dataloss (fringe) ID theft and US Law

[Henry Brown <hbrown () knology net>]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/6275264.html

Supreme Court to consider immigrant’s ID theft case
...
WASHINGTON — Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa, an undocumented worker from 
Mexico, made a curious and undeniably bad decision. After working under 
an assumed name for six years, he decided to use his real name and 
exchanged one set of phony identification numbers for another.

The change made his employer suspicious and the authorities were called 
in. The old numbers were made up, but the new ones he bought happened to 
belong to real people. Federal prosecutors said that was enough to label 
Flores-Figueroa an identity thief.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday on prosecutors’ 
aggressive use of a new law that was intended to strengthen efforts to 
combat identity theft. In at least hundreds of cases last year, workers 
accused of immigration violations found themselves facing the more 
serious identity theft charge as well, without any indication they knew 
their counterfeit Social Security and other identification numbers 
belonged to actual people and were not made up.

The government has used the charge, which carries a mandatory two-year 
minimum prison term, to persuade people to plead guilty to the lesser 
immigration charges and accept prompt deportation. Many of those 
undocumented workers had been arrested in immigration raids.

The case hinges on how the justices resolve this question: Does it 
matter whether someone using a phony ID knows that it belongs to someone 
else?

The government, backed by victims’ rights groups, says no. The “havoc 
wrecked on the victim’s life is the same either way,” said Stephen 
Masterson, a Los Angeles-based lawyer, in his brief for the victims’ 
rights groups.

On the other side, Flores-Figueroa and more than 20 immigrants’ rights 
groups, defense lawyers and privacy experts say that the law Congress 
passed in 2004 was aimed at the identity thief who gains access to 
people’s private information to drain their accounts and run up bills in 
their name. Surveys estimate that more than 8 million people in the 
United States are victims of identity theft each year.

Flores-Figueroa acknowledges he used fraudulent documents to get and 
keep his job at a steel plant in East Moline, Ill. But he “had no 
intention of stealing anyone’s identity,” his lawyers said in their 
brief to the court. He traveled to Chicago and bought numbers from 
someone who trades in counterfeit IDs.

Had he been caught while using the fictitious name and numbers that went 
with it, he could not have been charged with the more serious offense.

Federal appeals courts in St. Louis, which ruled against 
Flores-Figueroa, Atlanta and Richmond, Va., have come down on the 
government’s side. Appeals courts based in Boston, San Francisco and 
Washington, D.C., have ruled for defendants.

[...]

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