M. E. Kabay

Identity theft has been a major and growing problem in the United States for several years. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a "nonprofit consumer organization with a two-part mission -- consumer information and consumer advocacy" has an excellent survey page with pointers to years of published studies and point-form summaries of many of their findings. 

For example, they point to valuable research reports from Javelin Strategy & Research, where one can find dozens of reports on fraud (some costing as much as $3,000 but some available free). The "2009 Identity Fraud Survey Report: Consumer Version" dated February 2009 has the following key points:

Do you ever simultaneously feel like an idiot and also grateful that you've done at least something – anything – right?

Over the semester break between Christmas and the middle of January, I began the move from Windows XP Pro to Windows 7 on my main system in my home office. For many years, I've maintained two parallel tower computers, MAIN and SPARE, each running the almost all the same applications (yes, I buy two licenses for the software when the end-user license agreements don't allow multiple installations). Using Microsoft SyncToy, I synchronize MAIN to an external 250 GB USB disk drive every morning (all sensitive data are stored in volumes encrypted using PGP Desktop Home v9.12.0 on both systems and on the external drive). Norwich University specific data are synchronized to the NU-supplied laptop computer on which I work when I am at the university. In the evening, I synchronize the laptop files to the 250GB drive and then to both MAIN and SPARE. An automated backup creates an encrypted incremental backup every night which then gets stored on the MAIN, the external drive, and the SPARE. At the end of every month, all the incrementals are also copied to a 1TB external drive for long-term storage.

The need for protection against cyber crime is ever increasing, especially considering the volume of personally identifiable information (PII) and financial transactions which corporations and financial institutions manage on a daily basis. Moreover, cyber crime is often a transnational threat, creating even more difficulty for law enforcement to pursue cyber criminals. The added complexities of international inconsistencies with respect to laws pertaining to PII exacerbate the problem, and current cyber crime legislation in key areas around the world currently does not permit virtual self defense.

Chrisopher Kuner, in his paper "Internet Jurisdication and Data Protection Law: An International Legal Analysis," summarized the problems in his abstract as follows:

The popular press is full of articles braying news about Internet addiction; try typing "Internet addiction" into the search field of your favorite search engine and start browsing. A Google search in mid-December brought up 768,000 English, French and German pages on the topic.

You've won . . .  an Internet addiction