Loser: Britain's Identity Crisis

One of Britain's biggest unions comes out against ID cards. Quoting the LSE study:

the idea of a single central database, which they note could become a critical choke point if it suffers failures and denial-of-service attacks. And then there is the use of biometric systems, whose accuracy levels may not be adequate to handle such a large number of individuals, resulting in identification errors

And there's a new to me dimension to the argument:

Because the cards have unique numbers, different entities could eventually begin to use them as personal identifiers in their own systems. After all, this is exactly what happened with social security numbers in the United States and other countries. Created to keep track of a person's contributions to the social security system, the number became a highly trusted identifier and wound up being used by many other organizations, including employers, investment-account firms, and even video rental stores. The result is that it became easier for fraudsters—especially insiders—to get hold of the information they needed to steal people's identities.

IEEE Spectrum: Loser: Britain's Identity Crisis:
Filed in: ID_cards, UK, IEEE