft. Millions of Americans have had their personal information exposed through leaky government databases, stolen computers and private companies who fail to safeguard information from data thieves.

The task force, which is headed by embattled U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, released an interim report (.pdf) last September that offered up several recommendations that are commendable only for their obviousness: make sure government agencies are on the same page, reevaluate use of SSNs, have a bunch of workshops to talk about the problem, standardize complaint forms, blah blah blah. Just hurry up and do something already.

The only interesting recommendation the task force made was the following:

"Recommendation 6: To allow identity theft victims to recover for the value of time they spend in attempting to remediate the harms suffered, the Task Force recommends that Congress amend the criminal restitution statutes to allow for restitution from a criminal defendant to an identity theft victim, in an amount equal to the value of time reasonably spent by the victim attempting to remediate the intended or actual harm incurred from the identity theft offense."

Let's hope the full report today is useful, especially considering the Senate Commerce Committee is marking up a data protection bill this week that is similar to legislation the committee passed two years ago. The Identity Theft Prevention Act would require the FTC to set standards to protect sensitive, personal information and to verify the identity of third parties seeking the information.

The bill would also require any business that fails to safeguard sensitive personal information to notify customers of data breaches and, potentially, pay a penalty of up to $11,000 per violation per day. The bill would also allow consumers to place a security freeze on their credit reports.

UPDATE: The task force dropped its report today, a 120-page tome that looks like someone actually put some work into it. The government unveiled this website today. Threat Level has more on the report here.

Photo: David Goehring