As previously noted, I became an un-person last week as the Social Security decided to waste my time over a "mistake" some one made back in 1970. (Image from Mindfully.Org.)

Either my wonderful mother (who still walks among us, to my great joy) failed to check the box indicating I was a citizen on my Social Security application, or some clerk failed to do so when the data was entered because there were separate forms then for citizens and non-citizens.

The clerk who put me through this hell blamed "Homeland Security." But I think he was really responding to the reality of how this number is used.

As I've noted many times before, the Social Security Number is an index term. Everybody has one. Everyone's number is different. By indexing databases based on Social Security Numbers (SSNs), government and businesses alike can make certain there's a one-to-one correspondence between records and people.

Stories like this AP feature don't really address this need, this fact about how data is stored. Without the SSN we'd have to create one. Some companies like Acxiom do just that. Every business and individual in their database has their own unique identifier, created by the company. Which also means that the Acxiom indexing scheme is proprietary. The only way toward a non-proprietary indexing scheme, in other words, is for government to provide one. Which gets us back to the need for an SSN.

The Liberty Alliance has proposed to use cryptographic keys as an online access method, but this doesn't solve the underlying problem, which is the indexing of corporate and government databases. (The image is their logo, from their Web site.)

Even if the SSN moved toward some other numbering scheme, perhaps using cryptographic keys, we would still have the same problem. It's not the length of the index term that's the problem. It's the need to transfer it in order to make it useful.

Thus, my un-personhood (and maybe yours). The government feels that being hard on us, making sure it knows exactly who each number belongs to, it can at least make certain the SSN is a good indexing term.

But the Social Security Administration is not scaled, and not equipped, to take on this job of managing identities. Officially it hasn't been given that charge. And as I found out it manages this very poorly.

Those who object to better identity tools -- biometrics for instance -- leave us stuck with a broken system.

I've said before that the key to fixing identify is with carrots, not sticks. Provide benefits that come with better identity, and people will want it.

Instead we have a situation where the government uses sticks -- terrorism most especially -- in order to force us to comply with its new identity scheme.

This won't work. Putting the heavy hand of intrusive government against the creative energy of the American people is a bad bet.

To the destruction of the Copyright Wars, in other words, let's add the coming conflagration of The Identity Wars.

It turned out I was just an early victim, and only wounded.