Jack Cashill, WorldNetDaily

While out promoting my new book, “Deconstructing Obama,” I have been asked a few times about Obama’s mysterious Social Security number.

Not knowing enough to speak authoritatively, I chose to swim upstream through the data flood and head for the source.

Here I found a no-nonsense licensed investigator from Ohio named Susan Daniels. Widowed at 30 with seven children, Daniels went back to school and eventually emerged as a certified paralegal.

After several years working for others, Daniels got her own license as an investigator in 1995. Since then, she has specialized in litigation support for law firms. Her particular strength has been in researching assets.

By her own admission, Daniels is “good with public records.” She knows her way around databases and has access to many that the public does not.

“I did not like the way things were going,” Daniels says of the country’s drift circa 2009. And so in the best spirit of citizen journalism, she began to investigate Obama on her own.

What she and fellow investigator Neil Sankey unearthed was a nugget that could have ended the career of a George Bush or a Sarah Palin: Barack Obama had been using a Social Security number issued in Connecticut between 1977 and 1979, a state in which he never lived or even visited at that time in his life.

This will not come as news to the readers of WorldNetDaily, whose thorough investigation climaxed last June when WND’s veteran White House correspondent Les Kinsolving confronted Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs on the subject.

Predictably, Gibbs laughed Kinsolving off and switched the subject to the birth certificate. Kinsolving had seen this kind of laugh and switch before. In 1982, for instance, he introduced the subject of AIDS to then-press secretary Larry Speakes.

“Over a third of [the victims] have died,” said Kinsolving. “It’s known as ‘gay plague.’”

“I don’t have it. Do you?” joked Speakes to a general round of laughter. But unlike Gibbs, Speakes simply did not know any better.

As much as Daniels appreciates the work of WND and other serious investigators who have helped clarify the picture, she is distressed by the few who have clouded it.

“There have been many playing junior investigator from the start,” she jokes. “I don’t know if they even have their decoder rings yet.”

This being the case, I asked Daniels to guide me through the data mine field and help me ascertain what we know for sure about the world’s best-known Social Security number – 042-68-4425.

“All I can say,” says Daniels of 042-68-4425, “is that it’s phony and [Obama] has been using it, with it first appearing on his Selective Service document in 1980.”