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UK National ID Card Cloned In 12 Minutes
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Computer Weekly, which casts some doubt on the security of the UK's proposed personal identification credential: "The prospective national ID card was broken and cloned in 12 minutes, the Daily Mail revealed this morning. The newspaper hired computer expert Adam Laurie to test the security that protects the information embedded in the chip on the card. Using a Nokia mobile phone and a laptop computer, Laurie was able to copy the data on a card that is being issued to foreign nationals in minutes."
Mitigating factor - I believe in an afterlife. As long as I didn't actually commit the crime, then in the grand scheme of things the time spent in prison - or even the wrongful execution - becomes quite irrelevant. The important thing is how I behaved myself during that time.
If we refuse to prosecute cases because we might make a mistake, we'll never prosecute anyone except where we have clear HD video footage of the defense committing the crime. That's a direction I would prefer we avoid.
So no, I would not believe it's better to let ten guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person. (In fact I'm quite sure the false positive rate is much, much smaller. Try not to misrepresent it as 1 in 11, ok?)
We live in an imperfect world. People hold grudges. People's memories are warped by time, lack of sleep, emotions, alcohol, and so on. In such a world, it would be impossible to design a system that has zero false positives. I am willing to allow a tiny false positive rate rather than allow a large false negative rate - and if the event arises that I am falsely convicted, I will maintain that stance.