LOST SOULS We have been hearing a great deal lately about lost or stolen identity.
Just this past week we were told of the theft of a million of restricted records of our servicemen and women. It appears an unidentified government employee took some restricted discs or papers home for some undiscussed reason and while they were out of the "Secret" drawer, stole them. No one has said when all that took place,but we first heard of it this past week, and some people are upset. Our alert media is doing a fine job of informing the thieves about the treasure which they have in their possession as well as suggesting ways to best turn their holdings to their financial advantage. The original thief involved has " been placed on administrative leave" which must be extra vacation days with pay" for being naughty.
We have quite a history along such lines. In August 1814 when the British were occupying Washington , D.C. and fine-tuning the military art of Selective Arson, they chose to destroy the original manuscripts for the First and Second United States Census Returns for Virginia. The were for the period from 1790 to 1800. That meant we lost the schedules which named the heads of households and contained the number of inhabitants in each household. All that loss meant such basic statistics had to be founded on published abstracts containing the number of inhabitants of each county, some of which survived.
In 1908 the Bureau of the Census published a twelve-volume set of books listing just the "Heads of Families - Virginia " which was welcomed and used widely by people who set out to re-establish old or distinguished Colonial family.
The current plague of identity theft is associated to some extent on the great improvements made in our communications systems. The advances in the computer field have revolutionized our entire way of living far more than we realizes and opened entirely new aspects of knowledge and new ways to use it. Still growing...still innovating new concepts the Internet is a fertile field being worked by identity thieves. The widespread of colorful flood of small plastic cards which have inundated just about every niche of our society.
A major emphasis of our educational system - at all levels - has become: security.
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net May 2006 [c402wds]
