Raise the topic of identity theft at the dinner table in my parent’s home and you’ll undoubtedly get my mom started telling a story. When she was in college, you see, she was a victim of identity theft. Someone thieved her student ID. “Three or four years after I graduated, I was back at the University of South Dakota, and someone was using it to get into bars,” mom says. Mild enough, indeed. The aspect of this that surprised me, but obviously should not have, is that ID theft actually existed back then. (No offense intended, mom.) The reality is that, to this day, my mother has no idea how the younger student got her underage hands on my mom’s ID. There were no measures in place to prevent someone else from using her ID had she even been aware it was gone. Nor, for the record, does she recall how she discovered it was being fraudulently used. “Do you know how long ago that was?” she barked. Actually, no, not off the top of my head at least. What I do know is that today identity theft is a bigger problem than it was when my mom was an udergrad, and she got off easy that time. There are certain measures in place today, but even though ID theft has been going on for decades, if not longer, clearly the current practices are not enough. Bruce Schneier today posted a compelling argument that what we need to be doing is focusing on detecting and preventing fraudulent transactions. I’ll fess up that I cannot do his post justice in a sentence or three here, so I suggest going straight to the source. The Wall Street Journal Online, meanwhile, asks in its Question of the Day: Do you feel more confident providing your credit card information in-person or online? As of a few minutes before 4 pm est, the results were reasonably split. Fifty-three percent of respondents chose online as the answer, while 47 percent prefer to expose their credit card numbers directly to a live person. The newspaper maintained that the survey is a sampling of readers’ viewpoints, not a formal study. Security