Identity theft to be featured in new TV series

[BlueMTexpat]

Perhaps not surprisingly, it is not a US TV series, at least not yet, although ABC is apparently developing its own pilot. The program will be aired in the UK on ITV1, beginning tonight, and will be a six-part series. The series will contain at least one actor familiar to US viewers: Aiden Gillen from the very highly regarded cable series, "The Wire."

The Guardian attracted my attention to this today. "Identity theft's scary drama: 'They take your skin and do something terrible' What one writer learned about a very modern crime while researching a new TV series"

Ed Whitmore bought some logs in Arizona but never got to see them. "Somebody used my credit card. I had a hard time convincing Visa it wasn't me," he recalls.
<snip>
"The question of who we are beyond our DNA, our fingerprints, our job, our name, is at the heart of this show. What defines us?
"Somehow there's something more profound than just a crime. There's a sense of violation, of taking someone else's self and becoming them. It's like Goldilocks and the Three Bears – who's been sitting in my chair? They've borrowed your skin and done something terrible."
<snip>
At 38, Whitmore, whose previous credits include Waking The Dead and He Kills Coppers, is about to move to America to write a separate drama for ABC, currently called Hunter Gatherer. He won't be posting any updates on Facebook. "And none of my passwords have anything to do with my mother's maiden name. That's the golden no-no.
"Paper shredding is the one change I've made. But it's easy to get lazy. It's Sunday evening, life's too short, you just stick it in the bin and hope for the best. But if you're unlucky, the price is huge."
<snip>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2010/jul/05/identity-theft-tv-drama/print

And, about that paper-shredding thing-y, today's article also referred to a 2006 Guardian article that literally caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up straight because I am a fairly frequent flyer.
"Q. What could a boarding pass tell an identity fraudster about you? A. Way too much A simple airline stub, picked out of a bin near Heathrow, led Steve Boggan to investigate a shocking breach of security"

<snip>
The TSA said it would continue its passenger pre-screening programme in yet another guise after it had been audited and added that it had plans to introduce more security, privacy and redress for errors - confirming critics' suspicions that no such systems were yet in place. To the consternation of privacy activists in Europe, the TSA also spelled out plans for its desire for various US government departments to share information, including yours and mine.
<snip>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/may/03/theairlineindustry.idcards/print

Here is TSA's "Secure Flight" program in its latest guise. http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/layers/secureflight/index.shtm

And here is a recap of events leading to the SFP's roll-out last year. http://epic.org/privacy/airtravel/secureflight.html

While my lfe is generally an open book and I certainly understand that there are legitimate national security concerns that warrant gathering basic information, I still have issues about ANYTHING that was begun in the Bush-Cheney era under the guise of gathering "national security" information, particularly since there are way too many holdovers from B-C that are seeded throughout the civil service.

And also because it appears that there still could be a real issue with identity theft.

*******
Apologies in advance. This is the first time that I have ever posted a thread.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. I was at the bank one day... activating a card, and on the counter

there was a brochure that was a tutorial on how not to have your id stolen. On the cover of the brochure was a plain fingerprint from one of the tellers, perhaps the teller I was working with... and I said to her, isn't that the last thing you would want on an ID theft prevention brochure, the other had a chuckle and concurred... it was a funny moment in banking history for me.

[BlueMTexpat]

2. LOL ... but I hope that it just remained a funny moment.

I once had my identity stolen from two credit cards while I was travelling in Israel and didn't discover it until I received the bills. American Express never even questioned my protestations and immediately reimbursed my account. I love that about them.
But it took literally forever to get the Citibank Visa folks, even after I had been a cardmember in excellent standing for nearly 20 years, to admit that I could not possibly have made the charges, having left the country even before the purchases took place and proving that the so-called "signature" was not by any reasonable stretch of the imagination anywhere near a facsimile of mine. I finally gave up on the Visa altogether and cancelled the card. It was only after the cancellation that they allowed that a mistake had been made. But I got a new Visa card from a different bank altogether and never looked back.