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The National Council on Identity Policy Legal History: Social Security Numbers & Identity The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP... ~ This is a page from the NCIDP "A Brief History of Identity" collection. These pages are intended to provide a context for understanding the development of legal principles regarding identity information as it continues to bear upon modern legal governance of identity information. This is an extract of a history of this subject highlighting those aspects that enhance understanding of why the laws of today are such as they are, and how they came to be that way. These pages are intended to cast important perspective upon relevant law, but are not intended as a comprehensive sociological study of these subjects. Throughout most of history, by custom and tradition, an ordinary individual's declared name was the extent of identity information used to describe a person. There were no Social Security Numbers, Drivers' Licenses, Passports, voter registries, deed polls, credit reports.... Any individual could [and can] adopt any identity they chose at will, and their word of it was [and is] the fact of it. (Jonson v. Greaves (KB, 1765); Christianson v. King County (S Ct., 1915); et al.). The idea that an individual might be stuck with a fixed identity at any time in life was never conceived of, and was [and is] abject violence. (Keeble v. Hickeringill (QB, 1707)). That it might be dictated to an individual at any time was unimaginable, and is unconstitutional in the U.S. (Entick v. Carrington and Three Other King's Messengers (KB, 1765); Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey (S Ct., 1992); Lawrence v. Texas (S Ct., 2003); et al.). Time and again, history has shown that the slightest routinized solicitations of government to identify individuals is born of, or leads to, the selective oppression of individuals. The privacy right of anonymity is the first and most profound defense of personal safety and common liberty. * Social Security Numbers * Social Security Numbers (SSN's) (or more properly, Social Security ACCOUNT Numbers) were the product of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal plan that lifted the U.S. out of the Great Depression of the 1930's. During the Great Depression, many in the nation were left abandoned and penniless by the mass failures of businesses. The private retirement funds offered by employers vanished, and retirees were likewise left abandoned and penniless too late in life to start a life of employment all over again. Many people died. FDR's answer was to create a government guaranteed program that ensured the good of the people directly, protected against any potential instability in the economy and in the business world. It was the nation's first concerted attempt to protect the well-being of the people in such a manner. By the time it navigated its way through the legislative process and Congress, this New Deal program became Social Security, and its scope had been reduced to coverage mostly for workers who became disabled or retired, and their dependents. Moreover, instead of direct permanent funding for the program by the Treasury, the source of funds was to be contributions made by employers and employees. In this compromise, then, the benefits became tied to an individual's work history, and there needed to be a way to track individuated accounts and the contributions to those individuated accounts. Thus, the Social Security Number was born.
At the birth of the Social Security Number (SSN), grave concerns about such a number becoming identificatory in nature predominated. Consequently, extraordinary care was taken in an effort to ensure against any potential for that kind of misuse arising. In order to manage the individuated accounts, it was necessary for the government, the Social Security Administration, to receive individuated contributions from beneficiaries and their employers. This was an exchange of information between government and business unheard of in a nation of personal liberties and freedoms, and was only known of in fascist and totalitarianist regimes of the time. This was, understandably, unpalatable and a source of great revulsion over the program. In order to mitigate the fascist implications and the identificatory potentiality of the Social Security Number, the law authorizing the exchange of information between the Social Security Administration and the employers was crafted very narrowly. First, the records of the Social Security Administration itself were essentially sealed, even against other government agencies. Then, employers were ONLY authorized to disclose the SSN itself to the Social Security Administration, in accompaniment to the payment of the individuated contribution. And, in return, the Social Security Administration was ONLY authorized to disclose whether or not the employer-reported number was a valid Social Security Account Number. NO OTHER INFORMATION COULD BE EXCHANGED between the government (Social Security Administration) and employers. No name. No date of birth. No gender. Nothing else. The transmission of information and funds, then, was little different from making a deposit into a numbered bank account - only the number and the funds were necessary. This narrowly limited scope of exchange between employers and the Social Security Administration remains the rule of law to this day. The only connections between the SSN itself and any other point of identifying information, like name, was in the sealed records of the Social Security Administration itself, and on the Social Security Card it issued to individuals. That printed and recorded name, in accordance with an individual's common law identity property rights, was whatever name the individual declared to be proper, and new cards with new names were issued on demand. [Note however, that as of approximately 2000, Social Security Administration literature began to imply that it would NOT honor legal name changes except in those cases where a court order was obtained. If this implication of the literature is, indeed, representative of an administrative shift in policies, the policies themselves remain unsupported at law and their enforcement then becomes illegal, criminal activity.] The process was such that an individual would then present that Social Security Card, displaying the proper SSN and chosen name, to an employer. This meant that the process demanded that employers take on the role of state actors, which was almost as unpalatable at the time as the exchange of information between government and businesses. The duty for ensuring that earnings and contributions were properly reported and transmitted then fell to the employers, and it was made a felony for employers to misreport such information. To enable those employers to make such assurance, under penalty of felony crime, the law authorized and mandated that employers were to directly inspect the original Social Security Card itself and record the number directly therefrom.
Meanwhile, individuals themselves remained free to ignore the SSN, and were not required to obtain one. Nor were they penalized for not having an SSN or misstating an SSN, although later it was made illegal to use someone else's SSN. In fact, until very recently, it was a well-known fact of Federal law that you could purposely claim any nine-digit number you liked to be your SSN so long as it wasn't actually a valid SSN issued to someone else. This was a remnant of the narrow language implementing SSN's, and particularly of their optional nature, that persisted in the law. Claims that this has been changed at law have appeared in recent literature, but in every case such claims appeared without identifying the Federal Public Law that enacted such a change. Without examination of whatever Public Law might have implemented this new constraint upon individual privacy, it would seem unlikely to be enforceable in any case where the solicitation for the SSN was fraudulent, such as where a threat to withhold service or benefit was illegally made where the Privacy Act Notice accompanying the solicitation failed to state "Disclosure is Mandatory" and specify the Federal Statute appropriately making disclosure mandatory.
It is also notable that because the legislative compromise process led to Social Security benefits being targeted toward individuated accounts and age-related retirement, the Social Security Administration began soliciting people's ages. This too was regarded as an extraordinary and intrusive, unprecedented government activity. Thus, although solicited with the application for an SSN along with name, a person's recorded date of birth was whatever that person stated it to be, just as with name and consistent with individual identity rights. Apparently, a little humorously, stories abound of women who did not collect Social Security benefits for five or ten or more years later than their spouses and peers with whom they had grown up because they stated a legal age to the Social Security Administration that much younger than their biological age. This was largely immaterial to the given duties of the Social Security Administration, which was explicitly to manage accounts and not identities. However, it would have been far more sensible, and more proper, for the Social Security Administration to wait until an individual presented a request to collect their benefits before soliciting age information, as the duties at law for the Administration in regard to age related strictly to such benefits payments, and not to the funding of accounts prior to such payments.
In 1979, the practice of issuing Social Security Numbers to children at birth began. Previously, issuance was not made until an individual had grown older and begun seeking employment. To this day, any individual born before 1979 may very well not have a Social Security Number assigned to them if they've never sought employment, as in the case of many who were born into great wealth.
In 2000, the Social Security Administration first deleted comments on its form to apply for a Social Security Card (Form SS-5) that supplying gender information was optional and could be omitted. It is not clear what new Federal Public Law was enacted and went into effect in 2000 that mandated such an intrusive change. Nor is it entirely clear that the omission, and the law implementing it, had the effect of mandating disclosure of gender information upon individuals. Gender information ostensibly recorded by the Social Security Administration prior to 2000 can generally be expected to be unreliable and improperly substantiated in records where it appears at all. Gender identifiers recorded after 2000 may be inaccurate or falsified in any records pertaining to individuals with congenital variations of sexual development or otherwise of imprecise gender. (Important: see more on this on the "Birth Certificates & Identity" webpage), and may also be improperly substantiated depending upon whether the Administration relies upon first-party information only, or relies on less reliable third-party sources, such as documents of any kind. It appears that also in 2000, the Social Security Administration first began implying in its literature that legal name changes would not be consistently honored or respected. If indeed, as implied, that is the new policy of the Administration, such policy is unavoidably an unconstitutional and illegal policy rendered wholly unenforceable. Any such enforcement attempt would be thoroughly criminal felony activity.
In 2008, the Social Security Administration indicated an intent to exceed the bounds of its lawful authority and begin exchanging information with the business sector beyond simple verification that a number has been validly issued. This appears to be the most direct, blatant assault against the rule of law and the personal security of individuals ever to arise from the Social Security Administration. No new Public Law authorizing such intrusive violence has been identified, and the actions appear entirely felonious.
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