Officially Sanctioned Identity Theft

This is simply unbelievable.

To summarize, Miami County, Ohio prosecutors and Ohio liquor-control investigators decided to investigate a strip club. To infiltrate, they used a a 22-year-old University of Dayton criminal justice major, who was also an intern with the U.S. Marshals Service and in a security post with the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. How did they get her in to the club? Did they create a false identity? Well, sort of. They borrowed someone else’s. Without asking her.

They took the identity and social security of a 26-year-old Cincinnati woman. And they said it was OK, because the law allows them to. Ohio Rep. Jim Hughes, the Columbus Republican who sponsored the change, disagrees. “It was not intended for that, I can tell you that.”

The law was apparently designed so that law enforcement investigators could more easily work credit-card fraud and other identity theft crimes, according to a lobbyist who helped set up the law.

Jeff Gamso, legal director of the Ohio ACLU, said, “What (lawmakers) didn’t mean is that the police could actually engage in identity theft. Anybody who gave it a moment’s thought would know that they didn’t mean that.

The Ohio Department of Public Safety, which is the parent agency for the Ohio Investigative Unit that the state investigators worked for, is looking into the incident.

By the way, the county only ended up with misdemeanor charges against the club, which eventually closed. They did, however file and subsequently drop charges of perjury and obstruction of justice against someone. Their informant.