> He was consistent and clear when he talked about his identity in California courtrooms as he tried to fight the charges on the grounds that he really was the man whose name he was accused of stealing. But Mr. Woods made other remarks that seemed to amplify the doubts. In court appearances, transcripts show, he would sometimes interrupt the judge, talk about historical figures or assert that he had tried to warn the F.B.I. in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks.
I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
I was once dragged to a hospital by police because they were looking for a drug smuggler that was not me. They told hospital staff I was a druggie criminal with drugs up my ass, as I sat there in cuffs.
It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why.
I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication...
I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.
Something similar happened to one of our sons. Unfortunately he has a history of drug use that landed him in legal trouble. The local police recognize him. He had a minor fender bender. The police tested him for alcohol there, clean. But then given history they detained him and took him to the nearest ER for a battery of drug tests -- for which the hospital billed our son, and for which our son is on the hook. It's bonkers.
> After being chased by police for stealing clothing from a Walmart, Seacat barricaded himself in a house at 4219 South Alton Street in Greenwood Village, Colorado. By the time Seacat was finally extracted from the premises, the house had been destroyed by law enforcement in their efforts to flush him out. The homeowner—Leo Lech—filed a lawsuit against the municipality for compensation, but was ruled against by the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; he appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the court declined to hear the case.
The same wiki article also describes the absurdness of the whole thing:
> At 10:38 pm, SWAT entered the house and used a stun grenade to conceal their movements [...] During the next 10.2 hours, a Lenco BearCat was driven through the front door, tear gas[1] and 40 mm grenades were repeatedly launched inside, shots were fired upon the house, and explosives were detonated to destroy several exterior walls.
Just amazing multiple people (the authorities) were present and none of them stopped to think "gee, that house is somebody's home".
That's a different situation, because at least there it could be argued the damage was ultimately Seacat's fault for engaging in a shoot out with law enforcement on someone else's private property; the police were just doing their job apprehending an armed suspect. With a drug test that comes back negative, the person being tested clearly isn't at fault.
That said, I think it does probably make sense for there to be some sort of financial incentive for police to not create more collateral damage than necessary. Like maybe the damages should come out of the department budget initially and then they could get a judge to decide how much of that was the suspect's fault and recover that amount from them, assuming they can pay? Policing is a social service and I don't think externalizing the costs of social services onto innocent bystanders is a good idea; it makes the agency less accountable for the monetary costs they incur if those costs aren't tracked as part of their budget, and it's bad PR.
> At 10:38 pm, SWAT entered the house and used a stun grenade to conceal their movements, but were driven back outside by gunshots (though criminalists would later establish that they were not fired upon). During the next 10.2 hours, a Lenco BearCat was driven through the front door, tear gas and 40 mm grenades were repeatedly launched inside, shots were fired upon the house, and explosives were detonated to destroy several exterior walls.
Whether or not police have any imperative to consider the impact of their actions, this situation was clear incompetence and reckless destruction. They're just as much doing their job by forcing drug tests on random people. The person may not have been on drugs, but all police would have to do is say they saw "erratic behavior".
> Like maybe the damages should come out of the department budget initially and then they could get a judge to decide how much of that was the suspect's fault and recover that amount from them, assuming they can pay?
This is just a different bad incentive; it incentivizes police to completely ignore situations or to find someone to hold accountable. Just extend the logic to the other expenses of an investigation- hourly pay, overtime, materials, forensics. Making a criminal pay for their own arrest is a terrible idea.
Police should pay for all the drug tests they demand, and for all the damages incurred in the process of investigating or arresting a suspect. Those things are not related to the crime itself, like a fine is. They are part of the cost of investigation and operation.
> This is just a different bad incentive; it incentivizes police to completely ignore situations
If the societal cost of enforcement exceeds the societal cost of non-enforcement, then perhaps they should ignore the situation.
> or to find someone to hold accountable
This is why it would have to be decided by a judge as part of sentencing. If they're actually accountable then why shouldn't they be held to that?
> Just extend the logic to the other expenses of an investigation- hourly pay, overtime, materials, forensics. Making a criminal pay for their own arrest is a terrible idea.
I don't necessarily disagree, but just to play devil's advocate: why? It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it? (One argument I can think of is that for small crimes the cost of enforcement may greatly exceed the bounds of reasonable punishment for the offense, but what about when that's not the case?)
> Those things are not related to the crime itself
I'd argue exchanging gunfire with police is definitely a big part of the crime committed in this case. The shoplifting that started the encounter is practically irrelevant compared to that.
Broadly agree with you and would like to add that if in this particular case the department had expected to foot the bill for their destruction I imagine they would have readily found a slower but cheaper approach. They went with the fast, expedient, and above all exciting (for them) approach precisely because they knew they wouldn't be the ones paying for the aftermath.
> It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it?
How about transparency and uniform enforcement of the law? Fines should be formally codified, not implicit and variable depending on incidentals internal to that particular investigation. The legislature is always free to direct those proceeds wherever they would like.
Are you actually legally on the hook to pay? Or are they just going after you because they think they have a better chance of getting you to pay than the government?
I'm assuming you and the son of the other commenter are US citizens? Quite frankly the way the US operated on most things absolutely baffles me. In the UK were the same thing to happen to you the police would be paying the bill, but obviously we have the NHS so it actually pays. The NHS might be broken but I am thankful every time I hear an American health story!
Well, the NHS might be better than what the US has, but that doesn't mean it's good.
So Britain as a whole spends roughly half (in terms of percentage of GDP) on healthcare as the US. That includes both public and private expenditure. At similar health outcomes.
Now Singapore spends roughly half of what Britain spends (in terms of percentage of GDP), and our population is no worse off for it.
You need to look at PPP-adjusted per-capita stats, and also accept that there are limitations in a simple measure of "health outcomes" (e.g. average life expectancy)
What you can see though, is a cluster that vaguely fits "spend more, better life expectancy", with two outliers:
1. The USA, massively outspending every other country, but having same life expectancy as China spending a tenth of what it does
2. South Africa, spending roughly as much as Mexico or Columbia, but 10 years less life expectancy. I suspect it needs more targeted spending with its HIV crisis, rather than measuring average spend vs average life expectancy
Another thing to consider about South Africa is that wealth inequality is insanely high; it seems very plausible to me that most money is spent on like the rich 30% of population, and the majority of the country is basically on Namibian levels of care.
Public healthcare expenditure is also likely to be wasteful; governmental corruption and languishing infrastructure is a comparatively big problem there (compare power infrastructure, rail network, postal service), so the pure dollar value spent on healthcare is systematically off.
Thanks for the link btw-- I would not have expected such a clear trend in this, especially given how noisy metrics like life expectancy are; very interesting.
The GDP per capita in Singapore is roughly double that of the UK, so health spending per capita is similar. I cant find latest figures, but it seems it is somewhere around 20% higher spend in UK.
On the other hand, there are EU countries such as lithuania and estonia, that spend less than half per capita of Singapore, and are ranked with a higher healthcare index.
Depends on how you measure. Lots of health spending is labour costs, and our labour costs are higher. So percentage of GDP relatively closely tracks percentage of total working time.
Also perhaps our more enlightened policies are helping us achieve that higher per capita GDP?
> Also perhaps our more enlightened policies are helping us achieve that higher per capita GDP?
Singapore’s GDP per-capita is likely fairly inflated as it doesn’t correct for the effect of multinational tax planning by large corporations on the GDP statistics , unlike say Ireland.
Well, im not measuring anything. Im just saying that the spend per capita is mostly equivalent for Singapore and UK.
No idea why you are equating enlightenment to per-capita GDP. I don’t quite understand that equation. Singapore may have a high per capita GDP, but that isn't resulting in a higher median individual incomes. Given the extremely high cost of living, the purchasing power of an average Singaporean is actually comparable to that of someone in the less affluent EU countries that have 1/4 of the GDP per capita and equivalent (or better!) healthcare. So while the GDP figure looks impressive, it doesn’t fully reflect the financial reality for most residents. Is that your "enlightened policies" at work?
You can also get cheap dental and haircuts in Mexico: what's Singapore's purchasing power parity compared to the UK? Maybe not an extreme difference since Singapore has has such a high GDP or even worse, but if it is more that can explain a lot even for advanced services.
Purchasing power parity depends a lot on what basket you compare.
Eg owning a car or cigarettes are very expensive here. But eating out starts much cheaper than in the UK. (There's no upper limit in either place, of course.)
Hmm...there are other countries on that list...who spend more relative to their GDP. So not exactly "the world's ATM".
And of course the rest of the world finances the US economy and US debt by virtue of the US dollar being both the currency of international trade and reserve currency. And it is reserve currency by virtue of being the currency of international trade.
That is a far, far greater monetary value than the aid given out.
Which you can also tell by what happens to you if you start to use another currency for trade. "Would you like some regime change to go with that?" Or how the US fights the Euro tooth and nail, including sabotage.
There must be a whole bootleg health system by now in the shadows , that is single payer and non-hostile/helping. Wait till the debtdoctor passes then go to the real one in some back alley .
>I'm surprised the police doesn't have to pay for them. It's not that the tests were medically necessary.
If only it were so simple. Medicine can be quite nasty politically at times, internally and externally, and these mandatory examinations are the currency of really screwing someone if that's what you want. Psych especially, part of the theme of the original catch-22 book.
A lot of the laws are at first pass related to psych - "harm to self or others". That earns you a free non-voluntary trip to the hospital. The part where it gets nasty is when words get twisted, when ulterior motives exist, when the accuser possesses some authority - such that an "unsafe to self or others" argument is put forth. Situations where the person needs help, but perhaps won't seek it out on their own, thus the state must intervene. In this narrative, our police officers said, "harm to self, drugs in digestive tract, may rupture and cause death, not willing to seek medical care for fear of losing drug transport and/or prosecution, please treat so they don't rupture"
The victim of such a crime now has a choice - pay a bunch of money to the hospital to clear the bill, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to get the police to pony up responsibility. It's happened to me too along the lines of "the government made big mistake and caused problems for you, you can take ownership of the false accusations, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to have them wiped". Often in our society there's the suffering of being a victim, then the victim tax on top of that
This is why we need constitutional amendments to make the police better. I mean there’s shit like this, and then asset forfeiture (legalized theft). Shit like this should be non-partisan.
I read the piece on your blog viewing your life story from various perspectives. This story about your son seems a good example of those facets for him; in this case, the hospital situation piling on top of existing challenges. What a scam. Best of luck to both of you.
In medicine, for minor procedures such as blood tests or ECG, there is the notion of implied consent. Just holding out your arm for the blood test is implied consent. To refuse, you might say, I am of sound mind and I do not consent to this procedure. Or, you are performing this procedure without my consent and against my wishes. I'm not a lawyer,and not in the US, but this is how it generally operates for practical reasons. Written informed consent is required for more invasive or significant procedures.
That's despicable. What a clearly grotesque thing for a cop to be able to do, forcing people to involuntarily spend their own money to accomplish police business. If they want the tests, the least they should do is pay for them!
It's pretty bizarre. Surely if spending money is free speech as per Citizens United, then the right to remain silent also includes the right not to spend money on an investigation against yourself.
Apart from all the other common sense reasons why this is absurd
Ah, but you not only have the right to remain silent- since a 2013 supreme Court ruling, you also have to know that you have the right to remain silent, and you have to say that you know and that you wish to remain silent.
>In a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court ruled today that a potential defendant's silence can be used against him if he is being interviewed by police but is not arrested (and read his Miranda rights) and has not verbally invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.
Yes see Ashley Cervantes v US, nearly identical case to my circumstances and same people but even worse abuse. She lost as doctors were considered acting as non medical pseudo police for the purposes of challenging the care and considered purely medical actors when challenging the police search.
Catch 22 you lose. She was sent bill by same hospital. I contacted her lawyers for my own purposes, they said they'd given up these cases.
The result wasn't what you're describing. The plaintiff was suing in federal court, with a constitutional cause of action. The defendants argued, and the court decided that the plaintiff has a medical malpractice cause of action in state court, which is appropriate for her to pursue (at least before a federal court will rule in her favor).
> doctors were considered acting as non medical pseudo police for the purposes of challenging the care
What does that mean? They are either providing the services on behalf of the police, so their pseudo employer needs to pay them, or they are medical professionals providing a care you did not consent to or requested, in which case they should charge the party that requested the services, again, the police.
In both cases, you were not the contractual beneficiary of the services, so you own nothing. The fact that your blood and orifices are involved is purely incidental, any evidence resulting from this unnecessary medical act can only be used against you, so you would have no reason to want it.
What are the actual legal theories by which they're trying (/succeeding) at enforcing these bills? Anybody can send anybody a bill for anything, that does not mean it is valid or legally enforceable.
In general I find discussions of this topic very frustrating because everybody stops short of visiting the if and how of the fraudulent bills actually having an effect. I can certainly believe there are corrupt or dubious ways they get collected on, but those mechanisms need to be focused on and then eliminated as an obvious first step of healthcare reform.
Usually the hospital has you sign something during intake that says "I acknowledge that if the insurance fails to pay this bill then I am the final guarantor." And so without that signed documentation the detainee shouldn't be on the hook for the bill. So asking the hospital to present your signature on that document or escalating until someone can provide that or indicate that they don't have it should be enough. This is a situation where personal legal insurance might be beneficial because for about $30 a month you get a law office you can call and ask questions, for example about the legality of the local hospital's billing practices for detainees.
Yes I refused to sign anything so they just send it to a carousel of debt collectors who give up with resistance but then resell it to someone else whom hasn't received a cease and desist yet, then I must start over fighting it. This happens roughly annually for several years now.
The thing they have you sign is a single-party "consent" and not a two-party "contract", implying it's merely informing you about what they are able to do to you, rather than asking you to assent to a purportedly mutual agreement.
I cross out all that unilateral nonsense about being financially responsible (as well as other types of nonsense), and have never been balked at. Worst case is these days when they ask me to sign a contextless touchpad, and then they roll their eyes like it's some big imposition when I ask for a hard copy instead so I can "review".
So I don't think that paperwork is directly involved with how the medical industry has come to run on billing fraud shakedowns. Hence asking for actual mechanics / outcomes of what happens when people are "sent a bill" and don't do the implied thing of just paying it.
Also, have you ever talked to an attorney - especially asking them preemptive or against-the-status-quo questions? In my experience they generally tell you to just go with the flow. If they advise you to do anything else and it blows up, then they themselves could be on the hook.
It lives in one of those grey areas of "nobody has been murdered over it brutally enough to make national news so it persists" just like all the other abuse the police do. At least they don't suffocate people as much anymore...
One day I got a call at work from my (now previous) partner. "What's up?" "You need to come home, we need to talk."
I duly do.
"So I went to the doctor earlier today. Had an issue. They swabbed me and told me I have an STD. So they did a full STD and blood test, we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, who did you cheat on me with?"
"Uh, nobody."
Back and forth, arguing, etc. Me insisting I'll go get tested.
The doctor rings back the next day. "We reviewed and looked again under the scope, and you do not have an STD, just a yeast infection."
Relationship relief.
A month later, get a call from the clinic: "So about this bill for $290 for a full workup and testing, can you pay that today?"
No. Not a chance. You not only misread a test, but you also gave my girlfriend factually inaccurate information that you knew was going to be controversial. On the strength of that, you told her, "If it wasn't you, you really need to get fully tested if you don't know where he's been."
And then you want to send me the bill for the battery of tests you ordered because you misread a culture? No.
Doesn't matter. It's not like they can make you pay.
I refused to pay for medical "services" I never asked for. They sent the debt to collections. Collections had no argument other than that they would really like it if I paid. My credit score was unaffected.
This is what confuses me about so many of these "horror stories" about cancelling things like gym memberships or NYT subscriptions. You can't just say to someone "you owe me X because my policy says you do". You only owe someone something if you are legally or morally obliged to do so, and there are certainly lots of cases where (it seems to me) you are neither.
For people from most places outside the US, I bet such stories from US's medical system sound totally crazy. It is crazy for a medical system to function like this charging somebody for being involuntarily treated, and even more for no medical cause.
What would have happened, to the hospital's part, if they had declared that you were not intoxicated and you should not have been brought to the hospital, and sent you on your way? Would the police have had to justify dragging you to the hospital, and pay for your examination? I suspect that going along with the police may have been the decision with the simplest and most profitable outcome for everybody (apart from you) and that the hospital side was incetivised to go along with police's story rather than against, but I am not sure how things there typically work in such cases.
There was a highly publicized case a few years back where the police entered a hospital and ordered a nurse to draw a blood sample for an unconscious patient who had been in a car accident. They had no warrant and she refused per hospital policy (and law). The cops roughed her up pretty bad and arrested her.
Also good to point out that the reason they -rushed- to the hospital to do this was that the person who had hit them was an off-duty cop who was drunk and had run a red light, and they were looking for something, anything, to pin on this guy instead as being responsible, rather than the cop.
Said unconscious patient later died, if I recall correctly, too.
so now the people wielding all the power are risking death? sounds like an even more powerful incentive to cover stuff up extra hard and shoot all witnesses, etc.
What they ended up doing was getting a warrant AFTER the fact, then the smartest of the doctors waited to sign his chart until after that. Right after I was served the warrant I was released, that was the culpability they needed to save their asses.
The nursing board then used the warrants signed AFTER the nurses charts to shield nurses from my malpractice complaints. The board argued essentially nurses are performing a police search if told to execute a search, thus it's nonmedical search. However if you challenge the police, they argue it is medical care not a police search thus you can't challenge that angle either.
You should probably still try to sue each medical practitioner individually. Even in the 1980s, a doctor wouldn't interfere with something like preventing a mule from private lavatory use. If a new generation is dumb, there's only one recourse offered for fixing them.
Lawyers involved told me they'd given up and wouldn't take my case. The trouble is it is medical when you challenge the police search, and nonmedical when you challenge the medical care. The judges and police created a catch 22.
I live in a country in the EU where conversion therapy is illegal. One of my trans friends was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital, got emotionally and physically abused (no food, tied to bed), was forced into the male wing of the institute despite being legally a female and had "conversion therapy" performed on her against her will.
It's no secret that lgbt people and prisoners are being mistreated by medical professionals globally.
Being skeptical about authority figures is always a good thing, it always surprise me to see populations so deferent to them like americans are to law enforcement.
Yes, because they assume that the license to kill with paid leave will be used against someone they don't like. It's a real "fix your hearts" situation. Watch this play out in the current fiasco with USAID.
And I think in the vast majority of cases, it's only used against actual criminals. You only hear about these sensationalized cases because it's out of the ordinary and not at all common.
Sure, but there's a huge systematic bias in how a lot of surveys and research are carried out. If everyone is sampling from e.g. people who answer a phone call, their results will be consistent but hugely biased.
You haven't been to a sports even in the US right?
The general population in the US is very much in favor of law enforcement and the more "end of the world" news they consume the more they think there should be MORE law enforcement and they should have even more power.
> You haven't been to a sports even in the US right?
I have, as it happens. But many people never do; the people who go to sports games might be a similar group to the people who answer phone calls, but they're not a representative sample of the whole population by any means.
Law enforcement literally everywhere has a license to kill. They dress it up with a bunch of process to keep it from getting used on a whim but that is literally the point of law enforcement, to kill you if you don't comply with the will of the state as enforced through them.
Authority bias is very real, very problematic, and very well documented. As a consequence, those in authority must always be held to a high standard. Always doubt an assertion by authority unless accompanied with sufficient evidence.
Because there's probably a lot more to the story, and all the details that have not been provided probably make OP look worse and the police/hospital staff look better.
I have a cousin who is paranoid schizophrenic. He makes all kinds of wild claims about all sorts of things: family abuse, screwed over by employers/landlords, beaten up by the police for no reason, the people living in the crawl space are poisoning him, etc, etc... Many of them are provably false e.g. those family members didn't live there at the time of the allegation, the body cam clearly shows him charging the police and then trying to grab their guns while they try to wrestle him into handcuffs, nobody in the crawl space, etc. The problem is that it'd take a full time detective to track down all his various claims. It's very sad that as a vulnerable person he probably is sometimes taken advantage of by people, but at the same time he's never been compliant with medicine and therapy for more than a couple months at a time, despite extensive support. It's kind of a no win situation.
It is a weird twist on the fairy tale. What if you had a medical condition that compelled you to cry “Wolf” all the time? Obviously the townsfolk can’t spend all their time responding to false wolf sightings, but there is no lessoned to be learned when The Boy actually believes he sees a wolf every day.
I have been close to multiple people who made similar paranoid allegations while psychotic. It is sometimes hard for people to understand the allegations are false or part of an illness. This can include judges and mental health professionals.
Someone I know who has a psychotic illness was telling people “my dad is having an affair”. And people didn’t believe her because they just assumed it was another one of her delusions
Then guess what we find out a few months later? Yep, her father really is having an affair, and her mother has just discovered it and is now filing for divorce over it
He was for a while. It was partially successful at controlling his issues, but after a while he stopped coming to the door when social services came around each month to give him his injection. Social Services doesn't have the ability to bust down your door and inject you against your will.
>I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
(Un)fortunately, there is a quite famous experiment
>The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted, but acted normally from then onward. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication.
> For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions
How did anyone volunteer for this? Isn't there a risk of actually getting stuck at the asylum, or failing to clarify it was an experiment to have it removed from your records?
This is how divorce goes now based on my experience. The legal system is not setup to handle these sorts of problems well and leaves the innocent to deal with the fall out of bad actors and lawyers who empower them.
This won’t be corrected until there are penalties for political, legal, and administrative professionals who don’t do their due diligence.
Yes! This is divorce in America right now, if one party is willing to make up a series of lies, no matter how unbelievable the court will just default to the one making the accusations because its too much work to even try to sort out truth from lie, thats why the lawyers call it, "Liars Court" because the biggest liar wins.
The standard for the judicial is not "the truth", its about what you can "prove".
Judicial cannot claim one party is lying or not, in fact it is impossible, given the fact its nearly always a "he said she said" deal (in this particular scenario). Quite literally, the judge was't there, lawyers weren't there either and they get a twisted version of truth no matter if they are prosecuting or defense.
It sucks, fully agreed, but there is no way around it. As long as the judgement is not too punitive is about the best you can hope for.
This is in most small civil law areas and even summary criminal cases. They simply aren't important enough for the people in power to do their due diligence or give a shit. Nobody can force them to do their jobs either.
Imagine if some member of the bin Laden family was high on something and had rumors of their cousin's shenanigans and were spilling them out on some IRC channel or BBS or whatever, and that guy happened upon them and tried to alert the police, only to be dismissed as a lunatic and end up in prison for unrelated reasons while the disaster happened. That would be a true Kafkian nightmare.
No, i don't think so. I have an older friend that is persuaded to have seen something most people don't believe in back in the 90s. He just won't claim it publicly, and don't talk about it all the time, it's not a core part of his personality. Even if some people make fun of him for it (i don't think it happen nowadays, but it might), they can, and probably will believe him on other subjects (he is a very precise and knowledgeable in electronics, and have really interesting philosophical point of views).
I was crazy once. Actually, maybe multiple times. Weirdly, whenever I'm not crazy I think I want to be crazy, and whenever I am crazy I just want it to stop. "I didn't ask for that crazy, I wanted a different crazy!!!"
Can you explain. Like maybe you have a condition that causes some psychological challenges and then you get better and it goes away for a while? That would be horrible.
I don't know if I have any actual condition. I probably have maybe 5 mental disorders but I don't think any of them cause actual crazy just on their own. Usually my crazy is induced by staying awake for unhealthy lengths of time. I think last time this happened I joked about being schizophrenic because I kept hearing things in silence and being incredibly agitated/panicked about it. I probably said the exact quote "I didn't want that schizophrenia I wanted a different schizophrenia!!!!" since sometimes I wonder what it would be like to actually be schizophrenic. (I wonder this about so many things, though generally people tell me that wondering this is not normal)
This is just the system getting rid of (in their eyes) an undesirable. The truth doesn't really matter in these cases unless you have tens of thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to plead your case.
> I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
Likely a metric fuck ton. The perceived quality of one's character plays an outsized role in getting people to believe you. Serial killers figured that out a long time ago.
In contemporary parlance, “problematic” connotes to me that said individual expresses ideas, in their words, speech, or way of life, that are anathema to the dominant paradigm of thought/manners/civility, but does not necessarily imply anything about the mental health of the related individual.
Disordered thinking of the quality you’ve described is indicative of a serious psychological unwellness that, as the other commenter suggested, suggests paranoid schizophrenia or a related form of psychosis. But I don’t intend to seriously engage in back-of-envelope psychologizing.
Prattling on about irrelevant history and insinuating 9/11 conspiracy theories in a courtroom not at all concerned with either of those items does harm credibility, and I think rightfully.
For reasons of both family and personal history I am genuinely sensitive to the phenomenon of the “deemed crazy” person being consigned to permanent non-consideration of their words and expressions, their concerns, but I also recognize that such legitimate unwellness poses genuine issues for the believability of anything they claim.
Putting my extended aside aside, I would phrase it as “how many people are telling the truth about something, but aren't taken seriously because they're severely psychologically disregulated generally.”
It’s not necessarily outrageous for me to assert that I warned the FBI about 9/11 in June 2000. It seriously harms my credibility if I decide to bring up this grievance when I’m speaking to a judge about my undeserved traffic ticket in October 2024.
I wonder the same but I also firmly believe it's a useless and unproductive thing to worry about.
I mean, I wonder how many gold coins are laying in the forest? Surely there are many, and you can find ample news stories of people locating them out there, but I can confidently tell you that if you assembled a team an combed the forest for a year, maybe you would find one object worthy of a news story. And definitely you would wasted thousands of man hours that could have produced far far far more than what the object is worth.
In practical terms, it happens to virtually no one.
Hundreds of people win $10,000+ in the lottery every month. That is a lot of people. You can post a thread and will likely get comments from those who have won before.
But as a percentage of the population, virtually no one wins big in the lottery.
If you are foolish and think social media accurately portrays reality, you might quit your job to play the lottery full time - because hey, look at all the winners in the comments.
I'm not sure that being "problematic" was the issue here; it sounds more like they might have thought he wasn't fully sane. I could imagine thinking that someone fully believed what they said about their identity in the same way they believed that they could have stopped 9/11 if people had listened to them beforehand. The issue isn't thinking they have bad takes or unsavory opinions, but that they have trouble distinguishing reality from delusions.
Having grown up in the Deep South, I feel like every single person in the justice system from police to judge make decisions about you based on how you look and subconsciously decide to not believe facts or allow weak facts to have more weight. Nothing about this question seems outrageous to me whatsoever. And I think that’s the shocking part here.
This is how these institutions work. If someone behaves erratically, holds unconventional beliefs or just doesn't present themselves in the "right" way, they can be dismissed entirely
> But unlike the other investigators, Detective Mallory arranged for DNA tests of Mr. Woods’s father in Kentucky — whose identity was certain — and of Mr. Woods, who was then spending time at a shelter in Santa Monica, Calif. A comparison of the results showed that the California man was telling the truth.
It's really absurd they didn't do something like this in the first place. I'm presuming there was no living family that could tell them which man is which.
Even more scary: without any living relatives, there would be no way to identify himself with that degree of accuracy. Sure, you can disinter a corpse, but that's bureaucratically way more difficult than performing a DNA test on a live human, and assumes you know where your relatives are buried to begin with.
I wonder if that is at all possible. Could there be someone alive today who has no blood kin ( father, mother, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins 1st, 2nd, etc )?
Not necessarily. Many who grows up in an orphanage has living relatives.
For example many who are in an orphanage has living parents, but the social services and the courts have decided to take them into care for their own safety.
Or footprints since some hospitals take footprints of newborns, but it's neither a given that they did, or that they're readily available, or that you can identify which hospital to ask, or even that the person you want to identify still has both feet.
Probably. That assumes that the father was still alive and of sound mind. Also assumes that the father had much contact with the son.
If they have become strangers to each other a long time ago he might not even be able to tell who is his real son, but his DNA still can provide evidence.
Well, Woods discovered the issue when he was age ~50, homeless, and 2000+ miles away in another state, so it's plausible to think there was some breakdown in relationships.
Well even the NYT didn't state the names of the prosecutor and judge that got this so egregiously and unforgivably wrong. Name and shame would be a start.
I haven't found names or docket-stuff, but this page has more details like exact dates that may help someone with the right databases.
> On October 31, 2019, the District Attorney’s office filed charges of identity theft and false impersonation against Woods.
On December 23, 2019, Woods’s public defender expressed concern over Woods’s mental competence because he kept insisting that he was the real William Woods.
> On February 10, 2020, following an examination by a physician, Woods was declared incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a California mental hospital for treatment, including psychotropic medication.
Turns out the villain in that story is the system itself. Woods proved himself competent but the DA was not persuaded, so at his attorney's advice (the one who threw him under the bus with the competency evaluation) Woods accepted the criminal charges, thus the court feels absolved of blame.
There should be an NTSB for egregious acts of injustice, because the players in the system independently show no aptitude for reform and they all messed up badly. The way they defined their roles was wrong.
I mean, that at least sounds good, but in fact that would not be a start as it has no possible impact on these individuals on a personal or professional level.
I wish the times would just call this "identity fraud" instead of "theft". That mindset of "theft" creates a reverse-onus, while "identity fraud" makes it clear who should bear the risk.
Imagine if the banks handed out pieces of plastic with a number printed on that anyone could use to withdraw money and that you were expected to hand it over to strangers especially when intoxicated.
Bank are just a social construct that we pay alot of real money for.
To be fair, that's because US payment culture is depraved. The rest of the world has got chip+PIN, and tap. My card almost never leaves my wallet, much less my hands. Only the USA still does the insane thing of walking away with the card and returning with signature slips. Blows my mind when I visit.
Ye sure, but it took quite some time. I think you still can do number only withdrawals but the banks are reluctant to approve them due to scams. I think I signed a receit like 5 years ago when I said I forgot my pin.
I don't get the CVC number. Was it added becouse it was not copied by the old card receit copy machines? Like, it is just a number on the other side of the card.
When I visited Kentucky a couple of years ago, every restaurant still took my card and presented a signature slip. Just stone age. They even had chip terminals -- they inserted rather than swiped -- but no pin. Just a paper slip, and I had to watch my server walk away with my card.
Everyone in Canada brings a terminal to the table, you tap or do the pin, and my CC never leaves my hands.
And yeah - the CVC is just 3 more digits not captured on an imprint/swipe. Originally it was supposed to never be recorded, and only used during online validation. But that fell apart as the online/offline line blurred to invisibility. My
The responsible party, in the case of the Federal government failing to provide a national ID, is the contingent American citizens who are rabidly against the idea of national ID.
We have these little things called elections for doing that. Parts of the government would love to have this perfect registry and things like RealID are attempts at that but there's a lot of push back and reasons not to have some mythical impervious citizen tracking system too.
Technically correct, but it's an attempt by the federal government to increase the validity and security of state IDs, so it is relevant to this conversation about the shortcomings of state IDs and the role of the federal government in solving that problem.
It doesn't solve the problem, both because you have to ask for one (it's not issued to every citizen) and chiefly, it isn't a federal ID. The other parts are almost moot.
Sorry, what, elections are for doing what exactly? Not provide a registry of residence, surely.
Your second sentence builds up two strawmen:
1. That the registry has to be "perfect", whatever that means. It doesn't, it just has to be canonical, and allow for errors in it to be corrected according to some well-defined process. (Not by pulling 20 random documents in front of a judge and suddenly legally become another person.)
2. That these registries are "mythical". It's very much a solved problem. You (I'm assuming you're American) are literally living the only developed country without a registry of who lives in it.
Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth, other countries have this registry centralized -- perhaps the U.S. would be best served by state-wide registries, though since migration across state borders is unregulated, I bet that would be very difficult to maintain.
As for the reasons not to have such a registry, I have yet to hear any convincing ones.
You asked about holding the government accountable for not providing secure IDs. Doing that is a political question and we've had attempts to for thinkgs like RealID, they don't because there's a significant block that don't want them to for all sort of reasons ranging from legitimate to paranoid.
> Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth, other countries have this registry centralized -- perhaps the U.S. would be best served by state-wide registries, though since migration across state borders is unregulated, I bet that would be very difficult to maintain.
You're just describing birth certificates here. The US has those... very very few people don't get them. Getting access to them was an important part of Keirans's method of stealing Mr. Woods's identity. They will inevitably get lost or destroyed so you have to have some method of bootstrapping someone's identity and Keirans exploited that system through research.
It was designed around a time when it wasn't easy to acquire massive amounts of information about someone so it's not surprising that it starts to come apart a little bit in our digital panopticon.
I am not describing birth certificates. I’m describing a registry of residence.
That’s another thing the U.S. does wrong. If you hold a birth certificate for a child, what does that prove? It’s just an officially issued statement that a particular person was born to these particular parents. It’s completely useless as an authentication mechanism of identity.
The problem is not that birth certificates can be re-issued when lost. The problem is that they are trusted to mean anything about that person that possesses it.
Nothing you said made it sound any different from a birth certificate. What proves that you are the person living at that address and that you are the one that should be allowed to update that information? Just having a list of where people nominally live is meaningless by itself. The US has that information in loads of places, it's just not treated as the ground truth.
Also that system doesn't seem to work that great, the numbers I'm finding show Japan has about 3 million identity theft victims a year. Lower than the US but only slightly lower per capita.
The biggest problem in this instance isn't that his identity was stolen it was that he wasn't believed, partially because he was homeless, seems to have some mental health problems per the article and they're a maligned group in the US, and the courts and prosecutors didn't take the relatively simple step of requesting DNA evidence to resolve the situation.
> Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth
Japan is notorious for impersonation and false identities (especially children impersonating dead parents to claim their pensions).
> As for the reasons not to have such a registry, I have yet to hear any convincing ones.
The Japanese system is hugely cumbersome and also famously makes it difficult for people to escape from abusive family members (to the point there are e.g. dedicated companies for helping people move away in the middle of the night).
I understand your sentiment as a fellow US citizen; it can get annoying how so many people globally take part in debates about our society. To be fair, it's not like we in the U.S. shouldn't be open to hearing ideas from others about how we could run our government better. God knows there's plenty of room for improvement. And if I were to go to another country and see things that don't make sense to me, I'd understand they aren't going to just change anything immediately on my account, but I'd also appreciate having my thoughts considered by the people there.
His problem is more that he seems to believe his (and all others') country's ID system is somehow impervious to abuse (despite being imperfect by his own admission). The more centralized things are, the less you have to hack to do a takeover. The less centralized things are, the easier it is to accumulate supporting evidence for a takeover. It's a necessarily complicated system that has certain holes, and the main thing that would've helped in this case was more benefit of the doubt for the person who was up against a lot of documentation.
I appreciate that you’re defending my right to voice my opinion.
That said, you’re contradicting yourself: am I saying my country’s system is impervious to abuse, or am I admitting that it is not?
My point is not that a central database of people makes identity theft a thing. My point is that by not having one (or any), you are making it a lot easier than it has to be.
In one country, this kind of abuse of identity happens all the time, and in others, it is exceedingly rare. Anyone should be able to draw their own conclusions from that.
I’m seeing a statistic online that says “33% of Americans Faced Some Form of Identity Theft at Some Point in Their Lives” — not sure if that’s accurate but it’s a scary number!
> That said, you’re contradicting yourself: am I saying my country’s system is impervious to abuse, or am I admitting that it is not?
That's not me contradicting myself, it's literally quoting you contradicting yourself. Because you've made both of those arguments.
At this point, you seem to have backed off basically all of your claims about your system actually being better, leaving me with the question of what point you're trying to make at all.
> not sure if that’s accurate but it’s a scary number!
Boy, you sound like you'd be a very educated voter, LOL.
I Googled "scandanavian id fraud rate" and got 36% for Finland and 45% for Sweden out of one of the top results. So what exactly are you on about?
Well the Japanese one apparently doesn’t. But surely you see how it would be a logical fallacy to discount a type of system because of one faulty implementation?
I think it's on you to make the logical connection between the type of system and positive results at this point. (And no, your anecdotes and general vibes don't count.)
The US government isn't responsible for that failing. The people of the US generally do not want a national ID, and elect their representatives accordingly.
He was homeless and likely lost his ID and the papers needed get a new one. Then the identity thief obtained an ID and birth certificate.
Unless you are suggesting that the government take biometrics. Except that wouldn't have helped in this case, cause the identity thief would have shown up with ID and gotten scanned.
You know, there's a good chance that if so many important institutions didn't insist on having your life history, the guy that stole his identity wouldn't have stolen it. Even if he takes the name, two people can have the same name. It depends on where his motive was in the scale from fresh start to deranged and malicious. And no, I'm not excusing his later actions.
It looks like, from the article, his motive was "to escape responsibility from crimes he was accused of when he was young." It's utterly bonkers that running afoul of the law as a child can and still does affect people's lives decades later. The Criminal Justice System needs a graceful way to leave the past in the past and let minor crimes done long in someone's past age out of relevance.
When he first started using someone else's identity, the crimes might not have been "long in the past" yet, but once you start doing something like that and have established a life under the assumed identity, it's not easy to go back.
The real problem here is the attempt to maintain permanent one-to-one mappings between ID numbers and humans. The legitimate purpose of a government ID is so you can e.g. go to the bank, open an account and then later establish to the bank that you're the same person who opened the account. If you want to get a new ID number and start over, you shouldn't have to steal someone else's in order to do that, you should just be able to go to the DMV or the social security administration and get a new ID under a new name that isn't already somebody else's.
The hypothesis that this would help criminals is pretty thin. They're already going to use an assumed name, which is why law enforcement uses photos/fingerprints/DNA to identify suspects rather than a government ID that people aren't actually required to carry regardless.
In the US, a person can get a new SSN if their current SSN is heavily used in identity fraud. I've heard its a high bar, but technically a person can be associated with more than one SSN.
Getting an SSN for your child isn't compulsory, so the system also isn't expected to hold every person.
For the majority of people, it's 1-to-1. But it's not guaranteed that an SSN identifies a person (if it's been replaced) or that a person has an SSN (if their parents were lazy or are sov-cits)
Yes. But in Scandinavia, unlike the US, it is a unique identifier and there is a single national database.
"UNIQUENESS. The SSN is not a unique label. More than 4.2 million people, by the Social Security Administration's own estimates, have two or more SSNs. More serious, although much less prevalent, are the instances in which more than one person has been issued or uses the same SSN."
No, an SSN - for those who have one - is considered both an identity number and a secret. A national ID number (which all residents would have) is just an identifier. A fraudster can't get a credit card in your name with just your ID number.
What you're doing is removing the incentive for criminals to cause damage to innocent people by assuming another real person's identity instead of just creating a new one.
>I listen to his shows when I'm driving, but just be advised he is long-winded – repeating himself many times about the same thing.
I think you've identified why I don't particularly like his videos. His takes are usually interesting and they are usually interesting cases, but he spends 10 minutes talking about something that is worth 2 minutes at best.
I've seen that with some videos (and understand it to be the case with the algorithm).
There are a number of channels that I have put in the "don't recommend from these channels" because it's two minutes of content five times over (I'd rather watch a 2 minute short form on the mater). It's content that I'm potentially interested in... but that particular format irks me.
It really sucks that the way to make money through youtube is to constantly adjust your videos to whatever pays best according to the algorithm that shifts and changes.
It's a channel operator's decision to chase the algorithm instead of doing something that makes sense. The algorithm also likes people watching your videos, generally.
The issue is that your videos don't get surfaced unless you chase the algorithm. Hence thumbnails having faces on them all the time, also something the algorithm "likes".
Many creators have complained about the 'requirements' but if they don't do it, they don't get views.
They get views. They may not get as many views. Again, it's up to you if you want to defend crappy content in the name of a whatever% revenue increase. But as someone who's been making content for 12+ years and not chasing the algorithm, I can assure you, I absolutely get less views than people who do that, but I absolutely do still get views.
And ask yourself as a consumer of the videos-- what are you getting out of it? Literally just stop watching (and defending) videos with inflated runtimes; they do nothing but waste your time. Creators and/or the market will adjust or die out (or if enough others continue watching them, then they can keep doing their dumb thing while you seek out and support people doing it better, so everybody wins).
> Mr. Woods was held without bail on charges that he had illegally tried to gain access to bank accounts that Mr. Keirans had opened in Mr. Woods’s name.
Then
> Prosecutors in Los Angeles asked the judge to order Mr. Woods not to use his name.
because as far as the court and the prosecutors had deigned to investigate Mr. Woods was in fact the identity thief.
When Keirans first stole the identity in the 80s he bought a car with bad checks and got a job at a fast food place. Keirans had already had a run in with the law for car theft so working under a false name made some sense. From then on it seems like it just snowballed.
thats crazy it seems a lot harder to forge identity than to work and pay off loans and expunge misdemeanor if no politics / employment stuff esp if you already got a fast food gig
i wonder if it was a temp thing or planned this way
why not switch to a new identity after that instead of charging crazy story so many questions to both parties
Hot take: Yet another case of wrongdoing that could have been prevented if the U.S. (or its states) held a canonical registry of people.
If you couldn’t take out an ID card using a birth certificate and proof of residence (electricity bill etc weak measures), maybe this con would never have begun in the first place.
Almost every developed nation in the world has this problem solved.
What would a "canonical registry" include? Like, biometrics of every citizen?
I am from a european country, and when I had to renew my id card I had to prove my identity through answering questions about a part of my family tree my immediate family and I have been no-contact since ever. I had no idea about the names of these people, and the police officer was visibly frustrated. Nothing bad happened in the end but I can imagine if I was acting weird it could have had, because the whole id process was actually a failure.
My experience with other european countries is not much different either in terms of the process, likeprevious residence addresses, people you live with or similar info they have on you, most of which is not very private. Or a witness to testify which actually is the easiest. That's nothing that would have prevented a case like this on its own, without further investigations.
In my country first government issued id is done in the presence of a parent/guardian at the age between 16 and 18. Police before issuing the id will take your fingerprints and you can replace id (if stolen, lost, expired) with a fingerprint only. No questions and no witnesses necessary.
What happens if you lose your fingerprints in some way? Deep burns on your fingers can permanently change your fingerprints. What if you are in an accident and both hands or arms have to be amputated?
Could a bad actor put some sort of coating or prosthetic on their fingers to successfully impersonate someone else?
You can for example sing a contract with someone without notarizing it, but you need two witnesses for contract to be valid/accepted by the legal system.
I guess something like this would resolve the situation. Two persons to confirm your identity.
That's a valid concern, but only for a rather infinitesimal minority of people. Pretty much the definition of a "corner case", so rather irrelevant on the whole.
Well, it’s not mandatory to take out a passport or ID card anywhere that I’m aware. And perhaps a photo ID database would have been as far as I’d be willing to stretch when it comes to storing biometrics.
But you do realize that even the government of each state does not know who lives at what address? The only exception being around the time of each census.
It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
> It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
Only when you look at it as sending to a person. Really what you do is send it to an address the post office doesn't get a damn what you put above the street address, they just deliver it to the specified location.
Never tried that or had something sent to me that way. Seems like it'd succeed or fail randomly based on the local post office when doing the sortation to individual house bundles.
Yeah, that's how a post office has to operate under those circumstances. It seems to work decently, for the most part.
In my country (Sweden), the post office is able to forward mail to your new address after you move, because they can look up your address in the public registry. (Of course, they charge a fee for this but it's quite small.)
They can and do do that in the US but only for a limited time and you have to tell them your old address and new address. It's essentially a bridge for you to update everyone who might only rarely send you mail. I still get mail for the previous owner more than 4 years after buying my house. (This is confirmed by sending a postcard you either enter a code to complete the redirect or send back in I can't remember exactly I've done it twice in my whole life.)
> But you do realize that even the government of each state does not know who lives at what address?
Do you know that our voter registration, which is organized by state and ultimately administered at the county level, does include that information?
Also, have you considered how a mapping to an address would have helped in this case between two homeless people?
> It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
Did a quick web search because this seemed dubious. I think you're referring to a neighborhood that uses PO boxes. They absolutely can and do still "get their mail," they just need to go down the street for it instead of having it dropped 10 feet away from their front door. Less convenient, but not as if the system isn't there, and it would be trivial to have a mail carrier fill in that last half-mile if it made since for that community.
> Do you know that our voter registration, which is organized by state and ultimately administered at the county level, does include that information?
If you're a citizen, and you're correctly registered to vote. Additionally, for various reasons, US voter register quality is relatively poor - one study estimates that there's 6.1 million voters who have their name registered in more than one state (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/double-registration-and-strat...).
> Do you know that our voter registration, which is organized by state and ultimately administered at the county level, does include that information?
There are lots of people in the US who are not registered to vote. A few reasons:
* They are non-citizens.
* They are children.
* They are convicted felons and live in a state where they are not eligible to vote (either while serving their sentences or after).
* They are eligible, but have chosen not to register.
I'm sure there are other categories of people who are not registered to vote. But even just these represent more than a hundred million people, a good third of the population, at least.
Hey, you know another system that’s broken? The US voting system. Because you can’t know for sure who is entitled to vote if you don’t know who lives in your country.
You’re trying to put the cart before the horse with this argument. A voter registry under the current US system is not going to get higher quality data than the other existing government databases; in other words, it’s equally susceptible to fraud and abuse because it relies on weak authentication measures like phone bills or birth certificates.
Yeah they have to pick up their mail a few miles down the road at a private business which runs their PO boxes. I don’t that’s an acceptable level of service but to each their own, I guess…
The USPS is not a private business. They are the ones who "run" PO boxes. The acronym literally stands for "Post Office box," and they are in post offices.
No, it's not the USPS. I said a private business to keep it a bit anonymous but if you don't believe me, here it is: http://808alohamail.com/
There's hundreds of households on a fairly small area who are not at all served by any mailman, instead they all drive down the road to this place. Three local ladies started it up because the USPS dropped the ball.
I happen to know about this because I know someone local. They also told me about their new place, also on Hawai'i, where the mail instead arrives at a UPS office. (Not USPS. UPS.)
My point is that this new item (and others) make identity theft seem so extremely easy in the U.S. You just have to be determined. Doesn't take any particular skill to forge an electricity bill, doesn't take any skill to give someone else's social security number (which many apparent morons presume are secret), etc.
By moving the posts from "trivial" to "somewhat challenging", I think the U.S. would be better off.
As an example: If I wanted to assume a new identity in Sweden, to get rid of my criminal history, I'd have to make a very convincing fake I.D. card, and make sure to find a "victim" who is not going to sound the alarm when they notice. Basically, as soon as you register their name on your address, a confirmation letter will be sent to that person, which makes it so they can dispute it.
You could probably get away with it if you can find someone who moved abroad and forgot to notify the authorities. Even then, you'd have a really hard time getting a new passport or ID card in their name. It might work if you look a lot like them, and can drag their spouse, parent or sibling to the police station and have them vouch for you (with a valid ID card). I admit it's not impossible! But it certainly is not a thing that you ever hear about on the news.
> Basically, as soon as you register their name on your address, a confirmation letter will be sent to that person, which makes it so they can dispute it.
That doesn't seem relevant to the homeless man in question.
You’re right, that’s one vulnerability in the system.
I don’t know how common it is for someone to want to impersonate a homeless person, though, considering in Sweden you’d probably have to pay up that homeless person’s debt…
Ok, I’m slightly kidding here, but really this kind of long con is not a common mode of identity fraud in Scandinavia, probably because it’s harder to get away with.
The more common identify fraud here would be to assume the identity of someone with a stable economy and then try to take out payday loans in their name. Which a homeless person would be declined for, of course.
It gets rather involved and usually involves phishing the victim into signing something malicious using a digital ID. Not to mention no bank would agree to pay it out in cash. So it requires not only determination but skill as well.
So you just spent three paragraphs hand-waving away the exact situation this article was about.
"I don't know how common it is... not really a common mode of identity fraud... the more common identity fraud here would be..."
It was a homeless victim in this article. It seems like the improvements you're suggesting are entirely off-topic if you admit they wouldn't have helped here.
They would absolutely have helped! If there were, for instance, a proper way to validate what someone looked like, for instance if the national ID database had been consulted for photos of the person when issuing a new ID, then probably they would have realized these two men look nothing alike.
> You could probably get away with it if you can find someone who moved abroad and forgot to notify the authorities. Even then, you'd have a really hard time getting a new passport or ID card in their name.
And if they'd moved to e.g. Finland[1], it wouldn't even have mattered if they'd forgot that -- the Finnish (tax etc) authorities would inform their Swedish counterparts when they register as a resident of their new country.
Source: Got a letter from Swedish Riksskatteverket (tax authority) after I registered at Helsinki Maistraatti (municipal registrar) telling me I'd been moved to "Emigrated" status, back in 1995 when I moved here.
[1]: Probably all the Nordic countries before then, all EU ones now.
> On Friday, Judge Williams said that Mr. Keirans’s motive was clear: He had adopted the false identity, the judge said, to escape responsibility from crimes he was accused of when he was young. Mr. Keirans had run away from home as a teenager, stolen a car and skipped court after an arrest, his plea agreement says.
Oh, sure - misrepresenting who you are to businesses, law enforcement, potential partners. Regular victimless stuff.
In the US you can just adopt a new name, so long as you're not doing it for a fraudulent purpose (and obviously not by stealing someone elses identity). In this case, sure, he was ... _in the 1970s_. The initial name change was a crime but it was not a particularly significant one and it was a very long time ago.
It appears that the ongoing modern use was completely harmless except for the fact that the real owner of the name was brought into the legal system over it. But why did that happen?
You don't have to agree with my view on the identity theft to recognize that the question of why the real Mr. Woods was put under the thumb of the law is an interesting and relevant one.
