Publish them. That's right, put everyone's SS# and name on the internet so anyone can look them up. This will immediately make them, as public knowledge, useless to criminals.

At one time, SS#'s were used only to administer social security, they were secret by law, you still had to have other forms of identification available to actually conduct any official government business with them. It wasn't until they were adopted by private businesses as a cheap and convenient means of keeping track of their customers across corporate boundaries that they became useful to criminals for fraudulent purposes. Fraud has always been with us, but "identity theft" is a strictly modern problem.

OUR private number has been expropriated by the business sector to aid them in THEIR bookeeping, making us vulnerable to fraud and identity theft, all for their convenience, not ours. Not only do we have to take extraordinary measures to safeguard it, they get to use it for their own purposes without making an effort to protect our identity, or any penalty when they give it away, inadvertently or on purpose. They even peddle it to others for their financial benefit. And in an ultimate indignity, they have the audacity to market "security protection plans" to us so they can charge us for the privilege of not losing our identity and/or insuring us for the losses if they do.

Remember, "identity theft" wasn't a problem as long as our identity wasn't composed of a number. Once those numbers are common knowledge the problem goes away. Let the bean counters find some other way of keeping track of who we are, like they did for all those centuries before the SS# became the cheap, easy way to do it. They didn't have computers back then but they still managed to find a way, like paying somebody a salary to ID your signature or recognize your face. Sure, it will cost them money to do it. That's not my problem, it's theirs, and the people who want to buy their goods or services.

As usual, follow any social problem far enough and you'll eventually run into a lazy or crooked businessman at the bottom of it.