Surely ID cards are now finished, dead, deceased - an ex-policy? There's surely no way that anyone can believe in the idea of a central database of our most important personal details, to be administered by the government, after this:

Discs containing the personal details - including, where relevant, bank account details - of all the families in the UK receiving child benefit have gone missing, after being posted from HM Revenue and Customs to the audit office.

There's not really much point in excerpting the rest of the story. This is quite possibly the single biggest data protection failure in the world, ever. Nearly half of the entire population of the country is now at risk of fraud due to their personal details being simply 'missing'. There's almost no words for the scale of the mistake here. It is now clear that nobody, absolutely nobody, for any reason whatsoever, can continue to support the idea of ID cards and the accompanying database any longer, given the very clear risks demonstrated.

But if there's one thing - increasingly, it's starting to look like the only thing - that this government is really rather good at, it's ploughing full steam ahead with a disregard for facts, experience and common sense. This is the same government that thought that 1999 would be a really good time to sell off half of Britain's gold reserves, that tax credits so complicated that nobody can work out their entitlements would be a jolly good idea, that the credit bubble was entirely benign and could never go wrong. On the last point, the government persisted despite clear warnings from economists, amongst them current Lib Dem Acting Leader Vince Cable.

The same pattern is becoming apparent throughout government policy. On Iraq, military and intelligence doubts were brushed aside; economic advice was ignored prior to the Northern Rock collapse, and on ID cards, even criticism from the Information Commissioner has not been heeded.

As someone who works in an IT-related field, I feel that I know just how often IT systems can fail. And that's before you even consider the even greater possibility of human failure. The lesson that systems engineers have learned is that a bit of paranoia can be a healthy safeguard, and that to trust anything to a single system is utter boneheaded stupidity of a kind that would have any self-respecting systems administrator laughed out of the room by his peers. But, of course, the government has little concern for the opinions of people who might actually know what they're talking about, whether they're doctors, soldiers, economists, lawyers, teachers or just ordinary people. And so, the detachment from reality continues, until it becomes as obvious as it did with the Major government. And we all know what happens next...

Public Technology.net has a piece on the LSE report on the cost of ID cards published earlier this week. It has a pretty neat summary of the main points:

the LSE says the (Government´s) report remains vague on many important areas of the scheme and raises important questions:

It gives no details as to whether the new system is likely to be based on a new database (which can have proper security built in) or on existing databases which will have many inaccuracies.
What is the breakdown of the 'set-up costs'? Will this entail a new register or an adaptation of older systems?

There is no indication of when procurement is likely to begin or how long it is likely to take.
When will the procurement process actually begin?

It talks confidently about successfully recording biometrics to identify individuals uniquely, but there are no immediate plans to trial possible technologies at this stage.
How much will the Government spend on testing the technology, particularly secure systems required in this as well as the biometric technologies?

It refers to international obligations for passports in the Schengen area, but fails to point out that the UK is not subject to these requirements.
Has the Government looked into the implementation of biometric passport in the Schengen area?
Do their passport programs incur similar costs and details?

No consideration is made of the likely fees that will be charged to verify identities against the National Identity Register.
Has the Government estimated costs of allowing employers to verify visas through verification against existing visa databases for foreign employment?

The claimed purpose of the Scheme continues to shift.
It now appears to be primarily about illegal working and illegal immigration, rather than identity fraud which was claimed as the main purpose a year ago.

All good stuff but the essential problem with ID Cards is that they don´t do any good.

The ID cards campaign page puts it well enough:

Spain's ID cards did not prevent the Madrid atrocities. Stella Rimington, the ex-head of MI5, says "I don't think that anybody in the intelligence services ... would be pressing for ID cards".

As for the Government´s cost estimates - these are the guys who thought the Millenium Dome was gong to make money. Don´t even consider believing them.