The answer isn’t as clear as you think.
The way you can tell this article is crazy is by noticing lines like this:
> When a police officer or security guard scans your ID card with his pocket bar-code reader, for example, will a permanent record be created of that check, including the time and your location?
This is already what happens. The police officer logs your interaction alongside your drivers license (or non-driver ID) number. Transposing a nationally-unified ID scheme for the current state-based scheme doesn't increase the amount of logging, it substitutes one log for another.
You can get ID scanners for nightclubs which check dates, parse dozens of different designs of ID correctly, detect some types of fake IDs, and record banned patrons. That's a thing you can get in Europe as well as America.
But only in America are they allowed to save the patron's address and use it for marketing purposes.
Error-prone-ness is a feature for people who want the state to be less powerful.
Personally I think that for purely practical reasons national ids are good infrastructure.
I don't think in 2023 a "weak" national identity system offers much protection against an adversarial government.
This is especially true given that for many applications, I can already use my passport as an ID.
An attacker who pops my bank’s network doesn’t need to look for ID photocopies: my identifying info is in the database in an already parsed format.
Right now the way we verify identity is "dumb" in the sense that we prove identity using document ids or photos. This is "too strong" - to prove I am over 18 or just "the account holder" I must present valuable document IDs or scans which disclose other things about me such as my exact date of birth or my legal name. It is also "too weak" in that any verifier who receives these things can present them to someone else and impersonate me.
Today, every entity we deal with who verifies our identity can also impersonate us. There are billions of ID scans absolutely everywhere, in realtor's offices and lawyer's cabinets, at car rental agencies, etc ad nauseum.
A good "digital id" scheme allows for cryptographic proofs of identity which are non-transferable between verifiers. It allows things like proving that I am John Smith who is over 18 and holds a driver's license in a way that does not allow the verifier to then present those to someone else and impersonate me. It can allow for proofs of uniqueness, e.g. I can prove that I'm a person you've seen before with id xxxyyy in your database without disclosing my name (if the verifier chooses not to collect that). It can allow "blinding", e.g. I can hand over a token to someone who doesn't need to "see" my actual identity details unless they initiate legal process (say car rental scenario) and then I can be notified if that happens.
It is likely that a lot of verifiers might choose to "over collect" (say, request up-front proof of my legal name when strictly speaking they don't need that to rent me a car) but this can at least be discouraged by measures like tuning service charges so that more invasive verifications cost them more and ensuring that verifiers are subject to different regulation tiers based on the scope of data they collect. Even if the entity loses my PII e.g. my name, DOB, phone number, the systems are designed to not allow anyone accessing that information to impersonate me.
Strictly speaking digital id schemes / properties are orthogonal to "national ids". There are centralised, de-centralised and more or less anarchic (p2p) "versions" of digital identity. However, a government operated scheme at the national level could reduce a lot of commercial capture and the kind of "waste" that happens when you need to stitch together many disparate data sources.
That is a huge advantadge if the federal governments ever gets taken over by totalitarians. Surely at least some states will refuse to authenticate their ID cards when requested by the feds, some may even issue fake IDs to resistance members. If the feds have a centralized database with updated information on residences etc, they can quietly disappear people.