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I am not a lawyer, but I likely have had more at-bats with the credit reporting agencies and financial institutions on this and related issues than almost all l

I am not a lawyer, but I likely have had more at-bats with the credit reporting agencies and financial institutions on this and related issues than almost all lawyers and, I mean this literally, every other person on HN. I think you will, if you consult an attorney, be advised that you are unlikely to prevail in your cause of action under a libel theory. Your lawyer is likely going to point to the pre-emption parts of FCRA, specifically 15 U.S.C. § 1681h(e) and 15 U.S.C. § 1681t(b). The general tenor of this conversation is going to be "When Congress wanted to regulate the credit reporting industries, they and interested parties made a trade: a very consumer-friendly state machine and freedom to operate the state machine. Part-and-parcel to this trade was radically reducing legal risks to the financial industry and CRAs outside of the state machine. If you're going to claim that Congress didn't want to pre-empt state laws, you're going to be walking uphill against legislative history, the plain text of the statute, and every canon of statutory construction." Separate from the legal issue, I think HNers might be surprised to learn that the state machine pretty routinely achieves the objectives. A determined, literate, and well-organized person will routinely achieve the outcome they desire from it, even with the other side of process being the largest lenders in America. This is a surprising result in consumer lending when reasoning from first principles ("Shouldn't Bank of America's legal team always or approximately always crush a Kansan grandmother?") but I believe, from a few hundred at-bats, it to be true.

mindslight 7y ago
I know of your personal experience, and thank you for your response. I actually hadn't realized that the surveillance bureaus had regulatory-captured general legal immunity so openly. So yes, I was overstating the legal situation thinking they would be better on the hook for libel. Frankly this overbearing immunity should be a talking point of every "identity theft" article, but unfortunately those articles are written from a perspective that is still wed to the primacy of this system. > I think HNers might be surprised to learn that the state machine pretty routinely achieves the objectives None of these stories really focus on irreversible damages (besides eg SIM swapping stealing cryptocurrency), but rather the time taken dealing with that "state machine". Diligently checking your own dossier is doing the surveillance bureau's work for them - adding to this perverse incentive where they don't bother doing the diligence of verifying loan applicants hoping that consumers will be responsible for guarding use of public identifiers associated with them. A quick reading of the FCRA still doesn't show any statutory timeline within which surveillance subjects ("consumers") are required to verify the dossiers on themselves - compared to say regulation E which requires that you verify your legitimate account ledgers at least every month and a half (please correct me if I missed something). I'm not the type to be continually applying for new credit cards for whatever incentive they're offering, so dealing with any backscatter from identity fraud is purely a cost to me. The less I involve myself with their system, the more I can handle its involuntarily burden in "batch mode".

mindslight 7y ago

I know of your personal experience, and thank you for your response. I actually hadn't realized that the surveillance bureaus had regulatory-captured general legal immunity so openly. So yes, I was overstating the legal situation thinking they would be better on the hook for libel. Frankly this overbearing immunity should be a talking point of every "identity theft" article, but unfortunately those articles are written from a perspective that is still wed to the primacy of this system. > I think HNers might be surprised to learn that the state machine pretty routinely achieves the objectives None of these stories really focus on irreversible damages (besides eg SIM swapping stealing cryptocurrency), but rather the time taken dealing with that "state machine". Diligently checking your own dossier is doing the surveillance bureau's work for them - adding to this perverse incentive where they don't bother doing the diligence of verifying loan applicants hoping that consumers will be responsible for guarding use of public identifiers associated with them. A quick reading of the FCRA still doesn't show any statutory timeline within which surveillance subjects ("consumers") are required to verify the dossiers on themselves - compared to say regulation E which requires that you verify your legitimate account ledgers at least every month and a half (please correct me if I missed something). I'm not the type to be continually applying for new credit cards for whatever incentive they're offering, so dealing with any backscatter from identity fraud is purely a cost to me. The less I involve myself with their system, the more I can handle its involuntarily burden in "batch mode".