Wonko, the Register, and no doubt many others have noted that the House of Lords has again told the government where to stick its "volutary unless you want to travel" ID card scheme, and indeed they have a good point. ID cards are being foisted upon Britons at great expense, without any great desire (resigned acceptance seems about the strongest positive) and for very little justifiable reason. However the fact is that most people, while they don't want them, don't fear them either; they consider ID cards to just be "harmless" and have bought into the basic line that those who are innocent of crime have nothing to fear from them.
This is not the case unless the government suddenly gets a clue about security - something which to date is has not done. Allow me to illustrate by example. Neil Herron has an article about the DVLA and how it makes it easy for crooks to track down anyone who owns a car. As he says it makes it easy for anyone who feels like it to set up a bugus parking enforcement company and then ask for the name and address details of cars that look interesting. Indeed according to a comment by Wonko this has already happened with a bunch of crooks in Shropshire sending out bogus parking tickets to motorists.
Now you may say the the DVLA is a special case but it isn't: just like microsoft the government simply doesn't get security. 2 seconds on Google also pointed me to this story from last week about NHS records being found in a dustbin. You might claim that this is the fault of one individual doctor not the government but then the same could be said for the DVLA bureaucrat who thought selling names and addresses was a good idea or the brainy people who leave laptops with sensitive information on park benches or anything else. Government bureaucracies are historically very bad at keeping people's private data private and this is a really bad thing for the people whose private data the government is sloppy with. (Oh and this is not a UK specific thing - when I lived in California I recall the outcry about zillions of tax returns being mailed out with name address and social security number clearly visible to anyone who saw the return sitting in the mailbox or post office sack. With these three bits of information ID theft becomes remarkably easy for a conman).
The problem with ID cards is that some or all of the information on them must be widely queriable or else the whole scheme is a waste of time. Now it could well be that the ID card will be a waste of time and will in fact collect no more interesting data than the French ID card - a document which is essentially trivial to forge with a colour laser printer and a lamminator but which doesn't ever get looked at except by Gendarmes who want an excuse to arrest you - however HMG and the various Whitehall mandarins and ZANU labour apparachiks who are pushing the scheme claim that it will be more useful than that and indeed the register link above states:
Details of the register that emerged during the last ID Cards debate in the House of Commons showed that it is a more extensive scheme than the government liked to admit. The register itself would contain only basic information, but it would also have keys to 13 other government databases, making it a one stop-shop for information about individuals. Many critics says that this makes the information less secure.
Now when a government has got all this info in one place the temptation has to be to use it - otherwise nasty questions get asked about where all the money went (all those off site meeting, big lunches and conslutants at £1000/day are hard to justify) and why. Hence (going on past experience - see DVLA above) the checks for who is allowed to get access to the data will be lax. Hence any would be crook or terrorist who swipes your ID card for a minute will be able to retrieve whatever records the government has on you that are tied to your ID. This ranges from biomentric information to your social security benefits, your criminal record and your drivers license status to the more obvious and mundane such as name, address, date of birth and so on. Since the key to ID theft and other similar crimes is getting hold of private data and since the ID card and the government databases behind it have lots of private data the conmen are going to have lots and lots of incentive to develop ID card readers and associated infrastructure. This will probably include the subborning of lowly paid DSS workers or similar who will be paid in cash for data. All in all the ID card scheme looks like a license to fraud and theft and I pretty much guarrantee that the most obvious result is going to be the mother of all "class action" lawsuits by disgruntled punters who've had their credit history trashed and their savings nicked by enterprising crooks.