>Most people don't realize this, but there are not enough social security numbers to go around. Babies are given recycled (from deceased people) social security numbers now. The problem is that with today's computer systems, it is virtually impossible to wipe out the history from the original holder of that number which was not the case 20 years ago. Now this problem has been known for quite sometime and there have been numerous discussions on the costs involved in changing everything across the board in the U.S. to accomodate more digits. Up until 2 years ago you could in fact get issued a new social security number, now that is almost impossible to do. it depends on what part of the country you are in (mine is from Wisconsin and your social security number identifies which part of the country you were born in) and how many are available. Also, you can't even file for one until the entire legal process has been resolved and that takes typically 3-4 years (most people don't know that either).

A nine-digit address space was about to break soon anyway. Considering that in the thirties they didn't really know all the info stuff we know today, the system did last quite a while, eh?

Now they should allow characters or lengthen the field - which would break existing code anyway. This is bound to be a crisis larger than Y2K. But then they switched to 3+7 phone numbers when there were already millions of numbers out there, didn't they?