Much in the news here the last few days are the comments of a senior judge in the UK about keeping DNA in a national database. At the moment, anyone who is arrested in the UK for any crime, no matter how minor the crime or how young the miscreant, has their DNA taken, sequenced, and stored in a national database. If they are later found not guilty, their DNA stays on the database. The judge believes this is indefensible. There are more racial minority DNA samples, for example, because of the proportions of people being arrested for crimes.
However, instead of suggesting that the DNA of the innocent be removed from the database, he is suggesting that everyone’s DNA be placed in the database…some 60 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom.
Moreover, he also suggests that every visitor to the United Kingdom have his or her DNA taken. This is 100 million people a year.
Now in the scheme of things many of those 100 million people will be return visitors to the United Kingdom, but determining that (or taking another sample to ensure that they are actually the owners of the DNA previously taken) will take extra time in the immigration process.
Scalability of the database will be a difficulty; let’s say that of the 100 million visitors a year, 40 million are new visitors. That means that in the first year, you will have 160 million entries in the database. The next year 200 million, It will never get smaller as you can never expunge an entry (if you’re using it for crime detection purposes, crimes can be solved after the death of the perpetrator, thus his or her DNA must be kept in perpetuity).
If a match is found between a foreign person and DNA at a crime scene, we then have to deal with tracing that person (so addresses will need to be kept and updated regularly) and getting him or her extradited to face justice.
In the UK the scheme will have to be linked with the ID card database (still only a gleam in the Home Office’s jaundiced and jaded eye) so that DNA can be linked to its owner wherever the owner currently lives.
Technically, all this will be a challenge. If it happens, then civil liberties protection requires the highest level of security and accuracy. With the current woeful state of government procurement of IT services (eg, the NHS IT system, which is a shambles, or the Passport system, which was so ineptly rolled out at the beginning of the holiday season after new laws had taken effect requiring children to carry their own passports that the Passport Office (as was) had to pass out logo’ed umbrellas to all the punters who had to queue in the rain to get their passports) it is unlikely that the required level of security and accuracy will result from the procurement process.
There were several comments from foreigners who said that if such a program (of typing the DNA of all visitors) is started they will never visit the UK again.
Another difficulty is identical twins. Now you have the problem of identifying which twin actually committed a crime, as witness statements might not be able to distinguish between the two. If this program comes about, it will be the case that each twin will have to justify his or her movements if there is a DNA match, as identical twins’ DNA is, well, identical.
Personally, I think that the government is well-aware that this half-brained scheme is not practically achievable at a reasonable cost in a foreseeable time period. However, they made sure that the comments were widely circulated (the judge was on the Today program yesterday and there were approving noises from the government that fell short of an endorsement) in order that people will begin to understand that they have no rights any more here in the United Kingdom.
Now back to the main idea. There is a tendency nowadays to equate the ability to do something or other with the necessity of doing so. Just because we are (theoretically) able to collect and store DNA information from every citizen and resident of, and visitor to the United Kingdom does not translate into the necessity of collecting and storing it. We have had the ability to store fingerprint information for more than a century. However, if it has ever been suggested that all fingerprints be collected and stored centrally to assist in crime detection it’s not come about.
Not everything that is possible is desirable.
Technically, it isn’t a difficult system to implement. Politically, it is impossible. I recall in the 70s (I think – slight case of CRS here) when the Motor Vehicle registration information was going to be combined with a national Police computer network. The project was VERY badly designed right from the start; there were immediate territory wars between London and Swansea, and then the newspapers picked up on the fact that there was an “unallocated” area in each driver’s record of 125 bytes – with clever coding, enough space to hold a huge array of data about an individual.
Through mismanagement and political ineptitude, the system failed to get off the ground. Then along came the EU and data protection acts… just to put a finishing nail in the coffin lid.
I’ve been away a long time, so I don’t know if that project was ever revived; but I suspect this one will meet a similar fate.
I keep thinking the judge said this with the explicit intention to blow the database up.
If I trusted authorities to behave in good faith, I would think this a good idea.
But, you see, I don’t.
I would like to think so but there’s no indication that anyone here thinks that. I think he is a civil libertarian who feels that it’s against the human rights of those who are arrested to have their DNA included in the database if they are not subsequently convicted of anything, and the fact that a larger proportion of people of colour are included in the database because more of them are arrested without charge. So in his mind the solution is to ensure that everyone’s DNA is included in the database, thus making it fair.
Better to cleanse the database of records of those who are arrested but not convicted of anything.
And neither do I.
We’re sensible, I think.