New laws fail to slow identity theft

PC World reports that the laws against identity theft have been a failure:

Over the past five years, 43 U.S. states have adopted data breach notification laws, but has all of this legislation actually cut down on identity theft? Not according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who have published [PDF] a state-by-state analysis of data supplied by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

"There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the laws actually reduce identity theft," said Sasha Romanosky, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon who is one of the paper's authors.

This will come as a surprise to the liberal/statist group CAPIRG which had declared that California's identity theft law "is working" even before it took effect.