From the Army Times:
Soldiers' Social Security numbers will no longer be part of their dog tags, the Army announced Tuesday.
The change, which some have argued is long overdue, is the first update to the ubiquitous identification tags in more than 40 years.
A soldier's Social Security number will be replaced by a 10-digit, randomly-generated number. ...
4 comments:
In the old days we had random numbers instead of SSN on our dog tags. It was not a problem. Can still remember mine. The law used to be that the SSN was not to be used for identification. DUH...
I served in USMC from 1970-73. My original dog tags had only my serial number, but then they issued new ones with SSN. The plan was to gradually REPLACE the serial numbers with SSNs--identity theft was not yet considered any type of problem.
The average person really doesn't even begin to understand the depth of this problem within the military. I'm a retired former enlisted leader and I'll share what everyday life was like. I used to run around with a notebook and computer disks that had rosters of all my personnel, to include their SSNs. That was expected of me. All leaders at all levels did this. But it gets worse. When I wrote evaluation reports, I had to put my SSN, and everybody in the food chain that reviewed those reports had to put their full names and SSNs as well. That stuff is all archived all over the place. I recently shredded some of the stuff I had from 20 years ago. The military has literally been living on SSNs for decades. Very publicly. And it's a disaster in this age of identity theft.
Which by the way I've already been a victim of.
Even though I had a service # me ss #was also on my dod tags.Service '68-71
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