Why national ID cards won't work

Cryptography expert Bruce Schneier wonders why we want to spend billions on a security program that won't work. He notes that two of the 9/11 hijackers had forged driver's licenses and wonders what good it would have done us to know Timothy McVeigh's name before he was arrested:

"... But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on. The security risks are enormous. Such a database would be a kludge of existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it. And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen and the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down until it's restored? ..."