ID makes no solid predictions for the fossil record, and its major proponents mostly accept the mainstream scientific view as regards the age of the earth and the fossil record, though they will often dodge the question out of fear of offending the "6000 year old earth crowd" who provide some of their funding. So no, I don't think it is innacurate because disagreeing with the fossil record.
Their main arguments concern a few issues:
They have come up with a "explanatory filter", which they claim can detect design. When reduced to its core arguments,
it is useless, because it can not be applied, because it requires ruling out all known __and unknown__ natural causes. Basically this is a "God of the gaps" argument - everything that is unlikely to happen at random, and that we don't have a natural explanation for, must have been designed by a supernatural entity. The problem with this is that as soon as we do find a plausible natural explanation, the filter has failed. This has also been rejected as bad theology, because it implies that with every new scientific discovery, God gets smaller. This filter has never been applied to any biological system, or any other system AFAIK.
They have come up with a concept of complex specified information, which they claim cannot arise through evolutionary mechanisms. Unfortunately, the definition of this quantity is nearly impossible to nail down, and it has never been measured or attempted to be measured for any biological system. Their definitiosn of Information are weasely as well, making it unclear when they are talking about accepted defintions of Information (such as Shannon Information - Shannon's information theories are one of the reasons you are reading this on the internet today), or their own definitions that are accepted by no one else.
They make a an argument that no complex system can evolve if it consists of multiple independent parts such that it ceases to work if one part is removed. This has again never been successfully applied to any biological system (or even the mousetrap that they use as an analogy) - they like to talk about the bacterial flagellum, but are afraid to definitively state it as such a system, with good reason. There are logical problems with this argument- #1 such a system could evolve if it originated as a more complex system with redundancies and then the redudancies atrophied away and #2 cooption, which is a well known evolutionary phenomenon.
When reduced to it's core arguent, SETI is indistinguishable from the principles of Intelligent Design, yet, how many here on this forum would characterize it as you just did here.
Incidentally, SETI itself refutes your claim that such things have never been applied to biological systems. Whether or not they succeeded is irrelevant