Assembling a new identity used to be the specialty of spies and master criminals. Now, ordinary crooks are acquiring consumers' personal information - Social Security numbers, addresses, mother's maiden names and other data - and opening new accounts in other peoples' names. Nearly 10 million consumers are affected annually by lost or stolen data at a cost to the economy of $53 billion. Moreover, victims spend almost 300 million hours a year trying to clear their names and re-establish good credit ratings. Congress and state legislatures are looking at ways to stop identity theft, but financial and data-collection companies argue any solutions that slow down the business of buying and selling personal data would hurt the economy. Meanwhile, in the biggest in a series of recent security breaches, Citigroup announced on June 6 that computer tapes containing personal data on 3.9 million consumers were missing.

Peter Katel is a CQ Researcher contributing writer who previously reported on Haiti and Latin America for Time and Newsweek and covered the Southwest for newspapers in New Mexico. He has received several journalism awards, including the Bartolomé Mitre Award for drug coverage from the Inter-American Press Association and awards for investigative and interpretive reporting from the New Mexico Press Association. He holds an A.B. in university studies from the University of New Mexico.