The author Robert Heinlein once wrote that politics is scarcely less important than one's own heartbeat. I never believed it when I was younger, thinking that the actions of those old men and women in Westminster couldn't possibly have an effect on me.

Heinlein was right, of course. Politics shapes every aspect of our daily lives, from the jobs we do to the shops we spend our money in, from our health to our education to the price of our houses. It decides who stays rich and who stays poor.

Yet I still haven't been hugely interested in politics on a day to day basis. My life is pretty good and, although there are many, many things wrong with the world, I can't recall a time when there weren't. And I still feel that I have a fair amount of freedom.

Recently, though, that has started to change. I've written in the past about ID cards and the National Identity Register, but the topic is becoming more widely-discussed now. ID cards themselves don't matter so much to me: people in other countries carry them and something like a photo-card driving licence is hard to argue against.

But the database behind the ID cards... ah, the database. An IT company's wet dream and a control-freak politician's fantasy. Just imagine if all the personal information about every individual in the UK could be stored on an identity database, potentially interlinked at a future date with the census database, DVLA registrations, CCTV networks with face-recognition software, e-mail addresses, ISP records, bank accounts, phone bills, NHS health records, etc., etc. Wouldn't it be easy to spot criminals, terrorists and benefit cheats? And we can get the public to pay for it! It's such a simple, elegant solution.

Except that it's not. It won't stop criminals (who will simply steal someone else's identity), it won't stop terrorists (the 7/7 bombers were British citizens) and it won't stop benefit fraud (most fraud relates to lying about circumstances, not identity). It's not even necessary for travel abroad, because so-called 'biometric' passports are already being issued and just contain a digitised photo of your face - nothing else is required by international law.

Initially the National Identity Register will contain as many as 50 types of information about you (read the Bill itself if you doubt me). More will follow as other databases are linked to it in the future, either directly or indirectly. Taken together it's a hacker's wet dream, an individual's nightmare and a huge waste of public money that could be used for schools, hospitals and real policing. To see why, try this little thought experiment:

1) Find yourself a big piece of paper. Write your full name and address at the top, along with your e-mail address, your salary, any benefits you're claiming, your current and previous sexual partners' details, every address you've ever lived at, all your itemised phone bills, your health records (particularly sexual and mental illnesses), how much alcohol you drink, any drugs you take, where you shop, every car or plane journey you've ever taken, your vital statistics and any other personal information that you can think of (not all of this information will be included on the NIR from the start, but it's likely to be added over the coming years as other databases are linked to the main one).

2) Now, cut your finger and smear a bit of blood on the paper, or perhaps a bit of spit, anything that contains your DNA. Attach a close-up photo of your eyes and your fingerprints.

3) Now do the same thing for your children.

4) Take this big sheet of paper and copy it... oooh... let's say 500,000 times. Put each copy in an envelope (but don't seal it properly) and post it to everyone in your local council, central government, the police, your friendly local crime syndicate, banks, insurance companies and a varied selection of ID thieves and hackers. If you have any left over, post them to a few random businesses and governments abroad, or maybe to a couple of newspapers.

5) Remember, you must do all this at your own cost, because someone has to pay the massive fees of the IT companies that have persuaded the government that this is all such a great idea, although all that money and more will be clawed back by selling database access to banks, insurance companies and other interested organisations.

Would you do this? Why not? After all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right?

Databases being what they are - i.e. fallible - you can assume that some of the information you supply will be incorrect when it's transferred to the NIR. Perhaps they'll just get your name wrong, or maybe, like hundreds of people already, you'll be labelled as having a criminal record when you don't. And the Home Secretary decides what's correct, not you.

If this all sounds more like the old East Germany than a 21st century democracy, the only real difference is that this government seems to be doing it out of ignorance rather than malice. It's using a badly-made, jewel-encrusted, gold sledgehammer to crack a non-existent nut, thrashing around wildly as it does so and getting the public to pick up the tab. The MPs who voted for this appear to have very little grasp of IT and even less understanding of what freedom and privacy actually mean.

You might want to read more about why this whole project is fatally flawed and dangerous for you personally: www.no2id.net.