Last night, in the middle of a story on real estate fraud, CTV News inexplicably threw its support behind a national identity card. The segment claimed that such a card would ameliorate the risks of fraud and identity theft.

It’s not true. When it comes to real estate fraud, a national ID card offers no advantages over other identification documents. In fact, from a security standpoint, national ID cards are a singularly bad idea. Here’s why (and I’m getting this stuff from Bruce Schneier, so you can take his word for it):

  • ID cards can be forged, no matter how “unforgeable” they’re designed to be.
  • In order to get a real, official, government-issued ID card, you have to present other pieces of identification, which can be forged.
  • ID cards have to be checked — usually by human beings, who are error-prone and often poorly trained.
  • Finally, and most importantly, a national ID card would have to be backed up by a national ID database containing identifying information on everyone in the country. This database would need to be “widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.” It would contain data pulled together from all over the place, which means the data will be weird, inconsistent, and probably unreliable. Such a database would be a massive procedural and technological challenge (and that’s putting it mildly; Charlie Stross has convincingly argued that the UK’s plans for such a database could never work). It would also be a massive security risk: imagine what could happen if malicious hackers broke into the system and started messing with people’s records!

Schneier concludes, “That’s why, when someone asks me to rate the security of a national ID card on a scale of one to 10, I can’t give an answer. It doesn’t even belong on a scale.”

And yet the idea has been floating around in Canadian politics for a while now. It’s been on the table in national security discussions pretty much since September 11. Last February, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said that such a card is inevitable. I’d like to think the Canadian government will pay attention to security gurus like Bruce Schneier, learn from the debacle that Britain’s ID card scheme has become, and drop whatever plans it has to implement an ID card system of its own. But governments like to be seen to be doing something — especially when it comes to national security, which is the usual context for ID card proposals — and with major media outlets are talking favorably and uncritically about the idea, I suspect Ottawa will be pushing ahead with an ID card scheme. So maybe it’s time to start thinking about how to oppose such a plan.