Steve Summit posts to Peter Neumann’s Risks digest about delays in US “too little too late” efforts to secure the social security number by removing them from publicly accessible documents. He muses:

(not for the first time) what it would take to get U.S. commerce and society to properly separate the tasks of identification and authentication. Would federal legislation mandating this separation be effective?

Indeed. And what will it take to get the same point accepted in UK government? Can we do that BEFORE we use the national insurance number as our ID System index, rather than 15-25 years after?