The SSA has shown absolutely no urgency on this issue. Their existing policy is that having your SSN compromised is not enough to issue a new number. You have to actually be a victim of a financial or identity crime that abused your SSN for them to consider a new number. In reality what they should be doing is giving everyone accounts that can generate tokens for use with each transaction, to maintain a trail of where leaks originate and also to expire these temporary tokens. Instead they’ve stuck to this archaic system.
They can't issue new numbers in bulk without revamping the system because they'd run out. The urgent fix wouldn't work.
If the system needs to be revamped, then step one should be pressure/force so that companies stop treating the numbers as secret. And if we do that we don't need new numbers anymore.
