From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-gram:
Two years ago, if someone asked me about protecting against identity theft, I would tell them to shred their trash and be careful giving information over the Internet. Today, that advice is obsolete. Criminals are not stealing identity information in ones and twos; they’re stealing identity information in blocks of hundreds of thousands and even millions.
On the plus side, he says so many identities are being stolen now that the thieves don’t have time to use more than a small percentage of them for fraud…