I do find the debates about the proposed ID card scheme very interesting, so here’s another link to The Register that discusses the state of play:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/25/id_card_goes_icao/

For non-UK people, the UK government has been proposing for sometime that giving everyone in the country an ID card will be in everyone’s best interest, stopping fraud, fighting crime, helping old people cross the road, and will also save small kittens from trees. Wishy washy liberals like myself have been asking repeatedly how exactly the ID cards differ from passports and credit cards, and how exactly uniting things into one place makes anyone more secure rather than more easy to impersonate… Without much of a decent answer.

Here’s my personal highlight from the article:

supervision of enrolment would “reduce” (sic) the likelihood of fake biometrics being successful, and details of how the Government proposes to stop this becoming a simple key to ID fraud cannot be provided “in order to protect the integrity of the National Identity Register.”

Effectively, it’s a system which by design puts all of its eggs in one basket, and is dependent on that basket being made impregnable via measures which the Government will never reveal or discuss. Trust us…

Doesn’t that inspire confidence?