Comment Back into the tarpit (Score 1) 59
Okay, so South Korea's going to issue new ID numbers to people. What is that going to accomplish? The current ones appear to do plenty well for identification; it's only a problem if they're going to use a number that people can't change and which they have to share with a lot of other people as authentication. In other words, if they're not plain stupid about it. It's like my Social Security number: I got it as a child, and I can't change it, and at the very minimum every employer and financial institution I deal with needs to get and keep a copy. I have to give out the last four digits even more often, yet if somebody knows when and where I got my SSN they can make very good guesses at the first five. (It's worse now than when I was young, since newborns get numbers now, so they can be claimed as dependents. When I was young, I had to get one but not in such a restricted time interval.) Yet, if somebody gets my number, they can cause me a great many problems, and I can't track back to see which incompetent institution leaked it and get restitution from them.
What's going to happen, after the Koreans spend all that money, is that the fraud conveniently (for financial institutions) labeled "identity theft" is going to go way down, and then the bad guys will start getting IDs again from various sources, and then we're going to see this whole thing all over again. As long as somebody can pretend to be Park Geun-hye by knowing her ID number, nothing's going to improve.