“To speak on the Internet, there are no age limits, no gender limits, and no religious, ethnic, or national requirements. Indeed, there is no way to discern these traits in most Internet discussion forums, from Usenet to chat rooms, from Listservs to blogs.” (42)

“The commonality of identity theft leads to some amusing and interesting speculations concerning the future of “identity.” With the high frequency of the crime, even the criminal cannot be certain of the security of his or her own identity, or that the identity he steals is not already stolen.” (91)

“The security of identity in the digital world is, as a consequence, a different matter from safety in the physical world of extended objects. What is stolen is not one’s consciousness but one’s self as it is embedded in (increasingly digital) databases. The self constituted in these databases, beyond the ken of individuals, may be considered the digital unconscious.” (92)

“What needs special emphasis in the context of my effort to make sense of the new crime of identity theft is that individual identity is being transformed, by dint of information media, into something that both captures individuality and yet exists in forms of external traces.” (111)