The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP)

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP...

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) began its work in the mid-1990s with the efforts of one woman to survive domestic violence, stalking, attempted murders and threatened tortures and murders at the hands of an obsessive and homicidal abuser. She soon understood that her best defense against her perpetrator was not a piece of paper guaranteed incapable of stopping a knife or bullet, but instead her rights to privacy and anonymity, her rights to control her identity information and to whom that information was licensed.

She hit the books and soon became one of the few legal anthropologists in the world, specializing in U.S. identity and privacy laws and rights. Meanwhile, the newswire Firewire News organized and began following her work.

Unexpectedly, The National Council on Identity Policy was forced to confront its developing recognition that institutionalized violence, violence from and within institutions, organizations and individuals to whom survivors of violence were supposed to be able to safely turn were prevalent and even more damaging than the original violence that survivors were attempting to escape.

Before the end of the 1990s, the NCIDP had accepted this reluctant awareness, and was pointedly working to confront such forms of violence, while investigative reporters for Firewire News worked to uncover it.

On November 4, 1998, Vice President Al Gore announced that the Social Security Administration (SSA) would no longer demand "proof" that abusers had abused a victim's Social Security Number (SSN) before issuing new account numbers to victims. Anyone should, however, be able to obtain a new number without any specific cause or reason, and the executive nature of this policy change demonstrates that there is no legislative impairment of any individual's right to do so.

In 2003, the California legislature enacted statutes that prohibited the printing of Social Security Numbers (SSNs) on the face of identity cards, and prohibited SSN use as a student ID number. This created justification for budget allocations to obtain new software at state colleges and universities so that they could comply with long existing federal laws that criminalized such uses contrary to any student's wishes. The California laws made the prohibitions largely universal so that no student had to express an objection.

In 2004, a decade after its work began, The National Council on Identity Policy began broad public outreach efforts as an entity with the purpose of carrying onward the torch lit by its founder. That year, the NCIDP first established a rudimentary web presence at NCIDPolicy.org.

Called upon for a record number of professional consultations in 2007, the NCIDP followed in 2008, beginning a concerted effort to expand it's website at NCIDPolicy.org. That expansion continues, and information is added continuously.