How Social Security numbers became our insecure national ID

The whole notion that an SSN (or any number or text for that matter) should be security in any way shape or form is absurd.<p>In our country we have national ID numbers and they are used for everything. It's a great way to identify people no matter what database you're looking at, but anyone can know your number, or even look it up, but it's nearly impossible to do anything malicious with it.

If SSN is so insecure, its amazing to me that the government has done more at a federal level to prevent private companies from requiring them.