The widely reported news of the T-Mobile employees who sold the personal details of thousands of the network's customers serves as an illustration, if one were needed, of why we must never have a national ID database or the ID cards the database would produce.
The same scenario would exist – employees on relatively low pay entrusted with the safe keeping of private information, and enormous financial rewards for one prepared to leak them. The one-way nature of disclosure would be the same, too – once such information is in the public domain, it's there for good – you can never fence it back in again.
But the dangers of the national database would be even worse than it has been for these T-Mobile customers, or, for that matter, even for the many MOD employees whose personal data has been lost by incompetent bureaucrats (another risk of the national scheme). I say "even worse" because the records would run into the millions rather than thousands, and the details would be more intrusive and private.
The only sure way to safeguard that kind of information is never to build the database in the first place.
By Alex Deane