Social Security Numbers: Law of the Land

In a recent piece, Allan Holmes cites:

... an editorial in the New York Times Thursday, [which] calls the 2007 Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act, "a bad idea compounded by the notoriously bad state of federal government records."

This reminded me about the continued hysteria about Social Security numbers in federal records, with officials hurrying to the microphone or the hearing room to decry how privacy is at risk because government agencies use Social Security Numbers as identifiers. Though apocryphal, I find it easy to believe the story about the congressman who tried to introduce a measure forbidding the Social Security Administration from maintaining records that would include a person's SSN.

I wonder if Executive Order 9397, Numbering System for Federal Accounts Relating to Individual Persons, has ever been repealed (or retracted, or whatever happens to executive orders that no longer seem a good idea). The salient paragraph in EO 9397 is the first one:

Hereafter any federal department, establishment, or agency shall, whenever the head thereof finds it advisable to establish a new system of permanent account numbers pertaining to individual persons, utilize exclusively the Social Security Act account numbers assigned …

Signed by Franklin Roosevelt, November 1943.