NO2ID

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -liberties

We need a better DNA database

Civil liberties concerns about the retention of DNA are overstated – to fight crime, we need a fuller database

o Carl Gardner
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 March 2010 09.30 GMT

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My fear is that limiting the retention of DNA unnecessarily now may hobble a technology that could be a very powerful tool for identifying offenders, eliminating innocent suspects and protecting human rights in 30 or 50 years' time. The growth of the DNA database over the last 10 years has been a brave experiment; I hope it won't be closed down prematurely. The government is right not to "gold-plate" the European court's judgment, which ruled out only a blanket policy of permanent retention. The current proposals will almost certainly withstand a further human rights challenge, and should be defended in court if necessary.

The best reason to back the government, though, is that civil liberties concerns about DNA, now almost conventional wisdom, are abstract and overstated. What's the actual fear? Some say retention violates the presumption of innocence – but that principle does not mean nothing at all can be done to a presumably innocent person. If it did, arresting and questioning suspects – vastly more serious invasions of freedom than storing numbers on a computer – would also be ruled out. Others fear the leaking of personal details such as ethnicity or medical status, but the DNA profiles on the database do not contain this "phenotypic" information.

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So his argument seems to be that the DNA of innocent people should be retained on the database in case an unspecified future government at some unspecified later date thinks up some unspecified use for it and wishes to use it in this way without the consent of the person concerned.

He'll have to do better than that.

What irritated me was his assumption that retaining someone's DNA was a trivial interference with someone's privacy/civil liberties. What is and is not an interference is, to a large extent, subjective - if you find it a breach of your privacy, then it is, and the degree of intrusion depends at least to some extent upon how intruded the individual feels about it.

In that respect, it's no different to any other aspect of our private lives - some people think the bodyscanners at airports are fine and couldn't care less if a stranger sees an image of their naked bodies while, to others, this is an outrageous attack upon their personal privacy. Personally, I am firmly in the second camp on that.

Any intrusion into someone else's privacy should generally either be consensual, or should occur where it is unavoidable. In the case of DNA, if someone commits a relatively serious offence then they have infringed the rights of others. In doing so, they have forfeit, at least to some extent, certain rights which the rest of us enjoy, including the right for the state not to keep their fingerprints and DNA. However, this ONLY applies where a person is deemed guilty in the eyes of the law, and a person who has merely fallen under suspicion does not fall into that category and their situation should be restored, so far as possible, to the one they enjoyed before being suspected or accused. There is no moral justification for retaining the DNA or fingerprints of people who have, in effect, been cleared of criminal wrongdoing.

Stu

This is highly misleading.

Whilst the raw 'profile data' on its own might not currently include that information, the record which contains the profile *does*.
There's also the question of how long the sample itself is retained once the profile has been created. If memory is correct, these are held for some unspecified (years) by the company that does the DNADB (FSS?) for re-profiling and re-testing as may be required.

From FYI: Parliament Stuff, Sept/Oct 2007 pointing at Genetics Databases [9 October 2007] : Column 477W


Edit: Surely there's lots of reports that cover this as well.

"My fear is that limiting the retention of DNA unnecessarily now may hobble a technology that could be a very powerful tool for identifying offenders, eliminating innocent suspects ... "

Er...

http://gizmonaut.net/blog/uk/dna_retent ... eople.html

I cannot see any benefit to an innocent person in having their DNA on the database "just in case". If they are accused, they can always provide DNA then.

Rob

Keeping DNA on the database means that someone can be identified as the likely offender when there is no obvious offender, so there is always a benefit to keeping a profile on the system IF that person ever offends. Most DNA detections with the database take the form of a police officer receiving a "hit" notification from the Forensic Science Service to say that DNA recovered from the scene of an undetected crime appears to belong to a named individual and that is, generally, someone the police hadn't already suspected.

I think the compelling arguments against keeping innocent people's profiles on the system are firstly that it has always been a principle of the British legal system that a person suspected, but eventually cleared, of any crime should be restored so far as possible to the situation they enjoyed prior to being suspected. Secondly that, relative to the relative rarity of innocent people being subsequently identified for a major crime by virtue of the DNA database, the retention of the profiles of such people is grossly disproportionate when compared to their right to privacy.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of crime, especially crime in which DNA plays a role, is committed by a tiny minority of recidivist individuals, most of whom are already on the various databases owing to past offending which has been dealt with. Consequently, there is little to be gained from keeping the profiles of huge numbers of perfectly law-abiding people on the database.

Stu

Stu - I agree with what you say. I was really responding to the narrower argument that innocent people should be happy to have their DNA on the database where it can daily prove their innocence in every crime - which is fatuous. It is surely in nobody's individual interest to be on the DNA database (although it is certainly in society's interests, if that person really has commited a crime). -Rob

Rob

Sorry, I should have read your post more carefully.

Stu