WRITTEN ON July 30th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?
DNA profiles of innocent people should be removed from the national database, a government-funded inquiry has said. Control of the database should be taken from government and police and an independent body should be established to run it, the Citizens’ Inquiry urged. Javed Aslam, one of the 30 members of the public on the panel, said keeping the records would be “the first step towards a totalitarian state”.
“First step” shoud read “latest in a long series of steps”. As soomeone put it – we’re not sleepwalking into a surveillance sociey – at least, it’s a funny sort of sleppwalking that involves a series of wide-awake episodes in the House of Commons passing intrusive and restrictive laws, including the retrospective legalisation many years of illegal DNA data retention by the police.
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