Vox Polis

John Reid quietly admitted last Monday that of the 3.46 million people on the National DNA Database, 1.14 million have committed no offence. The latest figure is one million higher than Home Office figures released in March. The number of innocent people on the database is the result of a policy which allows the police to take and store DNA samples from anyone they arrest regardless of whether the arrest leads to a caution or conviction.

Given that the database contains a disproportionate number of samples from people from ethnic minorities as well as the records of (as of January) 24,000 innocent children, it’s pretty clear that what we have is not a database of criminals but one of people the police don’t like the look of. For the time being we have have a pledge from the Home Office Minister Andy Burnham that the database would not be extended to the whole population but in light of recent calls from Tony Blair to acquire the “maximum number” of samples an incomplete database could turn out to mean everyone apart from politicians and those with enough money to claim that they would be at risk if their information was stored in a leaky government database. I can only hope that the investigation by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics will provide enough evidence against the database for someone to put the breaks on the pernicious harvesting of our most personal information.

Via The Register.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 12:42 pm and is filed under UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.