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Judge Says, Record DNA of Everyone In the UK
Many readers informed us about the opinion of Lord Justice Sedley, a senior UK Appeal Court judge, who said that everyone in the UK should have their DNA recorded in the national database — including visitors. Reader ChiefGeneralManager writes, "Sedley calls the current database 'indefensible' because it contains a hodge-podge mix of people, including children and those who have been in contact with the police. His view is that we should make it compulsory for all DNA to be recorded to remove this anomaly. The UK Information Commissioner has expressed some concerns, but not dismissed the idea outright." And reader john.wingfield adds, "Just under two weeks ago, the Independent reported that the Government has admitted that an eighth of all records on the DNA database are false, misspelled, or incorrect — over half a million records. This raises the possibility of a breach of the 4th data protection principle of the Data Protection Act 1998: 'Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date.'"
You don't need an identity card when you have stored a sample of everyone's dna and dna analysis becomes very cheap, a la Gattacca.
This is what expects us.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Why not? In the U.S., don't we already record fingerprints at birth? Let's just all do this.
If you're against this, you probably have something to hide and you should be prosecuted anyway. If you didn't do anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, so why you should care? After all, we need to be protected from the terrorists!
You can't be against this, because it will protect the children. After all, if we have their DNA and they're kidnapped, we'll be able to find them quicker. Will someone please think of the children?
*sigh*
I'm moving to a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific to start my own country. Anyone care to join me?
My blog
I don't think it's the police's fault that black people commit more crimes than white people.
Okay, I can see that the current situation of including people who aren't convicted of a crime is unfair, but to suggest that the only possible solution is to treat everyone as if they have convicted a crime?!
... at them?
How about we stop adding people to the database so easily in the first place.
I also love that for once, it's a judge proposing authoritarian measures, and Labour who are opposing it: A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said to expand the database would create "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" and civil liberty concerns.
(For non-UK readers, Labour being the Government that have repeatedly brought in authoritarian measures, and plan bureaucratic nightmares like the national ID card scheme, ignoring any civil liberty concerns...)
Only a tiny sample of saliva, blood, semen
Hmm, if we are forced to all turn up to have our DNA taken, can we choose to spit, bleed or er
>When the remaining 91% are going to be DNA recorded
Of course, we won't mention the % of the 17 teens shot or stabbed in London this year who are black or the colour of the killers who have been arrested so far. Clue: Considerably higher than 40% were black.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I'm not real familiar with the way the British courts work, but I know that in the US a tactic sometimes used by judges that want a law overturned is to simply enforce the letter of the law. The idea is that the law itself is so flawed that by enforcing it strictly and literally it becomes evident that the law should be changed. Similar thing happened recently where some congressmen tried to reinstitute the draft, the reasoning being that if it's important enough for US soldiers to fight and die in Iraq, then it's important enough for every eligible US citizen to join up. Of course, and this was their point, if it's not that important, then we shouldn't be there. Maybe this judge is making the same point about DNA profiling: either everyone has to be on record, which would raise some serious privacy and legal issues, or no DNA records are kept at all because there isn't a fair way to do it.
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I think that the biggest affect would be the social changes. It is well known that for £50 you can get a car license plate traced, even though only the police are supposed to have access. How many people will be tempted to "just check" their paternity and get a surprise? We already have a principle that adopted children have the right to know and contact their natural parents. It won't be long before this right is extended to children of mothers who "don't know" who the father is, plus those discovered to be illegitimate by their fathers "just checking"? I don't know what the end result will be, and end to normal family based structures or maybe an increase in fidelity as people realise that even a one night stand with someone you don't know could be found out. One thing is certain the social implications are much more than just catching a few more or a few less criminals. The only way round this would be if there was some enforced method of storing hashes of the results only. This would mean that you could check whether a sample was a compete match for anyone (following up with a full comparison just incase of a hashcode collision) , but not check for partial matching such as family members. I don't know how feasible this is, as there are issues of degraded samples, etc.
Fine. Just don't expect me to visit.
Besides, Paris has better airshows, and Germany, Spain, and Italy all have better F1 races. Guess I'll take my tourist dollars there instead.
What about chimeras - people who have two different sets of DNA in the same body? They allegedly make up a small but not insignificant fraction of the population. How will the system deal with them?
The current status is that there are all manner of ways to get on the database without actually committing a crime. You can be arrested but not charged, you can be charged but subsequently found innocent, you can have your DNA "voluntarily" taken for all sorts of wide-sweeping investigations and so on. You can even have your DNA taken for elimination purposes as the victim of a crime.
The law, and indeed common sense, says that if you're not convicted of a crime, you shouldn't be treated like you've performed one. So what the Judge is really saying here is that the current composition of the database is a legal anomaly that should be cleared up. Either you can chuck away quite a lot of that data as unreasonable on Civil Liberties grounds, or if it's actually as useful as the Police claim, then the 'fair' solution is to put _everyone_ on there, whether they happen to have been attacked by someone or not.
Either one or the other, and it's up to the politicians, not the judges to decide which.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Probably similar to what happens when you refuse to be fingerprinted
and iris-scanned for the forthcoming ID card
- you lose you job
- you lose access to social security
- you lose access to medical treatment
- you are fined 2000 quid for each offence of not turning up
and they keep this up till you submit or die of starvation.
My grandfather died in the second world war fighting fascism yet
my pathetic generation will be queueing quietly to be fingerprinted;
it sickens me. I've enough computer skills to be able to skip the
country in a couple of years but I pity the poor fuckers I'll be
leaving behind.
will vanish, for the most part, if it requires giving a DNA sample to visit the country. This is not only intrusive, it is vile and disturbing on more levels than I care to go into this early in the morning. I, for one, would never visit the country if DNA sampling was required to enter.
:)
And let's go ahead and give a rest to that tired old bullshit about "If you have nothing to hide then..." Everyone has something they want hidden, even if they won't admit it. My argument is that, regardless of if I have something to hide or not, I _DO NOT TRUST ANY GOVERNMENT IN THIS WORLD_ with my DNA on file and for them to "protect" it while "only using it to solve crimes". Virtually all things that have been expressed in this manner are then perverted for some other use, above and beyond what the stated intent was. Someone in power will eventually decide they can use the database for other "good" and seek to extend their reach further and further into the homes and lives of all people - the criminal AND, especially, the INNOCENT.
I, for one, hope that the people of the United Kingdom will stand up against this complete and utter invasion of their lives and take back some control of the information that is connected to them. I also hope that the people of the United States and other countries (Australia, Canada, and many others) also stand up and take back control, because those so-called free countries many of us are living in are looking more and more like they're creeping into fascism and/or totalitarian or police states.
We must dissent.
(Kudos to all those who get the reference in my last line
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Or perhaps its not "disproportionate" and ethnic minorities really do have a higher percentage of criminals.
Just because you feel guilty for the acts of your ancestors doesn't make your biased assumptions accurate.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunately a criminal can very easily hide their DNA by injecting foreign blood into their circulatory system. It has been done, according to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia says: Dr. John Schneeberger of Canada raped one of his sedated patients in 1992 and left semen on her underwear. Police drew Schneeberger's blood and compared its DNA against the crime scene semen DNA on three occasions, never showing a match. It turned out that he had surgically inserted a Penrose drain into his arm and filled it with foreign blood and anticoagulants.
This means that criminals have a way to bypass DNA checks and hide their identity. It's harder than making a fake ID card, but it's still relatively easy. Therefore, a national universal DNA database would not help to catch the smartest (and probably most dangerous) of the criminals. It could help to catch a few stupid or clueless criminals, but these are not too dangerous compared to the smarter ones.
Therefore DNA evidence is not the final answer to whether a person is guilty. It can contribute to an investigation, but no one must base a decision solely on DNA identification. With this in mind, the ROI of a massive universal national DNA database may be much lower than this judge thinks.
That's because Heathrow is a dog's breakfast at the moment. Changing terminals is painful because it's congested, not because of customs impediments thrown up by the government. I regularly fly between the US and the UK, and it's hilarious how different customs experiences are in the different countries:
US: I have a sketchy muslim name, so I invariably get corralled into a side room, fingerprinted, "registered" and interviewed. If it takes less than 2 hours to complete this process, I consider myself fortunate.
UK: the nice lady at the customs booth says "welcome back," scans my passport and waves me through. Total time spent dealing with government officials: less than 2 minutes.
It boils down to the fact that the UK-- and the rest of Europe-- understands the business of accomodating foreigners, and attempts to handle the process flexibly and professionally. The US, on the other hand, is too preoccupied with maintaining it's illusory fortress to treat foreigners as anything more than unavoidable security hazards. This shows when the tourist dollars are totted up: all my vacations have been to Europe and Asia over the last few years, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
I am reminded of the offhand reference in Robert Heinlein's novel Friday that the California Republic, having determined that citizens with a bachelor's degree earned, on average, 40% more than citizens without such a degree, passed legislation awarding each citizen a bachelor's degree when they reached 18, thereby eliminating this shocking social inequity.
"The Government" is a hodgepodge of agencies with mutually contradictory goals and aims, most of whom would sooner throw rocks at each other than cooperate. This is, perversely, a good thing.
Why? Because although "the government" may know a lot about you, it doesn't know all of that in any one place. There's no single database -- yet -- where you can sit down, CSI-style, and bring up any citizen's dossier. Your local police department knows your name, address, and how many parking tickets you've gotten this year, but they don't have access to your tax information from the IRS. (And the IRS is actually pretty snarky about not sharing information casually; if I had a dime for every time one of my LEO buddies bitched about the IRS making them jump through hoops, I'd be a rich man. I guess there's honor among thieves or something.)
This is the way the system is supposed to work. (Well, I'd like to see the size of the bureaucracy cut down dramatically, but that's a different topic.) In order for the bureaucracy to function, it needs to know a certain amount about you. But different agencies need to know different things. As long as the data is kept compartmentalized -- as it is, in large part, today; owing less to design than simply because it's a really hard problem to correlate it all -- it's not a mortal threat to privacy.
It's when you start to get all that information put into a single database, and where there's a natural primary key that allows the database to be easily searched and information to be linked (why do people get paranoid about SSNs? Because they're the obvious choice for a primary key), that you start to get really Orwellian. With minor exceptions, we don't have anything like that in the U.S., although there are a lot of people trying.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
So will identity theft take on a whole new meaning thanks to unthinking legislation like this. Prior to any crime, a random trip on public transport to pick up DNA samples to obfuscate the crime scene, perhaps even a black market that sells a random range of various types of random DNA samples. What crime will you dead cells be committing tomorrow, hmm?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen