Slate has a great piece up on the use and misuse of statistics by reporters.

The magic number for journalists covering the identity theft beat has been $48 billion—the estimated annual losses suffered by identity theft victims—which carries the Federal Trade Commission’s imprimatur.… Fred H. Cate, a law professor and director of Indiana University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, notes that if the estimate were accurate, it would wipe out up to half of the banking industry’s $103 billion profits in 2005. “If those numbers were true, we’d have a banking crisis on our hands,” he says.

When I worked on the Hill, I came to recognize a similar dynamic at play: There were things everyone believed and no one questioned. I called them “political facts” because the source of the fact was consensus rather than any measurement or observation. Repetition of political facts in Members’ speeches and floor statements just made them all the more true.


A political fact relating to identity fraud is that it is a stranger crime, often a product of data breaches, that is conducted mainly over the Internet. It sometimes is, but in my book, Identity Crisis, I point out the results of an actual study showing that:

[M]ore than a third of individuals who had been impersonated in a true identity fraud knew … who the perpetrator was. And in more than half of those cases, the perpetrator was a family member or other relative. Other prominent perpetrators of identity frauds are people in companies or financial institutions with access to personal information, as well as friends, neighbors, or in‐​home employees of impersonation victims. So much for the Internet being the cause of identity fraud, though it certainly plays a role in some cases.

Alas, … my source was a Federal Trade Commission study.