Washington, D.C. - A federal law now gives all Americans free online access to their credit reports once annually. According to a CNN poll, one quarter of the population says this is “great news”, another twenty percent called it “not bad”, and the other sixty-five percent described the free access to their credit report as “like a kick in the balls”. While a small percentage of Americans will get to glance at their own responsible history of financial management, the rest will learn that “Yes you are a deadbeat and the system knows it.”
But what exactly are credit reports? Credit reports are like those files your principal kept locked in his office that kept a detailed record of what a bad kid you are. Instead of listing your detentions, tardies, and F’s, your credit report lists things like the unwieldy number of credit cards you have, how many dozens of payments you’ve missed, and how unbelievable your total amount of outstanding debt is. It’s not all bad though. If you haven’t had any problems with credit in the past, your credit report will actually help you–by allowing you get a ton more credit until you finally do have problems. In this way the government hopes to stimulate the economy by encouraging those who have good credit to borrow and spend more, and encouraging the debtors among us to realize how hopeless a task it would be to pay back your loans so why not just spend more.
Credit reports have been a foundation of the personal credit market for decades. Three companies handle nearly all the credit reporting in this country: Experian, Transunion, and Equifucked. This is like having three principals at your school, each of whom keeps a seperate file on you. So even if you could sneak into one office and add some creative whiteout to your file, your chances of successfully doing that to all three are pretty much nil.
According to the webmaster of the new site (https://www.annualcreditreport.com/), since it has gone live the site has been subject to nearly two hundred million hacking attempts. They also have received a deluge of angry emails such as this one “I swear that those unpaid credit cards aren’t mine. There must be a different Kristopher Michaelo Zupitoawtsac who also lives in Holton, Alaska.”
A new bill in Congress giving Americans free access to the secret reports the CIA keeps on them has yet to pass.