What have DNA database objectors got to hide? 2


Nick Freeman writes in the Manchester Evening News:

How many millions of hard earned tax payers’ money will be spent trying to catch Jo Yeates’s killer?

Hopefully nowhere near as many as the millions that were squandered in apprehending the wrong man in the Rachel Nickell murder case, before the real killer was finally caught – and only after he had killed again.

In the Nickell case, the police finally got their man after trapping him with a scrap of DNA. And we can only pray that the savage murderer who took the life of the young landscape architect from Bristol will be swiftly snared in the same way – but what if the police don’t have his DNA?

Hasn’t the time now come for everyone’s DNA to be stored on a national register – rather than, as is the case at present, just the samples taken from criminals or suspects?

In plain and simple terms, that means every person living in this country should, by law, be required to give a sample which would then be held on a database accessed only by law enforcement authorities.

He concludes:

And if you object? Well, I’m just wondering what you’ve got to hide.


2 thoughts on “What have DNA database objectors got to hide?

  • Robert Knight

    The cry “If you are innocent you have nothing to fear” always was the hollow excuse used by control freaks to excuse their outrageous intrusions into citizens’ privacy. The writer is either naive or dishonest and either quality excuses us from respecting his opinion.

    We know that by ever closer control of individuals, the state can do many things that we would like and that it cannot do without such control, but by the same token, it empowers itself to do things that we would definitely not like. That is the dilemma that we face with every new possibility made available to us by technology. Intelligent people know this and they also know how difficult it is to choose what to accept and what to reject, especially when rejection makes it harder to catch criminals or find people in distress.

    We have to face these hard choices, but we have to face them honestly, not blunt the scalpel of our reasoning powers with glib mantras suggesting that rejection somehow equates to criminal intent. That is as dishonest as it is irrational.

  • Robert Knight

    The cry “If you are innocent you have nothing to fear” always was the hollow excuse used by control freaks to excuse their outrageous intrusions into citizens’ privacy. The writer is either naive or dishonest and either quality excuses us from respecting his opinion.

    We know that by ever closer control of individuals, the state can do many things that we would like and that it cannot do without such control, but by the same token, it empowers itself to do things that we would definitely not like. That is the dilemma that we face with every new possibility made available to us by technology. Intelligent people know this and they also know how difficult it is to choose what to accept and what to reject, especially when rejection makes it harder to catch criminals or find people in distress.

    We have to face these hard choices, but we have to face them honestly, not blunt the scalpel of our reasoning powers with glib mantras suggesting that rejection somehow equates to criminal intent. That is as dishonest as it is irrational.

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