Issue of DNA records of the innocent reaches European Court

Did you wonder why Det Supt Stuart Cundy, who led the murder hunt which led to Mark Dixie's conviction, started going on about a compulsory national DNA database the other day? What his agenda might have been?

Unlike Scotland, where they take their civil liberties a wee bit more seriously, In England and Wales if the police arrest you, even if you have done nothing wrong, like the guy with the MP3 player, they will take your DNA and you will go into New Labour’s National DNA database, never to be removed.

This is unlike the tried and tested system with fingerprints where they only keep them if a person is convicted and people don’t mind giving them for elimination purposes because they know they will be destroyed afterwards.

Now the police’s practices with the DNA database is being challenged in the European Court of human rights as an infringement of an individuals right to privacy and anti-discrimination.

This database is scarily already the largest of it’s kind in the whole world.

If they win then the police will have to remove the DNA records from the system of those who have not been convicted and the system will have to work more like the fingerprint system or the Scottish system.

It is quite probable that a compulsory universal DNA database (that the police appear to be covertly working their way towards already) would indeed probably result in a few extra detections, or earlier detections of crimes.

Then again, so would electronically tagging every citizen, at their own expense, with a mini GPS system, camera and Microphone that relayed the info it recorded to a central database would too.

The question is, is the price paid in the loss of your civil liberties worth the benefits of the illusion of safety. DNA evidence can be spoofed, or compromised, by the savvy criminal and it is not always necessarily as reliable as it is imagined to be by the general public.

If they ever do manage to force a compulsory national DNA database on us by some devious means (Passports? ID Cards?). it will be great for the Authoritarians who want to check our every move.

Then there is the good old mission creep factor. What else would they get up to with the information? - One could do racial profiling in the name of medical research for instance…

One thing is certain - before long every junior civil servant and council worker in the country would have access and you could be sure they could not be trusted not to leave millions of records on a bus somewhere, or just loose them.

Best it is stopped. It comes to something when a UK citizen has to appeal to the European court to protect their civil rights from our own Government.

Cheap as chips? Will the UK ePassport work for more than a couple of years?

Remember the ePassport introduced in 2006, to comply with new international requirements? An absolute rip off snip at only £72 and rising.

The Home Office's Identity and Passport Service (IPS) are no doubt congratulating themselves for apparently accomplishing the unlikely feat of bringing in the scheme, on time and on budget. Note 'Identity' in the name – another brick in the wall of Nu-Lab's total surveillance society.

But wait – These are ten year ePassports and they contain a microchip with your data on it.

That microchip is only guaranteed for, wait for it, two years.

That’ll be fun then, when it packs up after 6 years while you are trying to go through US customs and they think you are a terrorist sneaking in on a fake passport.

And exactly who is going to pay for a new one when it stops working?