All UK ‘must be on DNA database’


The BBC reports:

The whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has said.

Lord Justice Sedley told BBC News the current England and Wales database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was “indefensible”.

He added it would be fairer to include “everybody, guilty or innocent” on it.

The Home Office said the database of four million profiles had helped solve criminal cases, but to expand it would raise logistical and ethical issues.

The DNA database – which is 12 years old – grows by 30,000 samples a month taken from suspects or recovered from crime scenes.

There has already been criticism of the database – the largest in the world – because people who are found innocent usually cannot get their details removed.


0 thoughts on “All UK ‘must be on DNA database’

  • Caesar

    I’m no lawyer, but I think this statement means something:

    “Article 12.

    No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

    -Universal Declaration of Human Rights
    http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

  • nina steggar

    The database as it stands only came to light when a private individual was arrested and his DNA taken. He then wrote to the chief constable of his area about being removed from the database and after much huffing and puffing they told him in a round about way that he was on so that was it. Then it became public and I thought there was going to be a furore. But, good old new labour used the parliament act to make something which was illegal at the time into something that was legal. I thought there would be a furore over this. But, once again new labour managed to avoid much of the flak. They have clearly decided to just keep adding to the database until they have got just about everybody then they’ll make it legal to just TAKE everybody. So WHATEVER THEY DO AND WHENEVER THEY DO IT IT WILL ALWAYS BE LEGAL SEE?. Good system isn’t it. Now we have a judge (of all people) who is worried about the fairness of it all. So logically we all have to be on it then no one is being treated differently from anybody. Because, of course, ALL OF US ARE BEING ABUSED EQUALLY. This country needs to wake up and fast. Do people really think that once this insane project of cameras, id cards and dna database is finally up and running that there will still be 1984 in the public libraries or the prisoner on the tv. Their very existence will in the future be denied or they will have to be remade as futuristic love stories where patrick mcgoohan realises the error of his ways and marries one of his ‘prison’ guards. Ahh!!!!

  • Ian Graham

    From today’s BBC coverage of developments around the McCanns ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6986514.stm ):

    “Allan Scott, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire’s School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences, said cross-contamination needed to be considered.

    “He said ‘secondary transfer’ of Madeleine’s DNA may have occurred and that DNA is ‘so sensitive’ that if two people met in the street and shook hands and then one committed a crime, they could possibly leave the other person’s DNA at the scene.”

    So what would be the point of a DNA database?

  • Rufus Evison

    What we are talking about here is the fact that DNA is persistent and transferable. That it is persistent is clear from the fact that archeologists have samples of prehistoric DNA. If it can last from prehistory then it can certainly last from when I went looking for a house to buy. That means my dna is in several houses in each of the areas I visited and potentially always will be.

    That is is transferable is clear fromt eh fact that the police can gatehr it and take it for sequencing. If they can gather it so can a criminal. If a sample of my dna is gathered it can be scattered at a crime scene. This is a fundamental flaw in using dna evidence to decide who to charge. It is not a fatal flaw in using it for elmination purposes, though it is not exactly a vote of confidence.

    That said there is another flaw in the database idea that is fundamental to using a database at all. An expanded database cannot work because of mathematical problems.

    The way you match dna is using a “dna fingerprint” not using the entire sequence. With this method you have a chance of having the same dna fingerprint as someone else. The government put this chance at one in a billion. An independant audit put it at around one in a hundred.

    If we assume the government estimate is right and then look at the mathematics there is still a real problem. If it is one hundred to one then there is a worse problem.

    One in a billion is alright if you are doing a one to one match. If you have a large database then you are looking at large numbers of possible matches. With one in a billion probabilities on a database the size they are proposing the mathematics (combinatorics) says there will be thousands of duplicates. This means the odds are that there will be several innocent people (hundreds or thousands rather than tens) appearing to be matches to crime scene dna.

    This is without even taking into consideration the fact that DNA is persistant and portable. Mathematically a database is indefensible unless we are prepared to send innocent people to prison.

    I will be doing a series of articles on this subject on my blog over the next few months. I will include some of the reasoning behind the maths.

    Rufus Evison
    ReasonedRants.BlogSpot.Com