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Identity theft

Identity theft, identity piracy or identity infringement occurs when someone uses another's personal identifying information, like their name, identifying number, or credit card number, without their permission, to commit fraud or other crimes. The term identity theft was coined in 1964. Since that time, the definition of identity theft has been legally defined throughout both the U.K. and the U.S. as the theft of personally identifiable information. Identity theft deliberately uses someone else's identity as a method to gain financial advantages or obtain credit and other benefits. The person whose identity has been stolen may suffer adverse consequences, especially if they are falsely held responsible for the perpetrator's actions. Personally identifiable information generally includes a person's name, date of birth, social security number, driver's license number, bank account or credit card numbers, PINs, electronic signatures, fingerprints, passwords, or any other information that can be used to access a person's financial resources.

Determining the link between data breaches and identity theft is challenging, primarily because identity theft victims often do not know how their personal information was obtained. According to a report done for the FTC, identity theft is not always detectable by the individual victims. Identity fraud is often but not necessarily the consequence of identity theft. Someone can steal or misappropriate personal information without then committing identity theft using the information about every person, such as when a major data breach occurs. A U.S. Government Accountability Office study determined that "most breaches have not resulted in detected incidents of identity theft". The report also warned that "the full extent is unknown". A later unpublished study by Carnegie Mellon University noted that "Most often, the causes of identity theft is not known", but reported that someone else concluded that "the probability of becoming a victim to identity theft as a result of a data breach is ... around only 2%". For example, in one of the largest data breaches which affected over four million records, it resulted in only about 1,800 instances of identity theft, according to the company whose systems were breached.

An October 2010 article entitled "Cyber Crime Made Easy" explained the level to which hackers are using malicious software. As Gunter Ollmann, Chief Technology Officer of security at Microsoft, said, "Interested in credit card theft? There's an app for that." This statement summed up the ease with which these hackers are accessing all kinds of information online. The new program for infecting users' computers was called Zeus, and the program is so hacker-friendly that even an inexperienced hacker can operate it. Although the hacking program is easy to use, that fact does not diminish the devastating effects that Zeus (or other software like Zeus) can do on a computer and the user. For example, programs like Zeus can steal credit card information, important documents, and even documents necessary for homeland security. If a hacker were to gain this information, it would mean nationwide identity theft or even a possible terrorist attack. The ITAC said that about 15 million Americans had their identity stolen in 2012.

Types
Sources such as the Non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center sub-divide identity theft into five categories:
 * Criminal identity theft (posing as another person when apprehended for a crime)
 * Financial identity theft (using another's identity to obtain credit, goods, and services)
 * Identity cloning (using another's information to assume his or her identity in daily life)
 * Medical identity theft (using another's identity to obtain medical care or drugs)
 * Child identity theft.

Identity theft may be used to facilitate or fund other crimes including Illegal immigration, terrorism, phishing and espionage. There are cases of identity cloning to attack payment systems, including online credit card processing and medical insurance.

Identity cloning and concealment
In this situation, the identity thief impersonates someone else to conceal their own true identity. Examples are illegal immigrants hiding their illegal status, people hiding from creditors or other individuals and those who simply want to become "anonymous" for personal reasons. Another example is posers, a label given to people who use someone else's photos and information on social networking sites. Posers mostly create believable stories involving friends of the real person they are imitating. Unlike identity theft used to obtain credit which usually comes to light when the debts mount, concealment may continue indefinitely without being detected, particularly if the identity thief can obtain false credentials to pass various authentication tests in everyday life.

Criminal identity theft
When a criminal fraudulently identifies themselves to police as another individual at the point of arrest, it is sometimes referred to as "Criminal Identity Theft." In some cases, criminals have previously obtained state-issued identity documents using credentials stolen from others, or have simply presented a fake ID. Provided the subterfuge works, charges may be placed under the victim's name, letting the criminal off the hook. Victims might only learn of such incidents by chance, for example by receiving a court summons, discovering their driver's licenses are suspended when stopped for minor traffic violations, or through background checks performed for employment purposes.

It can be difficult for the victim of criminal identity theft to clear their record. The steps required to clear the victim's incorrect criminal record depend on which jurisdiction the crime occurred and whether the true identity of the criminal can be determined. The victim might need to locate the original arresting officers and prove their own identity by some reliable means such as fingerprinting or DNA testing and may need to go to a court hearing to be cleared of the charges. Obtaining an expungement of court records may also be required. Authorities might permanently maintain the victim's name as an alias for the criminal's true identity in their criminal records databases. One problem that victims of criminal identity theft may encounter is that various data aggregators might still have incorrect criminal records in their databases even after court and police records are corrected. Thus a future background check may return the incorrect criminal records. This is just one example of the kinds of impact that may continue to affect the victims of identity theft for some months or even years after the crime, aside from the psychological trauma that being 'cloned' typically engenders.

Synthetic identity theft
A variation of identity theft that has recently become more common is synthetic identity theft, in which identities are completely or partially fabricated. The most common technique involves combining a real social security number with a name and birthdate other than the ones that are simply associated with the number. Synthetic identity theft is more difficult to track as it doesn't show on either person's credit report directly but may appear as an entirely new file in the credit bureau or as a subfile on one of the victim's credit reports. Synthetic identity theft primarily harms the creditors who unwittingly grant the fraudsters credit. Individual victims can be affected if their names become confused with the synthetic identities, or if negative information in their subfiles impacts their credit ratings.

Medical identity theft

Privacy researcher Pam Dixon, the founder of the World Privacy Forum, coined the term medical identity theft and released the first major report about this issue in 2006. In the report, she defined the crime for the first time and made the plight of victims public. The report's definition of the crime is that medical identity theft occurs when someone seeks medical care under the identity of another person. Insurance theft is also very common, if a thief has your insurance information and or your insurance card, they can seek medical attention posing as yourself. In addition to risks of financial harm common to all forms of identity theft, the thief's medical history may be added to the victim's medical records. Inaccurate information in the victim's records is difficult to correct and may affect future insurability or cause doctors to rely on misinformation to deliver inappropriate care. After the publication of the report, which contained a recommendation that consumers receive notifications of medical data breach incidents, California passed a law requiring this, and then finally HIPAA was expanded to also require medical breach notification when breaches affect 500 or more people. Data collected and stored by hospitals and other organizations such as medical aid schemes is up to 10 times more valuable to cybercriminals than credit card information.

Child identity theft
Child identity theft occurs when a minor's identity is used by another person for the impostor's personal gain. The impostor can be a family member, a friend, or even a stranger who targets children. The Social Security numbers of children are valued because they do not have any information associated with them. Thieves can establish lines of credit, obtain driver's licenses, or even buy a house using a child's identity. This fraud can go undetected for years, as most children do not discover the problem until years later. Child identity theft is fairly common, and studies have shown that the problem is growing. The largest study on child identity theft, as reported by Richard Power of the Carnegie Mellon Cylab with data supplied by AllClear ID, found that of 40,000 children, 10.2% were victims of identity theft.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates that about nine million people will be victims of identity theft in the United States per year. It was also estimated that in 2008; 630,000 people under the age of 19 were victims of theft. This then gave the victims a debt of about $12,799.

Not only are children in general big targets of identity theft but children who are in foster care are even bigger targets. This is because they are most likely moved around quite frequently and their SSN is being shared with multiple people and agencies. Foster children are even more victims of identity theft within their own families and other relatives. Young people in foster care who are victims of this crime are usually left alone to struggle and figure out how to fix their newly formed bad credit.

The emergence of children's identities on social media has also contributed to a rise in incidents of digital kidnapping and identity theft. Digital kidnapping involves individuals stealing online images of children and misrepresenting them as their own.

Financial identity theft
The most common type of identity theft is related to finance. Financial identity theft includes obtaining credit, loans, goods, and services while claiming to be someone else.

Tax identity theft
One of the major identity theft categories is tax-related identity theft. The most common method is to use a person's authentic name, address, and Social Security Number to file a tax return with false information, and have the resulting refund direct-deposited into a bank account controlled by the thief. The thief in this case can also try to get a job and then their employer will report the income of the real taxpayer, this then results in the taxpayer getting in trouble with the IRS.

The 14039 Form to the IRS is a form that will help one fight against a theft like tax theft. This form will put the IRS on alert and someone who believed they have been a victim of tax-related theft will be given an Identity Protection Personal Identification Number (IP PIN), which is a 6 digit code used in replacing an SSN for filing tax returns.

Techniques for obtaining and exploiting personal information
Identity thieves typically obtain and exploit personally identifiable information about individuals, or various credentials they use to authenticate themselves, to impersonate them. Examples include:
 * Using public records about individual citizens, published in official registers such as electoral rolls
 * Stealing cheques (checks) to acquire banking information, including account numbers and bank codes
 * Guessing Social Security numbers by using information found on Internet social networks such as Twitter and MySpace

Individual identity protection
The acquisition of personal identifiers is made possible through serious breaches of privacy. For consumers, this is usually a result of them naively providing their personal information or login credentials to the identity thieves (e.g., in a phishing attack) but identity-related documents such as credit cards, bank statements, utility bills, checkbooks, etc. may also be physically stolen from vehicles, homes, offices, and not the least letterboxes, or directly from victims by pickpockets and bag snatchers. Guardianship of personal identifiers by consumers is the most common intervention strategy recommended by the US Federal Trade Commission, Canadian Phone Busters and most sites that address identity theft. Such organizations offer recommendations on how individuals can prevent their information from falling into the wrong hands.

Identity theft can be partially mitigated by not identifying oneself unnecessarily (a form of information security control known as risk avoidance). This implies that organizations, IT systems, and procedures should not demand excessive amounts of personal information or credentials for identification and authentication. Requiring, storing, and processing personal identifiers (such as Social Security number, national identification number, driver's license number, credit card number, etc.) increases the risks of identity theft unless this valuable personal information is adequately secured at all times. Committing personal identifiers to memory is a sound practice that can reduce the risks of a would-be identity thief from obtaining these records. To help in remembering numbers such as social security numbers and credit card numbers, it is helpful to consider using mnemonic techniques or memory aids such as the mnemonic Major System.

Identity thieves sometimes impersonate dead people, using personal information obtained from death notices, gravestones, and other sources to exploit delays between the death and the closure of the person's accounts, the inattentiveness of grieving families, and weaknesses in the processes for credit-checking. Such crimes may continue for some time until the deceased's families or the authorities notice and react to anomalies.

In recent years, commercial identity theft protection/insurance services have become available in many countries. These services purport to help protect the individual from identity theft or help detect that identity theft has occurred in exchange for a monthly or annual membership fee or premium. The services typically work either by setting fraud alerts on the individual's credit files with the three major credit bureaus or by setting up credit report monitoring with the credit bureau. While identity theft protection/insurance services have been heavily marketed, their value has been called into question.

Potential outcomes
Identity theft is a serious problem in the United States. In a 2018 study, it was reported that 60 million Americans' identities had been wrongfully acquired. In response, under advisement from the Identity Theft Resource Center, some new bills have been implemented to improve security such as requiring electronic signatures and social security verification.

Several types of identity theft are used to gather information, one of the most common types occurs when consumers make online purchases. A study was conducted with 190 people to determine the relationship between the constructs of fear of financial losses and reputational damages. The conclusions of this study revealed that identity theft was a positive correlation with reputable damages. The relationship between perceived risk and online purchase intention were negative. The significance of this study reveals that online companies are more aware of the potential harm that can be done to their consumers, therefore they are searching for ways to reduce the perceived risk of consumers and not lose out on business.

Victims of identity theft may face years of effort proving to the legal system that they are the true person, leading to emotional strain and financial losses. Most identity theft is perpetrated by a family member of the victim, and some may not be able to obtain new credit cards or open new bank accounts or loans.

Identity protection by organizations
In their May 1998 testimony before the United States Senate, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) discussed the sale of Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers by credit-raters and data miners. The FTC agreed to the industry's self-regulating principles restricting access to information on credit reports. According to the industry, the restrictions vary according to the category of customer. Credit reporting agencies gather and disclose personal and credit information to a wide business client base.

Poor stewardship of personal data by organizations, resulting in unauthorized access to sensitive data, can expose individuals to the risk of identity theft. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has documented over 900 individual data breaches by US companies and government agencies since January 2005, which together have involved over 200 million total records containing sensitive personal information, many containing social security numbers. Poor corporate diligence standards which can result in data breaches include:
 * failure to shred confidential information before throwing it into dumpsters
 * failure to ensure adequate network security
 * credit card numbers stolen by call center agents and people with access to call recordings
 * the theft of laptop computers or portable media being carried off-site containing vast amounts of personal information. The use of strong encryption on these devices can reduce the chance of data being misused should a criminal obtain them.
 * the brokerage of personal information to other businesses without ensuring that the purchaser maintains adequate security controls
 * Failure of governments, when registering sole proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations, to determine if the officers listed in the Articles of Incorporation are who they say they are. This potentially allows criminals access to personal information through credit rating and data mining services.

The failure of corporate or government organizations to protect consumer privacy, client confidentiality and political privacy has been criticized for facilitating the acquisition of personal identifiers by criminals.

Using various types of biometric information, such as fingerprints, for identification and authentication has been cited as a way to thwart identity thieves, however, there are technological limitations and privacy concerns associated with these methods as well.

Market
There is an active market for buying and selling stolen personal information, which occurs mostly in darknet markets but also in other black markets. People increase the value of the stolen data by aggregating it with publicly available data, and sell it again for a profit, increasing the damage that can be done to the people whose data was stolen.

International
In March 2014, after it was learned two passengers with stolen passports were on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went missing on 8 March 2014. It came to light that Interpol maintains a database of 40 million lost and stolen travel documents from 157 countries, which Interpol makes available to governments and the public, including airlines and hotels. The Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database, however, is rarely used. Big News Network (which is based in the UAE) reported that Interpol Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble told a forum in Abu Dhabi in the previous month, "The bad news is that, despite being incredibly cost-effective and deployable to virtually anywhere in the world, only a handful of countries are systematically using SLTD to screen travelers. The result is a major gap in our global security apparatus that is left vulnerable to exploitation by criminals and terrorists."

Australia
In Australia, each state has enacted laws that deal with different aspects of identity or fraud issues. Some states have now amended relevant criminal laws to reflect crimes of identity theft, such as the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA), Crimes Amendment (Fraud, Identity and Forgery Offences) Act 2009, and also in Queensland under the Criminal Code 1899 (QLD). Other states and territories are in states of development in respect of regulatory frameworks relating to identity theft such as Western Australia in respect of the Criminal Code Amendment (Identity Crime) Bill 2009.

At the Commonwealth level, under the Criminal Code Amendment (Theft, Fraud, Bribery & Related Offences) Act 2000 which amended certain provisions within the Criminal Code Act 1995,

"135.1 General dishonesty (3) A person is guilty of an offense if a) the person does anything with the intention of dishonestly causing a loss to another person; and b) the other person is a Commonwealth entity. Penalty: Imprisonment for 5 years."

Between 2014 and 2015 in Australia, there were 133,921 fraud and deception offences, an increase of 6% from previous year. The total cost reported by the Attorney General Department was: There are also high indirect costs associated as a direct result of an incident. For example, the total indirect costs for police recorded fraud is $5,774,081.

Likewise, each state has enacted its own privacy laws to prevent the misuse of personal information and data. The Commonwealth Privacy Act applies only to Commonwealth and territory agencies and to certain private-sector bodies (where, for example, they deal with sensitive records, such as medical records, or they have more than $3 million in turnover PA).

Canada
Under section 402.2 of the Criminal Code, "Everyone commits an offense who knowingly obtains or possesses another person's identity information in circumstances giving rise to a reasonable inference that the information is intended to be used to commit an indictable offense that includes fraud, deceit, or falsehood as an element of the offense. is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; or is guilty of an offense punishable on summary conviction."

Under section 403 of the Criminal Code, "(1) Everyone commits an offense who fraudulently personates another person, living or dead, (a) with intent to gain advantage for themselves or another person; (b) with intent to obtain any property or an interest in any property; (c) with intent to cause disadvantage to the person being personated or another person; or (d) with intent to avoid arrest or prosecution or to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice. is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years; or guilty of an offense punishable on summary conviction."

In Canada, Privacy Act (federal legislation) covers only federal government, agencies and crown corporations. Each province and territory has its own privacy law and privacy commissioners to limit the storage and use of personal data. For the private sector, the purpose of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (2000, c. 5) (known as PIPEDA) is to establish rules to govern the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information; except for the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia where provincial laws have been deemed substantially similar.

Proposed legislation

 * Bill C-27 (39th Canadian Parliament, 2nd Session)

France
In France, a person convicted of identity theft can be sentenced up to five years in prison and fined up to €75,000.

Hong Kong
Under HK Laws. Chap 210 Theft Ordinance, sec. 16A Fraud: "(1) If any person by any deceit (whether or not the deceit is the sole or main inducement) and with intent to defraud induces another person to commit an act or make an omission, which results either- (a) in benefit to any person other than the second-mentioned person; or (b) in prejudice or a substantial risk of prejudice to any person other than the first-mentioned person, the first-mentioned person commits the offense of fraud and is liable on conviction upon indictment to imprisonment for 14 years."

The Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (PDPO) regulates the collection, use and retention of personal information in Hong Kong. It also provides citizens the right to request information held by businesses and the government to the extent provided by this law. The PDPO establishes the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data which enforces the law and advises on the use of personal data.

India
Under the Information Technology Act 2000 Chapter IX Sec 66C: "SECTION 66C PUNISHMENT FOR IDENTITY THEFT Whoever, fraudulently or dishonestly makes use of the electronic signature, password, or any other unique identification feature of any other person, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years and shall also be liable to fine which may extend to rupees one lakh."

Philippines
Social networking sites are one of the most famous spreaders of posers in the online community, giving the users the freedom to post any information they want without any verification that the account is being used by the real person.

The Philippines, which ranks eighth in the numbers of users of Facebook and other social networking sites (such as Twitter, Multiply and Tumblr), has been known as a source of various identity theft problems. Identities of people who carelessly put personal information on their profiles can easily be stolen just by simple browsing. Some people meet online, get to know each other through Facebook chat, and exchange messages that share private information. Others get romantically involved with online friends and end up sharing too much information (such as their social security number, bank account, home address, and company address).

This phenomenon leads to the creation of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 (Republic Act No. 10175). Section 2 of this act states that it recognizes the importance of communication and multimedia for the development, exploitation, and dissemination of information, but violators will be punished by the law through imprisonment or a fine upwards of ₱200,000, but not exceeding ₱1,000,000, or (depending on the damage caused) both.

Sweden
Sweden has had relatively few problems with identity theft because only Swedish identity documents were accepted for identity verification. Stolen documents are traceable by banks and certain other institutions. Banks are required to check the identity of anyone withdrawing money or getting loans. If a bank gives money to someone using an identity document that has been reported as stolen, the bank must take this loss. Since 2008, any EU passport is valid in Sweden for identity verification, and Swedish passports are valid all over the EU. This makes it harder to detect stolen documents, but banks in Sweden still must ensure that stolen documents are not accepted.

Other types of identity theft have become more common in Sweden. One common example is ordering a credit card to someone who has an unlocked letterbox and is not home during the daytime. The thief steals the letter with the credit card and the letter with the code, which typically arrives a few days later. Usage of a stolen credit card is difficult in Sweden since an identity document or a PIN code is normally demanded. If a shop does not demand either, it must take the loss from accepting a stolen credit card. The practice of observing someone using their credit card's PIN code, stealing the credit card, or skimming it, and then using the credit card has become more common.

Legally, Sweden is an open society. The Principle of Public Access states that all information (e.g. addresses, incomes, taxes) kept by public authorities must be available for anyone, except in certain cases (for example, the addresses of people who need to hide are restricted). This makes fraud easier.

Until 2016, there were no laws that specifically prohibited using someone's identity. Instead, there were only laws regarding any indirect damages caused. Impersonating anyone else for financial gain is a type of fraud in the Criminal Code (brottsbalken). Impersonating anyone else to discredit them by hacking into their social media accounts and provoke is considered libel. However, it is difficult to convict someone of committing this crime. In late 2016, a new law was introduced which partially banned undetermined identity usage.

United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, personal data is protected by the Data Protection Act 1998. The Act covers all personal data which an organization may hold, including names, birthday and anniversary dates, addresses, and telephone numbers.

Under English law (which extends to Wales but not to Northern Ireland or Scotland), the deception offences under the Theft Act 1968 increasingly contend with identity theft situations. In R v Seward (2005) EWCA Crim 1941, the defendant was acting as the "frontman" in the use of stolen credit cards and other documents to obtain goods. He obtained goods to the value of £10,000 for others who are unlikely ever to be identified. The Court of Appeal considered a sentencing policy for deception offenses involving "identity theft" and concluded that a prison sentence was required. Henriques J. said at para 14: "Identity fraud is a particularly pernicious and prevalent form of dishonesty calling for, in our judgment, deterrent sentences."

Statistics released by CIFAS (UK's Fraud Prevention Service) show that there were 89,000 victims of identity theft in the UK in 2010 and 85,000 victims in 2009. Men in their 30s and 40s are the most common victims. Identity fraud now accounts for nearly half of all frauds recorded.

United States
The increase in crimes of identity theft led to the drafting of the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act. In 1998, The Federal Trade Commission appeared before the United States Senate. The FTC discussed crimes which exploit consumer credit to commit loan fraud, mortgage fraud, lines-of-credit fraud, credit card fraud, commodities and services frauds. The Identity Theft Deterrence Act (2003)[ITADA] amended U.S. Code Title 18, § 1028 ("Fraud related to activity in connection with identification documents, authentication features, and information"). The statute now makes the possession of any "means of identification" to "knowingly transfer, possess, or use without lawful authority" a federal crime, alongside unlawful possession of identification documents. However, for federal jurisdiction to prosecute, the crime must include an "identification document" that either: (a) is purportedly issued by the United States, (b) is used or intended to defraud the United States, (c) is sent through the mail, or (d) is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce. See (c). Punishment can be up to 5, 15, 20, or 30 years in federal prison, plus fines, depending on the underlying crime per (b). In addition, punishments for the unlawful use of a "means of identification" were strengthened in § 1028A ("Aggravated Identity Theft"), allowing for a consecutive sentence under specific enumerated felony violations as defined in § 1028A(c)(1) through (11).

The Act also provides the Federal Trade Commission with authority to track the number of incidents and the dollar value of losses. Their figures relate mainly to consumer financial crimes and not the broader range of all identification-based crimes.

If charges are brought by state or local law enforcement agencies, different penalties apply to depend on the state.

Six Federal agencies conducted a joint task force to increase the ability to detect identity theft. Their joint recommendation on "red flag" guidelines is a set of requirements on financial institutions and other entities which furnish credit data to credit reporting services to develop written plans for detecting identity theft. The FTC has determined that most medical practices are considered creditors and are subject to requirements to develop a plan to prevent and respond to patient identity theft. These plans must be adopted by each organization's board of directors and monitored by senior executives.

Identity theft complaints as a percentage of all fraud complaints decreased from 2004 to 2006. The Federal Trade Commission reported that fraud complaints in general were growing faster than ID theft complaints. The findings were similar in two other FTC studies done in 2003 and 2005. In 2003, 4.6 percent of the US population said they were a victim of ID theft. In 2005, that number had dropped to 3.7 percent of the population. The commission's 2003 estimate was that identity theft accounted for some $52.6 billion of losses in the preceding year alone and affected more than 9.91 million Americans; the figure comprises $47.6 billion lost by businesses and $5 billion lost by consumers.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2010, 7% of US households experienced identity theft - up from 5.5% in 2005 when the figures were first assembled, but broadly flat since 2007. In 2012, approximately 16.6 million persons, or 7% of all U.S. residents age 16 or older, reported being victims of one or more incidents of identity theft.

At least two states, California and Wisconsin have created an Office of Privacy Protection to assist their citizens in avoiding and recovering from identity theft.

In 2009, Indiana created an Identity Theft Unit within their Office of Attorney General to educate and assist consumers in avoiding and recovering from identity theft as well as assist law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting identity theft crimes.

In Massachusetts in 2009–2010, Governor Deval Patrick committed to balancing consumer protection with the needs of small business owners. His Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation announced certain adjustments to Massachusetts' identity theft regulations that maintain protections and also allow flexibility in compliance. These updated regulations went into effect on 1 March 2010. The regulations are clear that their approach to data security is a risk-based approach important to small businesses and might not handle a lot of personal information about customers.

The IRS has created the IRS Identity Protection Specialized Unit to help taxpayers' who are victims of federal tax-related identity theft. Generally, the identity thief will use a stolen SSN to file a forged tax return and attempt to get a fraudulent refund early in the filing season. A taxpayer will need to fill out Form 14039, Identity Theft Affidavit.

As for the future of medical care and Medicaid, people are mostly concerned about cloud computing. The addition of using cloud information within the United States medicare system would institute easily accessible health information for individuals, but that also makes it easier for identity theft. Currently, new technology is being produced to help encrypt and protect files, which will create a smooth transition to cloud technology in the healthcare system.

Notification
Many states followed California's lead and enacted mandatory data breach notification laws. As a result, companies that report a data breach typically report it to all their customers.

Spread and impact
Surveys in the US from 2003 to 2006 showed a decrease in the total number of identity fraud victims and a decrease in the total value of identity fraud from US$47.6 billion in 2003 to $15.6 billion in 2006. The average fraud per person decreased from $4,789 in 2003 to $1,882 in 2006. A Microsoft report shows that this drop is due to statistical problems with the methodology, that such survey-based estimates are "hopelessly flawed" and exaggerate the true losses by orders of magnitude.

The 2003 survey from the Identity Theft Resource Center found that: In a widely publicized account, Michelle Brown, a victim of identity fraud, testified before a U.S. Senate Committee Hearing on Identity Theft. Ms. Brown testified that: "over a year and a half from January 1998 through July 1999, one individual impersonated me to procure over $50,000 in goods and services. Not only did she damage my credit, but she escalated her crimes to a level that I never truly expected: she engaged in drug trafficking. The crime resulted in my erroneous arrest record, a warrant out for my arrest, and eventually, a prison record when she was booked under my name as an inmate in the Chicago Federal Prison."
 * Only 15% of victims find out about the theft through proactive action taken by a business
 * The average time spent by victims resolving the problem is about 330 hours
 * 73% of respondents indicated the crime involved the thief acquiring a credit card

In Australia, identity theft was estimated to be worth between A$1billion and A$4 billion per annum in 2001.

In the United Kingdom, the Home Office reported that identity fraud costs the UK economy £1.2 billion annually (experts believe that the real figure could be much higher) although privacy groups object to the validity of these numbers, arguing that they are being used by the government to push for introduction of national ID cards. Confusion over exactly what constitutes identity theft has led to claims that statistics may be exaggerated. An extensively reported  study from Microsoft Research in 2011 finds that estimates of identity theft losses contain enormous exaggerations, writing that surveys "are so compromised and biased that no faith whatever can be placed in their findings."

Organizations

 * U.S.
 * U.S.

Laws

 * (Massachusetts personal information protection law)

title: Identity theft


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Talk:Postmodern music

Merged articles and archived talk page
I have merged Postmodern Classical Music into this article. I have also archived this talk page here since all the discussions were held last year or before. --Jubilee♫ clipman 04:32, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Cleanup
This article is a real mess and, even with the new material from the other article, just does not do justice to the subject. Anyone willing to overhaul this? --Jubilee♫ clipman 04:35, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's a shitty article for a shitty subject. What more could you possibly ask for? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.68.98.170 (talk) 13:57, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

 * Civility. Helpfulness. Hyacinth (talk) 06:01, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

 * I am totally on this. (Vive1936 (talk) 21:37, 14 May 2010 (UTC))

Tag removed. Hyacinth (talk) 20:22, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Additional citations
Why, what, where, and how does this article need additional citations for verification? Hyacinth (talk) 20:24, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
 * That banner must be seriously out of date! There is scarcely a sentence in this very short article that does not bear a verifying citation. I would say, remove the banner.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:02, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Citations seem to be done wrong DemonDays64 (talk) 22:21, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
 * How so? They appear perfectly formed parenthetical references to me. Or are you mistakenly assuming that Wikipedia has adopted a single referencing style? If so, then I suggest you read Citing sources and WP:CITEVAR.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:28, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Essay-like
Why, what, where, and how is this article written like an essay and what should be done about it? Hyacinth (talk) 20:24, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
 * It doesn't look essay-like to me. Perhaps it did in 2009, when that banner was place. I say remove the flag.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:04, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Verification
Editor Btbowen has removed a "Failed verification" tag, and replaced it with a hidden-text comment which I am moving here, since it requests discussion. The disputed passage is: "There is no discernible or provable difference between the labels "Postmodern" and "Postmodernist" music, the latter being simply a derivation of the former", and in support of this Btbowen offered Bertens 1995, 3. In placing the "failed verification" tag, I commented: "Bertens says nothing remotely like this but, on the contrary, refers to a "bewildering" variety of usage. Furthermore, his context here is the terms in general--he does not mention music at all until page 17." Btbowen replaced the tag and my comment with a quotation from Bertens ("Postmodernism is an exasperating term, and so are postmodern, postmodernist, postmodernity, and whatever else one might come across in the way of derivation.") and a comment: "what evidence is there that 'postmodernist' music is anything different from postmodern music; citation please? This is what I mean about labels being applied from the outside, as is almost always the case when discussing genre -- which is essentially how this is being treated. Most composers/artists would rarely-if-ever self-identify as 'postmodern.'" I agree that, as things stand, there is no evidence offered one way or the other. However, it is the responsibility of an editor to provide a reliable source substantiating claims that may be disputed. The offered source in this case fails to support the claim, either with respect to music or more generally as an aesthetic/philosophical term. Whether or not composers/artists would self-identify as 'postmodern' is entirely beside the point. What is needed here is a source stating that there is no distinction between the terms 'postmodern' and 'postmodernist', and preferably a source that makes this point specifically with music in view.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:12, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

The way I read the Bertens is that he is saying all those terms are synonymous; there is no difference between any of the derivations. I think it's possible that what you're asking for as a reference may be impossible, since if there is no difference and the two words are used interchangeably, then no one will have bothered to address the "confusion" of the terms. It's like the difference between "trumpet player" and "trumpeter." I'm honestly quite content to be wrong on this one; I've just never read anyone who makes the distinction. One would think if it were indeed a point of contention that a source such as Grove or Jameson or indeed Beard & Gloag would discuss this. —Btbowen 20:40, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

 * I think you can see the problem here has to do with "the way I read the Bertens", which is an interpretation. I read it quite differently: there is a confusion of terms that may mean different people actually mean different things. This view is supported by Jameson (somewhere, I could look it up) when he says there are as many different "postmodernisms" as there are "modernisms" against which they react. So far as the distinction between "postmodern" (a condition) and "postmodernism" (an attitude or aesthetic/philosophic position) is concerned, I can certainly find sources for you, though I cannot at the moment think of one that specifically addresses music.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:34, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

 * I don't think Jameson is talking lexical semantics, though; he means that postmodernism is manifested in an incredible number of ways. Yes, clearly what we have is a difference of interpretations. So then, how is it determined whose opinion ends up on Wikipedia? Btbowen 08:35, 3 October 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.88.12.27 (talk)

 * Opinions published in reliable sources may be cited on Wikipedia. Editors are not permitted to inject their own interpretations, which on Wkipedia is called original research. In the present case, Bertens can be used to verify the fact that there is a bewildering variety of terms. It must be left up to the reader to determine whether this might mean that all of these terms refer to exactly the same thing, or if it means there are significant differences of opinion about what might fall under these rubrics.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:00, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Missing Composers/Popular Musicians
Some of the composers I am familiar with are missing from this list. I don't want to introduce poor sources, but I thought I should bring them up: John Zorn, Henry Brant, Morton Gould, and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Two popular music entities that I would cite as postmodern are likewise missing: Mr. Bungle and Frank Zappa. I will delete John Cage from the "Popular Music" section since he is already listed under classical music. Magicwalltree (talk) 20:57, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It may be possible to find sources for any and all of these names, though I am a little startled to see Brant and Gould in your nominations. Still, they both composed mainly after 1930, which by some definitions makes them indisputably post-modern. It is very instructive, by the way, to compare this list with the List of modernist composers. Thank you for removing Cage from the list of popular musicians. I had tagged that entry for a reference rather than removing it myself, because Cage has been claimed for almost every other conceivable category, and I thought whoever had put his name there ought to be given the opportunity to cite a source in support of this one as well. Enough time has passed, however, and no citation has been forthcoming. Too bad.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:26, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
 * To me Henry Brant is clear cut: looking at the list of 16 characteristic of Postmodernism, I would say his music largely satisfies 15, with #10, being a possible exception. To return to Cage, of the 16, I count 9 clear characteristics of postmodernism in his music.

1. Yes and no... Cage broke many rules, but I see his music as an extension of modernism. 2. No, though Cage's music possesses some natural humor to it, I think it would be wrong to term it "ironic." 3. Yes, of course, this was his obsession. 4. No, though Cage's music was not accepted by many circles in his time, his purpose was not to challenge the barriers between high and low. 5. Yes, this follows from #3 for him and was an integral part of his rebellion. 6. Yes and no ... though this is similar to #4, I believe a case could be made that Cage want his music to be appreciated by a non-traditional classical audience that could be termed as "populist." 7. Yes, this is the same as #5. 8. Yes, Cage's rebellion in many ways socially, culturally, and politically driven. 9. No, in referencing Eastern Philosophy and the I Ching, I believe Cage is drawing from precompositional sources as many Modernists did. 10. Yes, Cage may not have embraced technology as composers do today, but the scope of technology was more limited in his time. 11. Yes, although this is a very vague characteristic. 12. Yes. 13. Yes. 14. No, again this follows from #9, in that his invention of Chance/Aleatoric music is a modernist system. 15. No, the meanings of his pieces are fairly specific. They range from traditional abstract compositions to Zen Meditations. 16. Yes. I hope to visit the library next week to back up my claim.Magicwalltree (talk) 20:03, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep in mind that what you must accomplish here is to demonstrate that the cited authors did not claim Brant or Cage as modernists or postmodernists. The 16 characteristics are Jonathan Kramer's criteria; there are many other opinions, and many of these definitions do not exclude traits of modernism. Furthermore, a composer may well change characteristics over the course of his career (in fact, it is unusual for a composer not to change). George Rochberg is a well-known example of a composer who allegedly started out as a modernist, and then changed his mind. If you know his Fifth Symphony, however, you may well have doubts about whether he rejected all elements of modernism. Finally, it should be born in mind that modernism and postmodernism are philosophical stances, not musical styles (though some writers pretend otherwise). It will not do (for example) to automatically impute a modernist position to a composer who happens once to have used a twelve-tone row, nor to label all minimalist composers as postmodern. If you were to do this, what would you make of a composer like Frans Geysen, who is a minimalist and at the same time uses twelve-tone rows?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:52, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * If it is a philosophical stance that we are looking for, shouldn't the basis for determining who belongs in this group be from the composer's own words only?Magicwalltree (talk) 04:58, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Supposing that the composers in question have discussed the appropriate things then, yes, this would be more significant than anything that could be deduced from a stylistic analysis of their music (one of the shortcomings of a formalistic approach to art). Of course, composers not trained in philosophy may not know how correctly to express themselves in these matters. There is in addition the possibility that they may not be telling the truth. A lie-detector test might be helpful or, better, fMRI promises a great deal for the future. Neither technique would be of much use in the cases of Cage and Brant, of course, since they are both deceased. Finally, it is not out of the bounds of possibility that these two categories are (1) not mutually exclusive, (2) inadequately defined, or (3) invalid. Fortunately, we need not concern ourselves with these issues on Wikipedia, which requires only the authority of a reliable source.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:00, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Postmodern music


text:
Talk:Geography of Missouri

Untitled
Does it actually make sense to break down physical geography by artificial political borders? See WikiProject_Ecoregions - the features you describe are different ecoregions, and have names given to them by ecologists. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.93.104 (talk) 07:11, 8 February 2003 (UTC)
 * I think the comment about geography by state is valid, I'm also working on one for the U.S. Still, I am following the guidelines set up in the WikiProject_U.S._States and the WikiProject_Countries - sfmontyo

As far as terminology, the geography descriptions are coming from the 1911 encyclopedia britannica with some minor editing on my part. Please feel free to edit them as you wish. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sfmontyo (talk • contribs) 07:49, 8 February 2003 (UTC)

The old encyclopedia info doesn't jive with the divisions that the state gives http://www.conservation.state.mo.us/areas/natareas/natural.htm also there was study done on Dialect and Heritage areas in Missouri done in the 1920's-1930's. It broke the State down into about 10 areas depending on the dialect (There are about 5 different dialects of English spoken in the state) or cultural heritage. A map of those the divisons can be found here Vernacular Architecture in Rural and Small Town Missouri (The Map is what you want to look at although the Vernacular Architecture article is very intersting. A portion of the WPA guide is here http://members.aol.com/hsauertieg/rt66/wpa_mo.htm  You can order the full guide from Amazon here Amazon Linkand I think the senate website also has that guide for sale or at least mentions it here http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/WPAStateGuides.pdf. I think the WPA Guide is Public Domain but I'm not sure. I know for sure that the State Conservation article is not Public Domain and would hve to be rewritten if it is to be included. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.244.3.94 (talk) 07:11, 6 June 2004 (UTC)

WPA Works not copyrighted
I dug around and the WPA Guides are not copyrighted http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpares.html. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.244.3.94 (talk) 07:34, 6 June 2004 (UTC)

Please!!
You need to put more information on volcanoes and earhquakes and why of the ozark plateau. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.29.88.61 (talk) 20:36, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Mississippi below Ste. Gen.
The article says, "The Mississippi is skirted with lagoons, lakes and morasses from Ste. Genevieve to the Arkansas border, and in places is confined by levees.". Is that accurate? It sounds like it might be taken from the 1911 Britannica, and much has changed in this area since then. --Kbh3rd talk 18:00, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Physiographic regions
The text and the map is not consistent in terminology and content. The text says there are has three distinct physiographic divisions in Missouri; the map shows five physiographic provinces. 84.23.155.84 (talk) 20:45, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Dissected till plain = Osage Plain and Dissected Till Plains?
 * Ozark highlands = Ozark Plateau?
 * Western plain = ?
 * Coastal plain = ?
 * Till plain = Mississippi Alluvial Plain?

title: Talk:Geography of Missouri


text:
Wikipedia:WikiProject Ecoregions/Examples

Example' (partial)

 * Arabian Desert and East Sahero-Arabian xeric shrublands (PA1303)

Files that must be cleaned up and probably renamed to fit the ecozone hierarchy:

 * Geography_of_Missouri
 * Rivers of Europe
 * Nearctic
 * Neotropic


text:
H. E. Bates

Herbert Ernest Bates (16 May 1905 – 29 January 1974) was an English writer, known for his gritty realistic short stories (he wrote more than 25 collections) and novels set in the early to mid 20th century of England mainly. He was from the countryside and adored flowers and gardening (writing two books on gardening), so much of his writing is informed by this. The semi-autobiographical "Love for Lydia" has detailed descriptions of nature in winter, and of the big grounds of Aspen Hall where he meets Lydia. His best-known works include Love for Lydia, Fair Stood the Wind for France,The Darling Buds of May, as well as My Uncle Silas. Many of his short stories were turned into tv series by British television in the 1970s.

Early life
Herbert Ernest Bates was born on 16 May 1905 in Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After the end of school, he worked as a reporter and a warehouse clerk.

Career
Typically, Bates' best-known works are set in the English countryside, particularly the Midlands including his native Northamptonshire and the 'Garden of England', Kent, the setting for The Darling Buds of May. Bates was partial to taking long walks around the Northamptonshire countryside, which often provided the inspiration for his stories. His love for the countryside is exemplified in two volumes of essays, Through the Woods and Down the River. Both have been reprinted numerous times. Several of Bates's works, such The Bride Comes to Evensford and Love for Lydia, are set in the fictional town of Evensford, which is based on Bates's hometown Rushden in Northamptonshire.

Bates discarded his first novel, written when he was in his late teenage years, but his second, and the first to be published, The Two Sisters, was inspired by one of his midnight walks, which took him to the small village of Farndish. There, late at night, he saw a light burning in a cottage window and it was this that triggered the story. He was working briefly for the local newspaper in Wellingborough, a job which he hated, and then later at a local shoe-making warehouse, where he had time to write; in fact the whole of this first novel was written there. This was sent to, and rejected by, eight or nine publishers until Jonathan Cape accepted it on the advice of its respected Reader, Edward Garnett. Bates was then twenty years old. More novels, collections of short stories, essays, and articles followed, but did not pay well.

World War II short stories
During World War II, he was commissioned into the Royal Air Force solely to write short stories. The Air Ministry realised that it might create more favorable public sentiment by emphasizing stories about the people fighting the war, rather than facts. The stories were published originally in the News Chronicle with the pseudonym "Flying Officer X". Later they were published in book form as The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories and How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France. After a posting to the Far East, this was followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain in 1947 and The Jacaranda Tree (published in 1949), and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (published in 1950).

He was also commissioned by the Air Ministry to write The Battle of the Flying Bomb, but because of various disagreements within the government, it was cancelled, and then publication was banned for 30 years. It was discovered by Bob Ogley and published during 1994 with the title Flying Bombs over England. Another commission which has still to be published is Night Interception Battle concerning the difficulty of tracking enemy aircraft at night.

Post-war work
Other novels followed after the war; he averaged about one novel and a collection of short stories a year, which was considered very productive at the time. These included The Feast of July and Love for Lydia. His most popular creation was the Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May. Pop Larkin and his family were inspired by a person seen in a local shop in Kent by Bates and his family when on holiday. The man (probably Wiltshire trader William Dell, also on holiday) had a huge wad of rubber-banded bank notes and proceeded to treat his trailer load of children with Easter eggs and ice creams. Other characters were modelled on friends and acquaintances of Bates, such as Iris Snow (a parody of Iris Murdoch) and the Brigadier who was modelled on the father of John Bayley, Murdoch's husband.

The television adaptation, produced after his death by his son Richard and based on these stories, was a tremendous success. It is also the source of the American movie The Mating Game. The My Uncle Silas stories were also made into a UK television series from 2000 to 2003. Many other stories were adapted to TV and others to movies, the most renowned being The Purple Plain in 1954 and The Triple Echo; Bates also worked on other movie scripts. In 2020 ITV commissioned a new television series of The Darling Buds of May, with the title The Larkins starring Bradley Walsh, Joanna Scanlan, Sabrina Bartlett and Tok Stephen. The first episode aired in October 2021.

Personal life
In 1931, he married Madge Cox, who lived two streets away from him in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener who wrote many books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life.

They had two sons and two daughters: Ann, Judith, Richard and Jonathan. Jonathan Bates was nominated for an Academy Award for his sound work on the 1982 movie Gandhi. Richard became a television producer, Bates's granddaughter, Victoria Wicks is an actress and script consultant.

Death and honours
Bates died on 29 January 1974 in Canterbury, Kent, aged 68. A prolific and successful author, his greatest success was posthumous, with the television adaptations of his stories The Darling Buds of May and its sequels as well as adaptations of My Uncle Silas, A Moment in Time, Fair Stood the Wind for France and Love for Lydia. In his home town of Rushden, H.E. Bates has a road named after him to the west of the town, leading to the local leisure centre. His archive is held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. After Bates' death Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at the age of 95.

Novels

 * The Two Sisters (1926)
 * Catherine Foster (1929)
 * Charlotte's Row (1931)
 * The Fallow Land (1932)
 * The Poacher (1935)
 * A House of Women (1936)
 * Spella Ho (1938)
 * Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944)
 * The Cruise of the Breadwinner (1946)
 * The Purple Plain (1947)
 * Dear Life (1949)
 * The Jacaranda Tree (1949)
 * The Scarlet Sword (1950)
 * The Grass God (1951)
 * Love for Lydia (1952)
 * The Feast of July (1954)
 * The Sleepless Moon (1956)
 * A Crown of Wild Myrtle (1962)
 * A Moment in Time (1964)
 * The Distant Horns of Summer (1967)
 * The Triple Echo (1970)

Pop Larkin series

 * The Darling Buds of May (1958)
 * A Breath of French Air (1959)
 * When the Green Woods Laugh (1960)
 * Oh! To be in England (1963)
 * A Little of What You Fancy (1970)

Short stories

 * The Seekers (1926)
 * The Spring Song and in View of the Fact That (1927)
 * Day's End (1928)
 * Alexander (1929)
 * The Tree (1930)
 * The Hessian Prisoner (1930)
 * A Threshing Day for Esther (1930)
 * Charlotte Esmond (1930) Republished as Mrs Esmond's Life (1931)
 * A German Idyll (1932)
 * Sally Go Round the Moon (1932)
 * The Black Boxer (1932)
 * The Story Without an End (1932)
 * The House with the Apricot (1933)
 * Time (1933)
 * The Lily (1933)
 * The Woman who had Imagination (1934)
 * The Duet (1935)
 * The Mill (1935)
 * The Ox (1939)
 * I Am Not Myself (1939)
 * The Beauty of the Dead (1940)
 * The Bride Comes to Evensford (1943)
 * Colonel Julien (1951)
 * The Delicate Nature (1953)
 * Dulcima (1953)
 * The Nature of Love (1953)
 * The Daffodil Sky (1955)
 * Summer in Salander (1955)
 * The Grapes of Paradise (1956)
 * The Queen of Spain Fritillary (1956)
 * Death of a Huntsman (1957)
 * A Great Day for Bonzo (1957)
 * A Month by the Lake (1957)
 * Night Run to the West (1957)
 * A Prospect of Orchards (1957)
 * The White Wind (1957)
 * An Aspidistra in Babylon (1959)
 * The Watercress Girl (1959)
 * Mr Featherstone Takes a Ride (1961)
 * Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal (1961)
 * The Day of the Tortoise (1961)
 * The Ring of Truth (1961)
 * The Quiet Girl (1962)
 * The World is Too Much With Us (1962)
 * The Fabulous Mrs V (1964)
 * The Simple Life (1967)
 * The Chords of Youth (1968)
 * The Four Beauties (1968)
 * The White Admiral (1968)
 * The Dam (1971)
 * The Man Who Loved Squirrels (1971)
 * The Song of the Wren (1972)
 * The Yellow Meads of Asphodel (1976)

Short story collections

 * Day's End and Other Stories (1928)
 * Seven Tales and Alexander (1929)
 * The Black Boxer Tales (1932)
 * The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934)
 * Thirty Tales (1934)
 * Cut and Come Again (1935)
 * Something Short and Sweet (1937)
 * Country Tales (1938)
 * The Flying Goat (1939)
 * The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940)
 * Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947)
 * The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949)
 * Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951)
 * Twenty Tales (1951)
 * Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951)
 * The Daffodil Sky (1955)
 * Selected Stories (1957)
 * The Watercress Girl (1959)
 * An Aspidistra in Babylon (1960)
 * Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (1961)
 * The Golden Oriole (1962)
 * Seven by Five (1963)
 * The Fabulous Mrs V (1964)
 * The Wedding Party (1965)
 * The Wild Cherry Tree (1968)
 * The Song of the Wren (1972)
 * The Good Corn and other Stories (1974)
 * A Party for the Girls (1988)
 * Love in a Wych Elm and Other Stories (2009)

Uncle Silas series

 * My Uncle Silas (1939)
 * Sugar for the Horse (1957)

Flying Officer X series

 * The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942)
 * How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories (1943)
 * Something in the Air (1944)
 * The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952)

Drama

 * The Last Bread (1926) (a play in one act)
 * The Day of Glory (1945) (a play in three acts)

Essays and non-fiction

 * Flowers and Faces (1935)
 * Through the Woods (1936)
 * Down the River (1937)
 * The Seasons & The Gardener (1940)
 * In the Heart of the Country (1942)
 * O More Than Happy Countryman (1943)
 * War Pictures by British Artists (1943)
 * Country Life (1943)
 * There's Freedom in the Air (1944)
 * The W.A.A.F in Action (1944)
 * Flying Bombs over England (1945) Also published as "The Battle of the Flying Bomb."
 * The Tinkers of Elstow (1946)
 * The Country Heart (1949)
 * Fawley Achievement (1951)
 * The Country of White Clover (1952)
 * Edward Garnett (1950)
 * A Love of Flowers (1971)
 * A Fountain of Flowers (1974)

Criticism

 * The Modern Short Story (1942)

Books for children

 * The Seekers (1926)
 * The Seasons & The Gardener (1940)
 * Achilles the Donkey (1962)
 * Achilles and Diana (1963)
 * Achilles and the Twins (1964)
 * The White Admiral (1968)

Autobiography

 * The Vanished World (1969)
 * The Blossoming World (1971)
 * The World in Ripeness (1972)

References to H.E. Bates

 * Bates's novel Love for Lydia served as an inspiration for Donna Lewis's 1996 smash hit "I Love You Always Forever".
 * Literary study of his works: Dennis Vannatta, H.E. Bates (Twayne's English Authors Series). Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. ISBN 0-8057-6844-0
 * Bates' idyllic depiction of rural Britain is referred to by the character 'I' in cult British comedy Withnail & I
 * His short story 'The Mill' featured as the extract in the first paper of the AQA English Language GCSE in 2019.

title: H. E. Bates


text:
John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 –12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British and Irish author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.

Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller, was adapted as an award-winning film, and remains one of his best-known works. This success allowed him to leave MI6 to become a full-time author. His other novels that have been adapted for film or television include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Russia House (1989), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008) and Our Kind of Traitor (2010). Philip Roth said that A Perfect Spy (1986) was "the best English novel since the war".

Early life and education
David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England, son of Ronald Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1905–1975),  and Olive Moore Cornwell (née Glassey, 1906–1989). His older brother, Tony (1929–2017), was an advertising executive and county cricketer (for Dorset), who later lived in the United States. His younger half-sister was the actress Charlotte Cornwell (1949–2021), and his younger half-brother, Rupert Cornwell (1946–2017), was a former Washington bureau chief for The Independent. Cornwell had little early memory of his mother, who had left their family home when he was five years old. His maternal uncle was Liberal MP Alec Glassey. When Cornwell was 21 years old, Glassey gave him the address in Ipswich where his mother was living; mother and son reunited at Ipswich railway station, at her written invitation, following Cornwell's initial letter of reconciliation.

Cornwell's father- who escaped from his "orthodox but repressive upbringing" as son of "a respectable nonconformist bricklayer who became a house builder and mayor of Poole"- had been jailed for insurance fraud and was a known associate of the Kray twins. The family was continually in debt. The father–son relationship has been described as "difficult". The Guardian reported that Le Carré recalled that he had been "beaten up by his father and grew up mostly starved of affection after his mother abandoned him at the age of five". Rick Pym, a scheming con man and the father of A Perfect Spy protagonist Magnus Pym, was based on Ronnie. When his father died in 1975, Cornwell paid for a memorial funeral service but did not attend, a plot point repeated in A Perfect Spy.

Cornwell's schooling began at St Andrew's Preparatory School, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School. He grew unhappy with the typically harsh English public school regime of the time and disliked his disciplinarian housemaster. He left Sherborne early to study foreign languages at the University of Bern from 1948 to 1949. In 1950, he was called up for National Service and served in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Allied-occupied Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who had crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents. During his studies, he was a member of The Gridiron Club and a college dining society known as The Goblin Club.

When his father was declared bankrupt in 1954, Cornwell left Oxford to teach at Millfield Preparatory School; however, a year later, he returned to Oxford, and graduated in 1956 with a First-Class degree in Modern Languages with a German Literature concentration. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958.

Work in security services
He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins. Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as "John Bingham"), and while being an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961). Cornwell identified Lord Clanmorris as one of two models for George Smiley, the spymaster of the Circus, the other being Vivian H. H. Green. As a schoolboy, Cornwell first met the latter when Green was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–51). The friendship continued after Green's move to Lincoln College, where he tutored Cornwell.

In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn. He was later transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as "John le Carré"—a pseudonym required because Foreign Office staff were forbidden to publish under their own names. The meaning of the pseudonym is ambiguous: he sometimes said he had seen "le Carré" on a storefront, and later said he couldn't remember an origin. When translated, "le carré" means "the square".

In 1964, le Carré's career as an intelligence officer came to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent, one of the Cambridge Five. Le Carré depicted and analysed Philby as the upper-class traitor, codenamed "Gerald" by the KGB, the mole hunted by George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).

Writing
Le Carré's first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), are mystery fiction. Each features a retired spy, George Smiley, investigating a death; in the first book, the apparent suicide of a suspected communist, and in the second volume, a murder at a boys' public school. Although Call for the Dead evolves into an espionage story, Smiley's motives are more personal than political. Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works; following its publication, he left MI6 to become a full-time writer. Although le Carré had intended The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as an indictment of espionage as morally compromised, audiences widely viewed its protagonist, Alec Leamas, as a tragic hero. In response, le Carré's next book, The Looking Glass War, was a satire about an increasingly deadly espionage mission which ultimately proves pointless.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People (the Karla trilogy) brought Smiley back as the central figure in a sprawling espionage saga depicting his efforts first to root out a mole in the Circus and then to entrap his Soviet rival and counterpart, code-named 'Karla'. The trilogy was originally meant to be a long-running series that would find Smiley dispatching agents after Karla all around the world. Smiley's People marked the last time Smiley featured as the central character in a le Carré story, although he brought the character back in The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies.

A Perfect Spy (1986), which chronicles the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym and how it leads to his becoming a spy, is the author's most autobiographical espionage novel, reflecting the boy's very close relationship with his con man father. Biographer LynnDianne Beene describes the novelist's own father, Ronnie Cornwell, as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values". Le Carré reflected that "writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised". He also wrote a semi-autobiographical work, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), as the story of a man's midlife existential crisis. With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, le Carré's writing shifted to the portrayal of the new multilateral world. His first completely post-Cold War novel, The Night Manager (1993), deals with drug and arms smuggling in the world of Latin American drug lords, secretive Caribbean banking entities and corrupt Western officials.

His final novel, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.

Themes
Most of le Carré's books are spy stories set during the Cold War (1945–91) and portray British Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries, aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama. While "[espionage] was the genre that earned him fame...he used it as a platform to explore larger ethical problems and the human condition". The insight he demonstrated led "many fellow authors and critics [to regard] him as one of the finest English-language novelists of the twentieth century." His writing explores "human frailty—moral ambiguity, intrigue, nuance, doubt, and cowardice".

The fallibility of Western democracy – and of its secret services – is a recurring theme, as are suggestions of a possible east–west moral equivalence. Characters experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict is internal, rather than external and visible. The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels and appears as a supporting character in four more, was written as an "antidote" to James Bond, a character le Carré called "an international gangster" rather than a spy and who he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature. In contrast, he intended Smiley, who is an overweight, bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy.

Le Carré's "writing entered intelligence services themselves. He popularized the term 'mole'...and other language that has become intelligence vernacular on both sides of the Atlantic — 'honeytrap', 'scalphunter', 'lamplighter' to name a few." However, in his first tweet as MI6's chief, Richard Moore revealed the agency's "complicated relationship with the author: He urged would-be Smileys not to apply to the service."

Other writing, film cameos
Le Carré records a number of incidents from his period as a diplomat in his autobiographical work, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016), which include escorting six visiting German parliamentarians to a London brothel and translating at a meeting between a senior German politician and Harold Macmillan.

As a journalist, le Carré wrote The Unbearable Peace (1991), a nonfiction account of Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire (1911–1992), the Swiss Army officer, who spied for the Soviet Union from 1962 until 1975.

Credited under his pen name, le Carré appears as an extra in the 2011 film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, among the guests at the Christmas party in several flashback scenes. He also appears in an uncredited cameo role (as a museum usher) in the 2016 movie Our Kind of Traitor.

Threats to democracy
In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy, saying: "I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about". He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the "notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we called anti-communism" prevailing during that time.

Le Carré opposed both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguing that their desire to seek or maintain their countries' superpower status caused an impulse "for oligarchy, the dismissal of the truth, the contempt, actually, for the electorate and for the democratic system". Le Carré compared Trump's tendency to dismiss the media as "fake news" to the Nazi book burnings, and wrote that the United States is "heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism".

In le Carré's 2019 novel Agent Running in the Field, one of the novel's characters refers to Trump as "Putin's shithouse cleaner" who "does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can't do for himself". The novel's narrator describes Boris Johnson as "a pig-ignorant foreign secretary". He says Russia is moving "backwards into her dark, delusional past", with Britain following a short way behind. Le Carré later said that he believed the novel's plotline, involving the U.S. and British intelligence services colluding to subvert the European Union, to be "horribly possible".

Brexit
Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and sharply criticised Brexit. Le Carré criticised Brexit advocates such as Boris Johnson (whom he referred to as a "mob orator"), Dominic Cummings and Nigel Farage in interviews, claiming that their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". He further opined in interviews: "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really, as something we could return to", adding that, with "the demise of the working class we saw also the demise of an established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures". On the other hand, he said that in the Labour Party "they have this Leninist element and they have this huge appetite to level society."

On Brexit, le Carré did not mince his words, comparing it to the 1956 Suez crisis, which confirmed post-imperial Britain's loss of global power. "This is without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez", le Carré said of Brexit. "Nobody is to blame but the Brits themselves – not the Irish, not the Europeans." "The idea, to me, that at the moment we should imagine we can substitute access to the biggest trade union in the world with access to the American market is terrifying", he said.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2019, he commented: "I've always believed, though ironically it's not the way I've voted, that it's compassionate conservatism that in the end could, for example, integrate the private schooling system. If you do it from the left you will seem to be acting out of resentment; do it from the right and it looks like good social organisation." Le Carré also said: "I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years. And it's a kind of liberation, if a sad kind."

US invasion of Iraq
In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion, The Times published le Carré's essay "The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to the Iraq War and President George W. Bush's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, calling it "worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War" and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams". Le Carré participated in the London protests against the Iraq War. He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history".

He was critical of Tony Blair's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying: "I can't understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretences has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed."

Iran
Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He said that Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which "we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAK".

Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, stating: "Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".

Israel
In a 1998 interview with Douglas Davis, Le Carré described Israel as "the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on, a nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future." He declared: "No nation on earth was more deserving of peace—or more condemned to fight for it."

Personal life
In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp. They had three sons: Simon, Stephen and Timothy; they divorced in 1971. In 1972, Cornwell married Valerie Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton who collaborated with him behind the scenes. They had a son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway. Le Carré lived in St Buryan, Cornwall, for more than 40 years; he owned a mile of cliff near Land's End. The house, Tregiffian Cottage, was put up for sale in 2023 for £3 million. Le Carré also owned a house in Gainsborough Gardens in Hampstead in north London.

Le Carré was so disillusioned by the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the European Union that he secured Irish citizenship. In a BBC documentary broadcast in 2021, le Carré's son Nicholas revealed that his father's disillusionment with modern Britain, and Brexit in particular, had driven him to embrace his Irish heritage and become an Irish citizen. At the time of his death, le Carré's friend, the novelist John Banville, confirmed that the writer had researched his family roots in Inchinattin, near Rosscarbery, County Cork, and that he had applied for an Irish passport, to which he was entitled having completed the process of becoming an Irish citizen and having Irish ancestry through his maternal grandmother, Olive Wolfe. His neighbour and friend Philippe Sands recalled: "He became an Irishman through his maternal grandmother. And it was very, very moving, I have to say, to arrive at the place of the memorial to find an Irish flag and only an Irish flag. He had really in the last years, grown very disillusioned with what had happened to Britain and the United Kingdom."

Le Carré died at Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, on 12 December 2020, aged 89. An inquest completed in June 2021 concluded that le Carré died after sustaining a fall at his home. His wife Valerie died on 27 February 2021, two months after her husband, at age 82.

In 2023, biographer Adam Sisman in The Secret Life of John le Carré identified 11 women with whom le Carré had affairs during his second marriage.

Le Carré's son Timothy died on 31 May 2022 at the age of 59, shortly after he finished editing A Private Spy, a collection of his father's letters.

Novels

 * Call for the Dead (1961),
 * A Murder of Quality (1962),
 * The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963),
 * The Looking Glass War (1965),
 * A Small Town in Germany (1968), ISBN 0-143-12260-6
 * The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), ISBN 0-143-11975-3
 * Smiley Versus Karla trilogy
 * Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), ISBN 0-143-12093-X
 * The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), ISBN 0-143-11973-7
 * Smiley's People (1979), ISBN 0-340-99439-8
 * The Little Drummer Girl (1983), ISBN 0-143-11974-5
 * A Perfect Spy (1986), ISBN 0-143-11976-1
 * The Russia House (1989), ISBN 0-743-46466-4
 * The Secret Pilgrim (1990), ISBN 0-345-50442-9
 * The Night Manager (1993), ISBN 0-345-38576-4
 * Our Game (1995), ISBN 0-345-40000-3
 * The Tailor of Panama (1996), ISBN 0-345-42043-8
 * Single & Single (1999), ISBN 0-743-45806-0
 * The Constant Gardener (2001), ISBN 0-743-28720-7
 * Absolute Friends (2003), ISBN 0-670-04489-X
 * The Mission Song (2006), ISBN 0-340-92199-4
 * A Most Wanted Man (2008), ISBN 1-416-59609-7
 * Our Kind of Traitor (2010), ISBN 0-143-11972-9
 * A Delicate Truth (2013), ISBN 0-143-12531-1
 * A Legacy of Spies (2017), ISBN 978-0-735-22511-4
 * Agent Running in the Field (2019), ISBN 1984878875
 * Silverview (2021), ISBN 9780241550069

Archive
In 2010, le Carré donated his literary archive to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The initial 85 boxes of material deposited included handwritten drafts of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Constant Gardener. The library hosted a public display of these and other items to mark World Book Day in March 2011.

Awards and honours

 * 1963, British Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
 * 1964, Somerset Maugham Award for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
 * 1965, Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
 * 1977, British Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for The Honourable Schoolboy
 * 1977, James Tait Black Memorial Prize Fiction Award for The Honourable Schoolboy
 * 1983, Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize for The Little Drummer Girl
 * 1984, Honorary Fellow Lincoln College, Oxford
 * 1984, Mystery Writers of America Edgar Grand Master
 * 1988, Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award
 * 1988, The Malaparte Prize, Italy
 * 1990, Honorary degree, University of Exeter
 * 1990, Helmerich Award of the Tulsa Library Trust.

 * 1996, Honorary degree, University of St. Andrews
 * 1997, Honorary degree, University of Southampton
 * 1998, Honorary degree, University of Bath
 * 2005, Crime Writers' Association Dagger of Daggers for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
 * 2005, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, France
 * 2008, honorary doctorate, University of Bern
 * 2011, Goethe Medal, awarded by the Goethe Institute
 * 2012, Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, University of Oxford
 * 2020, Olof Palme Prize – le Carré donated the US$100,000 prize money to Médecins Sans Frontières.

In addition in 2008, The Times ranked le Carré 22nd on its list of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945".

title: John le Carré