If I understand the conflicting claims correctly (??), one claim is that Bounel and the association of the SSAN with his name is a total fabrication, as in a fabrication deliberately sown by the Obama-ites inside SSA with the intent to mislead the birthers, and they fraudulently rigged the SSA computers to return that information sometime in 2009. If that is the case, there might be an actual real person associated with the SSAN that no one yet knows exists. That person may or may not be Obama, may or may not be alive, may or may not have been born early enough that the newly discovered SSA freedom of information directive describes. If that is the case, all the SSA has to do is respond appropriately to the requests. If it actually is Obama, then privacy rules apply, and it can’t be confirmed by the SSA, in which case the thrust of the inquiry cannot proceed since nothing can be established in the public record to file in court against Obama in any related action. There might be a slim chance that there is something both fraudulent and obtainable. For that to occur, the original SSAN would have to have been fraudulently used by Obama, the original application would need to be old enough so that privacy laws would no longer apply, and the SSA must honestly report the original application to the court.
Beyond that, a SSAN beginning with 042 seems to be tied to Obama, which seems to point to some kind of fraud, although I do not see where it is a by itself definitive proof of fraud— that is, somehow Obama could have in theory flown to Connecticut in 1980 and registered himself with SSA there. As long as it could have theoretically happened, there is nothing illegal about it on its face. Did anyone track down if B-R required a SSAN to work in 1976? Again nothing wrong legally since B-R could in theory have waived it or made some sort of error, or Obama could have used a friend’s SSAN.
Fogbow has some interesting takes on this, under "The President's Social Security Number."
CLAIM: Obama's Social Security Number was issued for a state he never lived in.
TRUTH: President Obama's Social Security number (if he hasn't been issued a new one since his original one was spread all over the Internet) begins with the digits 042. While this is ordinarily an indication that the number was issued to someone living in Connecticut, the Social Security Administration says:
One should not make too much of the "geographical code." It is not meant to be any kind of useable geographical information. The numbering scheme was designed in 1936 (before computers) to make it easier for SSA to store the applications in our files in Baltimore since the files were organized by regions as well as alphabetically. It was really just a bookkeeping device for our own internal use and was never intended to be anything more than that.
Orly Taitz recently received, in response to an FOIA request, the SS-5 (Application for Social Security Card) of a man who appears in the Social Security death index with a number just one digit lower than President Obama's. This man, Thomas Wood, was born in 1962 and died in 1981. The SS-5 showed he had requested his Social Security number on March 21, 1977. President Obama's number was probably issued the same day. It is perfectly reasonable that a high school sophomore would be requesting a Social Security number in the spring, while getting ready to start a summer job at Baskin Robbins.
The first three digits of a Social Security number at that time were called the "Area Number". And it's true that the Area Number 042 is normally issued for people who live in Connecticut (or apply for the Social Security card with a mailing address in Connecticut). President Obama lived in Hawaii in 1977, while attending Punahou School. He attended Punahoufrom the fifth grade until graduating in 1979, and his first job was at the Baskin Robbins at the corner of King and Punahou Streets in Honolulu.
So how did President Obama get a Social Security number with an Area Number reflecting residence (or mailing address) in Connecticut?
Most likely, this was due to a clerical error. At the time, President Obama was only 15 years old, and lived with his grandparents in an address on Beretania Street. The President’s house in Hawaii was in zip code 96814 and the zip code for Danbury, CT. is 06814. Since the '0' and '9' on a typical typewriter are immediately adjacent (remember, the president's Social Security number was issued in 1977, when data entry was via keypunch and data cards), it would have been a common error to accidently type a '0' when the ZIP code really began with a '9'. Another possibility is that President Obama, a left-handed 15 year old boy at the time, may have written his own ZIP code in a less-than-fully-legible manner, making the '9' look somewhat like a '0'.
Most of this sounds fairly reasonable, though somewhat unusual and serendipitous for the pro-Obama crowd.
When I read onwards at fogbow, there seems to be other serendipitous mistakes that must be presumed to happen to give Obama a totally clean slate on all aspects of his documented historical past.
However, Fogbow mentions that Obama is left-handed, which may lead to clerical errors on reading his handwriting. Left handers have two potential problems when writing. The first problem is that if he or she is using a pen, the hypothenor part of the hand can later smear the undried ink if the hand continues to move to the right during writing, while resting on the paper itself, thus moving over and across the characters previously written. The second problem is that if the left-handed writer curls his or her hand to avoid the first problem, then the angle becomes very awkward to write correctly since the hand is now held in such a way that it is "above" the area of the paper being written to, and writing characters can be deformed. So either smearing or deformation could occur on the SS-5 form if Obama wrote it with his left hand.
So there could in theory be a valid systematic component if a larger than usual number of discrepancies in Obama's handwritten forms are attributed to clerical reading errors.