Well, if you cant guess, this whole deal annoys the **** out of me.

The three main failings with the ID card system that spring immediately to mind are (and given time I am sure I can come up with more!):

1. Weakpoints. Like everything, there is a vulnerable point which will (eventually) be the one the “bad people” we are trying to defend against will attack. In the ID card system there are hundreds, and with the gold standard of ID there is no way to defend against it.
   The really scary thing with this, is it will be administered by people (civil servants) earning around 20k per year (in London). Can you imagine how easy it would be for someone to bribe / blackmail them into a few “human mistakes?”
2. Errors. There are 60,000,000 people in the UK.  Assuming that this ID card system is brilliant and has a 0.01% margin of error (note: does anyone know what the error bars are? If it was this accurate it would be the MOST accurate system ever by an order of magnitude. Finger prints are lucky to be less than 10% error and that will get most people convicted) that means around 6000 people will be wrongly arrested. This is not to mention the simple errors that happen every day. What happens if the person entering your data puts a typo in? How can you go and change it in the future?
3. Prove Innocence not Guilt. There is a fundamental relationship between the state / police force / legal system and the people it represents and protecs. This is enshrined in the Government proving itself to the “people” and the legal tenets of “Innocent until proven guilty.” ID cards reverse that whole deal. You must prove who you are to the government and, critically, when dealing with the police are assumed to be guilty until your ID can prove otherwise.

Now lots of people trot out the “nothing to hide…” defence of them but that is too foolish to even enter into a debate over (maybe another day).

Take this scenario as an example. It summer and I go for a run in shorts and T-Shirt. On my way a bored police man thinks I am suspicious enough to warrant him stopping me (this has happened to me several times in the past) and asks for my ID card. I am not carrying it (no pockets) and at that point I am arrested. Now I must prove my innocence. This is wrong in every possible way.

Scenario number 2. Lowly paid worker in civil service who enters ID data is contacted by master criminal and offered huge sums of money to make a mistake entering his data. Later it turns out this mistake meant that his ID and your ID were mixed up and you find armed police smashing your door down. You have no method of proving this is a mistake and are therfore conviced because, once more, you are guilty until you can prove innocence.

The list of possible things that can go wrong is pretty much endless. I agree there are probaly millions of scenarios where the right thing will happen – however what is the rate of failure that we can accept? How many innocent people should we be allowed to effectively distroy in order that others are “kept safe?”

At various times in the past, people have produced mountains of quotes along the lines of “he who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither” (i.e. Benjamin Franklin) and pretty much through out the whole of human history this has been the case. If people have rights and freedoms then bad people will do bad things. That will never change. However, taking them away means good people get punished. That can never be right.