The bad thing about national ID cards is...
... pointed out by a Crypto-Gram reader (Pierre Honeyman- 6th comment) in the 2004-05-15 issue:
"Shake Hands with the Devil", Gen. Romeo D'Allaire's account of the genocide in Rwanda, contains an even more chilling reason to reject national ID cards.
The genocidaires in Rwanda used national ID cards to both find the victims of their genocide, and also to eradicate all records of their existence. The cards were checked to ensure that the right people were being murdered, then the cards were burned at the scene; meanwhile, bureaucrats complicit in the genocide removed records of the victims from that national databases, ensuring that the records confirmed these people had never existed.
The very thought of that potential use of national ID cards is chilling.
While it is an extremely compelling emotional argument to assert that such a thing could never happen here in the West, a good friend of mine from the former Yugoslavia assured me that that attitude was also prevalent there.
The quality of a publication can always be measured by the reader's comments. Mr. Honeyman points out a chilling example of why not to systematically use ID cards.