"Nice credit rating you have there. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it."

Via mazianni:

There are obvious steps that credit companies could take which really would reduce the risk of identity theft – such as taking further measures to verify identity, reducing sales of personal data, using PINs, etc.  However, credit companies won’t support measures which reduce their own profits.  “Identity theft could be made as obsolete a crime as cattle rustling or high-seas piracy,” reported MONEY Magazine several years ago.  “…[It's] now possible to request a freeze on your credit report, stopping anyone from granting new credit without your approval.  Why isn’t this brutally simple and effective solution more widespread?  Simply put, it disrupts the free flow of credit information on which consumer lenders and data sellers depend.”

When credit companies play both sides of the game, there are reduced incentives for them to build secure systems.  Rather, they have found a way to profit from crime.  By fighting consumer protection measures and selling personal data, credit companies increase consumers’ risk of identity theft.  As long as credit companies can scare enough people into paying them for “protection,” they can actually make money from the results of their own recklessness – thus passing the costs of identity theft on to consumers or merchants, and reducing or even eliminating financial incentives for genuine, systematic improvements.

(Emphasis mine.)

In other news:

• Mission creep on the airlines, from the LA Times via bruce_schneier
• From SecurityWire, the costs of data breaches are rising.
• From the LA Times, although President Obama has signed an executive order to close Guantanamo, he's pretty much OK with the practice of "rendition".
• Bank of America apparently spent as much as $10 million of its Federal bailout money on an 850,000-square-foot Superbowl entertainment sideshow.
• And the latest Stupid Teen Prank:  Abusing Internet phone services to make spoofed 911 calls.  They call it "swatting", because they can usually get a SWAT team response against their randomly-chosen victims.  The last line in the article is ... well, the only question is whether the speaker is simply lying through his teeth, or stupid almost beyond belief.

(Oops.  Rendition article link fixed.)