Reuters filed this report on June 24 about the Internal Revenue Service investigating “whether unauthorized people gained access to sensitive taxpayer and bank account information.”

In 2002, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., speaking in Chicago about the effects of the 9/11 attacks on the country’s financial infrastructure, said:

“I am confident that … we will achieve an even higher degree of resilience for our financial system, which will be effective in responding to the panoply of imaginable–and even some unimaginable–events.”

We heard plenty about “failure of imagination” in the wake of 9/11. I hope that identity theft on a grand scale — which could play all kinds of havoc with our financial infrastructure — is part of the current imaginings for those who are in charge of such things.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 8:25 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.