According to Starbucks Gossip, 97,000 current and former Starbucks employees received a letter in the mail last weekend informing them that a company laptop has gone missing and the hard drive contained oodles of personal information, including their addresses and social security numbers. To assuage employees concerns, The Mermaid is offering the affected people a free credit report. One commenter on the blog is looking on the bright side, however. "Go ahead and steal my identity. You'll get your car repo'd and your salary garnished!" more ›

What happened, after the jump. more ›

It was an interesting story, but Discover Magazine posted an even more compelling version, complete with horrifying medical details and a zinger of an ending. more ›

A Seattle-area man whose identity had been stumping the FBI has been identified with the help of his parents. The 52-year-old man had been arrested two weeks ago by federal authorities on charges of identity theft and fraud. The government had not been able to identify the man, who had been known to use over 30 aliases, because he had burned the tips of his fingers to alter his prints. more ›

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Here are things you don't want cops to find when they search your apartment:

Four computers, two printers, a scanner and an industrial machine that makes identity cards...$17,500 in cash, dozens of credit cards and fake driver's licenses, and keys to unlock many of the apartments and mailboxes in [your] upscale apartment building...a book titled "The Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Hapless Victims," as well as a newspaper article on "How to Spot Fake IDs."

Here are three vaguely computer-related crimes taken from recent headlines in Seattle, Chicago and New England. more ›

Seattlest's favorite crime (just edging Identity Theft) strikes again, this time in one of Seattlest's favorite places. A copper theft at Snoqualmie Pass temporarily disabled highway signs and safety lighting, which had to suck for people navigating the pass in the middle of the night. more ›

Although the dailies almost convinced us that spam as we know it has ended because Robert Alan Soloway was arrested yesterday, our inbox says otherwise. more ›

Michael Dirda, in the New York Review of Books:

In contemporary America, as Jonathan Raban reminds us in Surveillance, any quest for anonymity—"to live obscurely" according to the Greek ideal for happiness—has grown increasingly difficult, if not impossible. And it's not only an Orwellian Big Brother who is watching. We track each other. We check out the backgrounds of friends, Saturday-night dates, and business associates; we data-mine and Google-search; when on line we worry about hackers, viruses, and identity theft. Schools and playgrounds are patrolled by guards, while spy cameras observe our children in the hallways and bathrooms. Only those who know the code can unlock the steel gates to our "planned communities." Amazon monitors our taste in books. Our cell phones take pictures and record conversations. People can't walk their dogs now without taking along their Blackberry or wearing their Bluetooth.

It was said on this site not too long ago that copper theft was Seattlest's favorite modern crime. Something about raw materials theft and the sheer weight of the score tips the scales in its favor over identity theft which is exactly the opposite end of the virtual spectrum and our second favorite crime. Ain't nothing virtual about the 15,000 feet of copper wire that was taken from a road construction project in Washington last week. Construction sites, however, are strictly amateur as copper heists go. The real challenge is in live wire. One minute you're on the phone to whoever complaining about whatever and the next... That bitch did not just hang up on me. No, but that bitch did just run off with your copper wire. In Delridge over the weekend Qwest was a little slow in getting to a downed pole and the copper guys got there first leaving some 200 West Seattle residents without phone service for a day while the wire was replaced. more ›