WRITTEN ON May 3rd, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, We told you so..., What do we want?
DNA profiles of almost a million innocent people are to be destroyed as part of a major overhaul of the police national database. They include people who have been arrested and never charged, and those taken to court but found not guilty….The campaign group Genewatch, which opposes the DNA database, has warned that health and drug companies want access to the samples to create profiles to predict who is genetically susceptible to different illnesses and diseases. There have also been fears the samples could one day be used for racial profiling or even to predict criminal behaviour…”This is not a privacy-friendly Home Office,” said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. “Any developments in this area are because the Home Office has been dragged here by the European court of human rights.”
Don’t expct us to say thank you. This was an outrage, respectively and dubiously “legalised”: an offence and a waste of our money. Now will you try and run the country without breaking the law, and destroying our trust in law enforcement and public services please. Next on the list: health, childrens and identity databases.
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2 Responses to “Home Office to clean up its DNA act”
There’s no evidence that the Home Office intends to run the database in line with the spirit of the ECHR judgment: which was pretty clearly, “retention not legitimate at all”. It is taking advantage of the fact the court failed to state that, because it was not required to address what period other than eternity would be a permissible trespass on privacy.
What they are planning on doing (though not yet, not nearly yet) is holding DNA and fingerprints of those not convicted, or not charged, with minor offences for about as long as it takes to get to the court, where they will then be forced to argue the disproportion limb of the argument in order for the court to take a view on the particular retention period the home office has chosen. This is calculated to avoid that limit being litigated at all.
I have a strong suspicion when it comes to an SI they will calculate the retention period prospectively only, so those who are on the database will stay on for the moment.
There’s also < http://reclaimyourdna.org> which launched at the beginning of the month…