Ein ehemaliger Derbyshire stellvertretender Leiter-Polizist, der die nationale DNA Polizeidatenbank herstellte, glaubt, daß genetische Proben von jeder an der Geburt genommen werden sollten.
Ziehen Sie Dovaston an, dargestellt, auch gesagt, daß Immigranten ihre DNA notieren lassen sollten.
Er glaubt, daß der Nutzen einer Universaldatenbank weit alle Ausgaben der menschlichen Rechte überwiegt. Herr Dovaston, das nicht nur Polizei eines Datenbankgebens eine bessere Wahrscheinlichkeit der anziehenden Verbrecher gesagt wurde, aber sie half auch zu den freien unschuldigen Leuten, die von einem Verbrechen vermutet werden konnten.
Aber Herr Dovaston, der 40 Jahre' Polizeiservice hat, sagte, daß es eine ernste Diskussion in der Regierung würde geben müssen, bevor solche Masse an der richtigen Stelle gesetzt wurden.
Er sagte: „Ich denke, daß der Nutzen einer Universaldatenbank weit alle mögliche Ausgaben überwiegt, die menschliche Rechte umgeben und meine eigene Meinung ist, daß DNA von den Leuten von der Geburt genommen werden sollte. Ich sehe nicht das Problem, aber ich verstehe, daß es ernste Diskussion in der Regierung geben muß, bevor sie stattfinden könnte.“
Nur Leute, die festgehalten worden sind, werden auf die DNA Datenbank gesetzt. Fotographie: Betätigen Sie Verbindung
Können Sie gegenwärtige Datenbank DNA Großbritanniens stützen entgegensetzen schon Plänen für biometrische Identifikation Karten? Die ist die Frage, die ich mit dieser Woche gewrungen habe. Die Antwort, da Sie sehen, ist nicht trivial.
Die letzte Woche hat drei Männer gesehen, die des Mordes überführt werden, und alle drei wurden entweder von den mehrfachen Tötungen überführt oder vermutet. In zwei Fällen prüfte DNA Beweis lebenswichtiges: ihre DNA war durch das übliche Verfahren erworben worden, hingegen, wenn jemand festgehalten wird, seine oder DNA (als Satz von 20 Zahlen) auf der nationalen Datenbank genommen und notiert wird. Vorhergehende Verbrechen, in denen DNA zurückgewonnen worden ist, aber kein anderes gefundenes Gleiches wird dann gegen neue Eintragungen überprüft.
Und DNA, das entscheidende biometrische fast seiend, ist sehr hinweisend. There are even cases that have been solved because someone has given a DNA sample and the database has suggested that someone related to them has a link to an unsolved crime.
It is beyond argument that the database is a fantastic tool for solving crime. I think it is also right that arrest should be the trigger for taking a sample, since it’s logical that someone who has committed a serious crime will probably commit smaller ones too. (And that’s why I’m against the case currently being brought by two people who were arrested but not charged and want their DNA details removed from the database. Arrest may be a weak indicator, but it’s still an indicator.)
False convictions
Equally, I’m against widening DNA collection to the whole population. The reasons were elegantly spelt out in The Guardian on Thursday by Professor Allan Jamieson: “The larger [the database] becomes, the greater the chance is of a fortuitous ‘hit’, false conviction, and unnecessary stress on individuals and resource deployment by the police.” And since the Home Office minister Tony McNulty agrees, I don’t think there’s much risk of the DNA database encompassing all of us.
OK, but what about biometrics — iris scans, fingerprints, facial recognition — for ID cards? After all, consider benefit fraud, which is estimated to have cost the taxpayer £2.5bn in 2006/7. There’s an interesting exchange in last year’s Hansard in which a minister for the Department of Work and Pensions says that “the introduction of identity verification services, to be provided by the Identity and Passport Service as part of the National Identity Card scheme, will have a significant impact on the ability of fraudsters to make claims for social security benefits using more than one identity.”
That’s fine — except that in an earlier question in that exchange, Derek Wyatt asks what estimate has been made of how much could be saved by having a verifiable national database of addresses (which presently doesn’t exist). The minister replies: “There has been no estimate made of the value of fraudulent claims which could be detected annually if a definitive national database of addresses existed.”
So it’s one of those things where the government has only worked out the answers to the questions it likes, rather than all the possible answers. It’s a long way from what you’d call “science” - or even rigour.
Ludicrous and expensive
More to the point, an ID card would be used to prevent benefit fraud — not to prove who committed the crime after the fact. If you had to give an iris scan when making each benefit application, that would make multiple fraudulent applications harder. The fact that one woman could claim for an amazing 18 non-existent children doesn’t suggest that the system for detecting unusual claims is very robust at the moment. But making parents and children come to an office for iris scans and fingerprinting before they can get child benefit would create a ludicrous, expensive system that could still be gamed (what about children visiting from abroad? You’d have to iris-scan and fingerprint everyone).
It is that presumption of guilt, though — the thinking that you’re only out to cheat the system — that seems so wrong about the national biometric database. Leave aside the issue of how secure it might be. Nobody can change your biometrics, just as they can’t change your DNA, so it’s actually rare in being a database you could happily stick on CDs and post around the country. The key is that it assumes you’re guilty. And that’s what I don’t like.
The point about the DNA database is that it only comes into play after a crime has been committed, and when someone is suspected of it. At that point, you become a suspect in all unsolved crimes with DNA evidence. (And perhaps others where your details might match those from other crimes.)
But in claiming benefit, or trying to board an aeroplane, we’re not committing a crime. And in a society that likes to call itself “free”, the presumption of innocence is surely the most important title we can give everyone, even if it is disappointed by fraudsters and killers. It has been the bedrock of our legal system for centuries.
And that, in short, is why I support the DNA database, even for suspected criminals, but do not support a nationwide biometric database. Innocent unless proven guilty is an important freedom. Let’s stick with it.
Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Tether has secured a House of Commons debate on the impact of the proposed National DNA Database, which takes place today. It has been welcomed by human rights, mental health and church groups.
The campaigning organisation Black Mental Health UK (BMH UK) says that it is especially concerned about the likely discriminatory impact of such a database on black and ethnic minority people.
With African Caribbean persons routinely entering mental health facilities via the police and criminal justice system, BMH UK is calling for the removal of thousands of black patients whose names have been added to the database during the process of securing mental health care.
The National DNA Database adjournment debate will come before parliament on Friday 29 February 2008 at around 2.30pm.
The government’s own figures suggest that 77% of young black men will soon have their details held on the database, despite evidence that black people are actually no more likely to have committed a crime than white people, says BMH UK.
The UK has the largest National DNA Database in the world, with 4.5 million profiles set to be held by the government by 2010. There are currently 500,000 people on the database who have no current conviction, caution, formal warning or reprimand.
Black Mental Health says that the misapplication of data could lead to innocent people being condemned in the future. A spokesperson declared: “The public have no way of knowing how secure this information is. What if someone steals your DNA? … Losing child benefit details is one thing, but a person’s DNA is part of who they are. This is another hostile move against personal freedom and civil liberties.”
“When people who need help are taken in by the police we find that they are very quick to take a swab rather than ensure the well-being of the person,” commented the Rev Paul Grey of the New Testament Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination.
“It is disturbing to know that those needing health care are on a criminal database. Wherever this is the case, it is imperative that their details are removed as quickly as possible. What kind of a society criminalises those who need help?” asked Matilda MacAttram, director of Black Mental Health UK.
“The over-representation of black people on the government’s database should horrify anyone who cares about justice and fair play. There is a real danger that the DNA database just reinforces the myth that black people are more likely to commit crime, and that is a very dangerous untruth. The truth is, if you are black, you are no more likely to commit crime and more likely to be a victim of crime,” Sarah Teather, MP for Brent East, added.
Three killers have been convicted this month of appalling crimes. Two were implicated through DNA profiling. The aftermath has seen renewed calls for both a universal DNA database and the death penalty, bolstered by a belief that advances in scientific evidence would eliminate the risk of wrongful convictions. Keeping everyone’s DNA profile in the universal database could make a significant impact on the investigation of crime. But there are also cogent reasons why it would increase the risk of convicting innocent people.
The UK database is already the largest in the world. Profiles produced from crime scenes are now easily checked against that database, which at first mostly included only those convicted of serious offences. Now the net is much wider, with people who have been neither charged nor convicted still on the database. As a scientist who works on behalf of the defence in assessing DNA evidence - and challenged the validation of low copy number DNA in the Omagh bomb trial - I have some experience of the difficulties involved in such cases.
DNA profiling technology has improved from days when we needed a splash of blood or a good-sized stain. We can now obtain profiles from something that may have been only touched, and match DNA from just a few cells. From a system that had match probabilities of thousands, we are in the era of billions. This is where the problems begin. For many cases, the issue is not: “Is it my DNA?” It is: “How did it get there?”
The police are likely to conclude on the basis of a database match that they, more likely than not, are investigating the guilty party. The investigative process can then follow a pattern of accumulating circumstantial evidence. Once this process results in a charge, an error can be compounded by the jury failing to appreciate the difference between threads of evidence all dependent on that first “identification” by DNA. Juries, police, and lawyers can struggle with the many misunderstandings of probabilities, conditional match probabilities, odds and frequencies.
The police claim prosecutions will not be mounted on DNA evidence alone. This is not correct. There are cases where DNA alone could provide compelling evidence for a prosecution (for instance, a full profile obtained from an intimate sample from a rape victim when the defendant claims no contact) and cases where the DNA is irrelevant. There are no hard and fast rules.
Nevertheless, an “innocent” match being used to assemble a circumstantial case in court raises the very real prospect of false convictions. Excluding any DNA evidence from the case if it has been used to identify the suspect in the first instance might protect against this.
I suspect most people imagine that all DNA profiles obtained emanate from blood, semen, or some other clear stain. But often there is no visible stain at all, and the profile is a mixture. Mixtures create the potential for more difficulty. By way of illustration: if I have profile AB and you have profile CD, our mixed cells would have a profile ABCD. However, the same profile could be produced by two people with profiles AC and BD, or AD and BC. If this mixture was found at a crime scene, we now have six “suspect” profiles. If the person with the BD profile is unlucky enough to live in the area where the crime was committed, BD now needs to explain why he has no association with the material found at the scene. In fact, a mixed profile could generate about 60,000 suspects.
Technical and procedural issues associated with this powerful criminal investigative tool have been, and are being, resolved. However, the difficulties will be compounded and amplified if more individuals are on the database. The larger it becomes, the greater the chance is of a fortuitous “hit”, false conviction, and unnecessary stress on individuals and resource deployment by the police. Success, in thinking that we are convicting more criminals, could encourage further steps that will increase the errors.
Failure to use DNA properly will almost certainly result in unintentional but significant damage that could threaten its more restricted but beneficial use. This is a wide-ranging and important debate that requires an understanding of the scientific and procedural aspects of criminal justice systems and the frailties of both.
Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to “profile” suspects.
Brussels officials are already considering controversial anti-terror plans that would collect up to 19 pieces of information on every air passenger entering or leaving the EU. Under a controversial agreement reached last summer with the US department of homeland security, the EU already supplies the same information [19 pieces] to Washington for all passengers flying between Europe and the US.
But Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, to be applied to domestic flights and those between EU countries. According to a questionnaire circulated to all EU capitals by the European commission, the UK is the only country of 27 EU member states that wants the system used for “more general public policy purposes” besides fighting terrorism and organised crime.
The so-called passenger name record system, proposed by the commission and supported by most EU governments, has been denounced by civil libertarians and data protection officials as draconian and probably ineffective.
The scheme would work through national agencies collecting and processing the passenger data and then sharing it with other EU states. Britain also wants to be able to exchange the information with third parties outside the EU.
Officials in Brussels and in European capitals admit the proposed system represents a massive intrusion into European civil liberties, but insist it is a necessary part of a battery of new electronic surveillance measures being mooted in the interests of European security. These include proposals unveiled in Brussels last week for fingerprinting and collecting biometric information of all non-EU nationals entering or leaving the union.
All airlines would provide government agencies with 19 pieces of information on every passenger, including mobile phone number and credit card details. The system would work by “running the data against a combination of characteristics and behavioural patterns aimed at creating a risk assessment”, according to the draft legislation.
“When a passenger fits within a certain risk assessment, he could be identified as a high-risk passenger.”
A working party of European data protection officials described the proposal as “a further milestone towards a European surveillance society.
“The draft foresees the collection of a vast amount of personal data of all passengers flying into or out of the EU regardless of whether they are under suspicion or innocent travellers. These data will then be stored for a period of 13 years to allow for profiling. The profiling of all passengers envisaged by the current proposal might raise constitutional concerns in some member states.”
The Liberal Democrat MEP Sarah Ludford said: “Where is this going to stop? There’s no mature discussion of risk. As soon as you question something like this, you’re soft on terrorism in the UK and in the EU.”
Britain is pushing for a more comprehensive system based on the experience of a UK pilot scheme that has been running for the past three years. Officials say Operation Semaphore, monitoring flights from Pakistan and the Middle East, has been highly successful and has resulted in hundreds of arrests.
The scheme has seen one in every 2,200 passengers warranting further investigation, with a tenth of those “being of interest”. British officials say rapists, drug smugglers and child traffickers have been arrested and want the EU scheme to cover “all fugitives from crown court justice”.
But Ludford said: “If you ask the UK government how many terrorists have been picked up, I don’t think you get a very straight answer.”
EU officials have asked the Home Office minister Meg Hillier for information about the arrests of suspected terrorists.
Victoria Grove wanted to find out if she was destined to develop the form of emphysema that ran in her family, but she did not want to ask her doctor for the DNA test that would tell her.
She worried that she might not be able to get health insurance, or even a job, if a genetic predisposition showed up in her medical records, especially since treatment for the condition, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, could cost over $100,000 a year. Instead, Ms. Grove sought out a service that sent a test kit to her home and returned the results directly to her.
Nor did she tell her doctor when the test revealed that she was virtually certain to get it. Knowing that she could sustain permanent lung damage without immediate treatment for her bouts of pneumonia, she made sure to visit her clinic at the first sign of infection.
But then came the day when the nurse who listened to her lungs decided she just had a cold. Ms. Grove begged for a chest X-ray. The nurse did not think it was necessary.
“It was just an ongoing battle with myself,” recalled Ms. Grove, of Woodbury, Minn. “Should I tell them now or wait till I’m sicker?”
The first, much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.
In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast and colon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.
Others enter a kind of genetic underground, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money for DNA tests that an insurer would otherwise cover, so as to avoid scrutiny. Those who do find out they are likely or certain to develop a particular genetic condition often beg doctors not to mention it in their records.
Some, like Ms. Grove, try to manage their own care without confiding in medical professionals. And even doctors who recommend DNA testing to their patients warn them that they could face genetic discrimination from employers or insurers.
Such discrimination appears to be rare; even proponents of federal legislation that would outlaw it can cite few examples of it. But thousands of people accustomed to a health insurance system in which known risks carry financial penalties are drawing their own conclusions about how a genetic predisposition to disease is likely to be regarded.
As a result, the ability to more effectively prevent and treat genetic disease is faltering even as the means to identify risks people are born with are improving.
“It’s pretty clear that the public is afraid of taking advantage of genetic testing,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. “If that continues, the future of medicine that we would all like to see happen stands the chance of being dead on arrival.”
Caught in a Bind
For Ms. Grove, 59, keeping her genetic condition secret finally became impossible. When her symptoms worsened she was told to come back to the clinic before antibiotics would be prescribed. But there had been a snowstorm that day, and she could not summon the strength to drive.
“I have alpha-1,” she remembers sobbing into the phone. “I need this antibiotic!”
The clinic called in the prescription.
Ms. Grove, who does freelance accounting from home and has health insurance through her husband’s employer, allowed herself to be identified here because she said she felt an obligation to others — including some in her own family — to draw attention to the bind she sees herself in.
“Something needs to be done so that you cannot be discriminated against when you know about these things,” she said. “Otherwise you are sicker, your life is shorter and you’re not doing what you need to protect yourself.”
Employers say discrimination is already prohibited in the workplace by the Americans with Disabilities Act and existing laws governing privacy of medical records. But employee rights advocates say nothing in those laws explicitly prevents employers hard-pressed to pay for mounting health care costs from trying to screen out employees they know are more likely to get sick.
Courts have yet to rule on the subject. When the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission sued the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway for secretly testing the blood of employees who had filed compensation claims for carpal-tunnel syndrome in an effort to discover a genetic cause for the symptoms, the case was settled out of court in 2002.
And in 2005 when Eddy Curry, then the center for the Chicago Bulls, refused a genetic test to learn if he was predisposed to a heart ailment, the team traded him to the New York Knicks.
Insurers say they do not ask prospective customers about genetic test results, or require testing. “It’s an anecdotal fear,” said Mohit M. Ghose, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, whose members provide benefits for 200 million Americans. “Our industry is not interested in any way, shape or form in discriminating based on a genetic marker.”
Still, a recent study by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute found otherwise. In 7 of 92 underwriting decisions, insurance providers evaluating hypothetical applicants said they would deny coverage, charge more for premiums or exclude certain conditions from coverage based on genetic test results.
The Medical Cost
Regardless of whether discrimination actually occurs, many health care professionals say the pervasive anxiety over it demands legislative action. Geneticists complain that discrimination fears prevent them from recruiting research participants, delaying cures and treatments for disease. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the same concern is a leading reason people cancel appointments for tests that detect cancer risk.
“We are dealing with potential lifesaving interventions,” said Dr. Kenneth Offit, chief of the center’s clinical genetics service. “It’s a tragedy that people are being scared off by this.”
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which passed the House of Representatives by a wide margin last year, would prohibit insurers from using genetic information to deny benefits or raise premiums for both group and individual policies. (It is already illegal to exclude individuals from a group plan because of their genetic profile.) The bill would also bar employers from collecting genetic information or using it to make decisions about hiring, firing or compensation. But it has yet to reach the Senate floor.
Meanwhile, a $300 genetic test for prostate cancer risk announced last month immediately drew callers to a public radio station in Washington that was discussing the test, voicing fears of insurance discrimination. Dr. Karim Kader, who made the test possible with his discovery that men who carry certain DNA variants are four to five times likelier to develop prostate cancer, assured one caller that the test would be “very private.”
And last year, hundreds of customers paid the start-up company DNA Direct for tests that range in cost from $175 to $3,456 to ensure that no third party, not even a doctor, had access to their results. Mary, a freelance camera assistant in Brooklyn, for instance, sent a swab of her cheek cells to DNA Direct to find out if her extreme fatigue was caused by hemochromatosis, a genetic condition in which the body retains too much iron.
“I would rather not lay out the $200 myself,” said Mary, who requested that her last name be withheld for the same reason she paid for her own test. “But it seemed safer.”
Treatment for hemochromatosis typically involves removing a unit of blood twice-weekly by phlebotomy. But that would mean disclosing the condition to a doctor, so Mary is planning on becoming a frequent blood donor.
Kathy, a financial analyst in Houston who would like to know if she, like her two sisters, has a genetic predisposition to breast cancer, said she was not going to take even an anonymous test. “Then,” she said, “I’m just in a position of having to lie.”
The culture of secrecy around genetic information is stronger in the United States, some experts say, than in countries where people are guaranteed health care. Among Americans at risk for Huntington’s disease, an incurable brain disorder, only 5 percent take the DNA test to determine if they will develop it, compared with 20 percent of Canadians in the same position, according to Michael R. Hayden, a professor of human genetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Here, doctors often feel obligated to inform patients of the potential financial downside.
“I always warn them,” said Dr. Stephen Moll, director of the Thrombophilia Program at the University of North Carolina, who uses a genetic test to determine the best treatment for patients with blood clots. “Especially if they are self-employed, I don’t want it to be a surprise if their health insurance premium goes up.”
Unknown Risks
After receiving a similar warning from her doctor, Katherine Anderson’s parents did not allow her to be tested for Factor V Leiden, a genetic condition she might have inherited from her father that increases the risk of blood clots.
But last year, with nothing in Ms. Anderson’s record to indicate reason for concern, a gynecologist prescribed a birth control pill to regulate her uneven periods. Six weeks later, Ms. Anderson, then 16, developed a clot that stretched from her knee to her abdomen. The pill, combined with the gene she had indeed inherited, had increased her clotting risk by 30-fold.
Now largely recovered, her primary concern is whether she will be viewed as a health insurance liability for the future.
“I don’t want to have to work for a big business just to get insurance,” she said. “This could be determining what I can do for my whole life.”
For Judith Berman Carlisle, the price of privacy was forgoing the DNA test that would have convinced her not to have surgery. Ms. Carlisle, 48, who was setting up her own therapy practice, was afraid testing positive for the high-risk breast and ovarian cancer gene that runs in her family would prevent her from buying health insurance.
But her sister had developed ovarian cancer the year before, an aunt had died of it, and Ms. Carlisle was desperate not to get it herself. Her doctor agreed to remove her ovaries based on her family history — the way such decisions were commonly made before a genetic test was available.
Ms. Carlisle was convinced the surgery would be less damning than proof that she carried a defective BRCA1 gene, which also confers a very high chance of developing breast cancer.
“There’s a big difference between someone saying, ‘I have a strong family history,’ ” Ms. Carlisle said, “and saying, ‘I only have a 13 percent chance of not getting breast cancer during the time you’re insuring me.’ ”
Last fall, after the surgery to remove her ovaries, she began to consider a double mastectomy to remove any chance of breast cancer, the disease her grandmother and another aunt had died of. Having secured health insurance, she took the test for the BRCA1 mutation. It came back negative.
“The first thing they said to me,” Ms. Carlisle said, “is that I have no higher risk than anyone on the street.”
We seem to be busily building the world’s first popular police state.
Opinion polls show high levels of support for identity cards, surveillance cameras, detention without trial - and now a national DNA database covering every individual, including those who have never had any dealings with the police.
Given the growing fear of crime, such attitudes are not surprising. Events in the past week have encouraged them further. Both Suffolk serial killer Steve Wright and Mark Dixie, murderer of Sally Anne Bowman, were caught largely through DNA samples. Police officers and victims’ relatives want the change. The case seems open and shut.
Britain already has the world’s largest DNA database. Anyone arrested in England and Wales is compelled to submit to a DNA swab and the record is kept whether he is convicted or not. In Scotland this rule is restricted to violent and sex offenders, and then for only three years unless an extension is applied for.
But the operation of the scheme south of the Border has led to the beginning of serious doubts. As so often with measures aimed at greater security, people are far less enthusiastic when they are affected personally.
Many entirely innocent citizens have been disturbed by the way they or their children have been registered - for life - as potential criminals. There have also been suggestions that police have abused their arrest powers to collect DNA samples.
The European Human Rights Court has been asked to rule next week on the case of two men from Sheffield who were arrested but not charged, and want their DNA records expunged.
But just because this annoying liberal court has poked its nose into our affairs, we should not necessarily dismiss these concerns.
Some types of DNA evidence have been questioned, particularly after the recent Omagh bombing trial.
Meanwhile, professional criminals are increasingly expert at destroying their own DNA traces or polluting crime scenes with false DNA trails.
It is not the magic bullet it first appeared to be.
There is another point. As the criminal justice system increasingly fails to deal with the low-level disorder that worries most people, it trumpets its rare successes in headline-making cases, such as those involving Wright and Dixie.
Yet it can be argued that old-fashioned close-to-the-ground police work might have caught these two just as quickly, if not sooner.
And - while it is essential that justice is done on such killers - the main job of the police is to prevent crime in the first place, and no DNA database can do that half as effectively as patrolling constables on foot.
Home Office Minister Tony McNulty is right to be cautious before treating the entire population as suspects.
He and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith should take the same view of equally worrying plans for ID cards, and for intrusive surveillance on travellers to Europe.
We are not all guilty, and we will lose much more than we gain if we submit ourselves to Big Brother.
Balancing the responsibilities of the State against the rights of the individual is one ofthe most difficult things for politicians to get right. The tendency is to be all in favour of civil liberties while in opposition but to revert to authoritarian type when in government. That’s certainly happened with this Labour government. And in times of threats to national security, politicians need to be quite courageous to resist all the demands to impose authoritarian measures on the populace.
The argument surrounding DNA evidence is a perfect example of the dilemmas faced. At the moment only someone interviewed by Police has their DNA taken. If they are charged it is kept on their records, but not removed if they fail to be convicted. Some argue that if the government had everyone’s DNA on record it would make the Police’s life far easier and crimes would be solved much more quickly. It’s a similar argument to ID cards.
This week European judges will consider the case of two people who were charged with a crime but never convicted who want their DNA wiped off the national database. This case has far reaching implications and could lead to more than 500,000 other people’s DNA being wiped.
This is a really difficult one for people like me who believe that the rights of the individual must be protected from the pervasive influence of the State. In theory I would support the right of the innocent individual to have their records wiped if they had been found not guilty of a crime, or not even charged. However, the real world does not operate in this way. The individual also has the right to be protected from harm by others, and it is the role of the State to introduce laws which enable that to happen.
As I understand it the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives believe that only those convicted of a crime should be on the DNA database. It’s a consistent position and easy to argue. The fact that 100,000 innocent children are on it and should never have been, 26,000 police-collected samples have been left off it and half a million entries have been misrecorded lend weight to the view that the government is incapable of managing such sensitive data.
And yet, and yet. What worries me is that sex attackers and murderers are more difficult to find without full access to DNA records. So I wonder if a messy compromise isn’t something we should be considering. My only exceptions to the “No DNA record unless charged” rule would be for people interviewed on suspicion of rape or murder. I accept that it would mean some innocent people being added to the DNA register, but it would undoubtedly reduce the time it takes the Police to solve these two heinous crimes, and therefore prevent others from taking place. Of course one can take this further and use the same argument in favour of everyone having their DNA taken, as it would then lead to other crimes being solved more quickly. I realise that. But I’m afraid that murder and rape are crimes which merit a different and stronger approach.
UPDATE: Martin corrects me in the comments: “Actually Iain you’re wrong to say:”If they are charged it is kept on their records, but not removed if they fail to be convicted.”People who are arrested but not charged remain on the DNA database.”Before 2001, the police could take DNA samples during investigations but had to destroy the samples and the records derived from them on the Database if the people concerned were acquitted or charges were not proceeded with.The law was changed in 2001 to remove this requirement, and changed again in 2004 so that DNA samples could be taken from anyone arrested for a recordable offence and detained in a police station.”http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/science-research/using-science/dna-database/So the dataabse is already being populated with the DNA of people who have never been charged just in case they later go on to commit a crime. Either they should be removed or everyone should be added.
European judges could strip the profiles of more than half a million people from the national DNA database on privacy grounds — undermining its growing value to police as an investigative tool.
As two sex killers caught by the database were jailed for life yesterday and a senior detective joined calls for a universal register, the European Court of Human Rights will hear a case that could mean 560,000 DNA samples being destroyed. Two people charged with offences but never convicted will ask the court next week to remove their records from the database. If they succeed, 13 per cent of the 4.3 million profiles collected since 1995 would have to be destroyed.
The category of DNA profiles facing destruction has yielded vital clues in criminal cases. Official figures seen by The Times indicate that the DNA of 8,500 people never previously charged or convicted has been matched with DNA taken from crime scenes. The cases have involved about 14,000 offences including 114 murders, 55 attempted murders and 116 rapes. Europe will rule on the legality of the database as demands grow for the entire British population to be sampled after its crucial role in catching Steve Wright, the Suffolk Strangler, and Mark Dixie, the killer of Sally Anne Bowman.
Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, who led the investigation into Miss Bowman’s murder, said that a universal database would have caught Dixie within 24 hours of the killing. Instead he remained at large for nine months until police took a DNA swab from him after a pub fight. Dixie, 35, was jailed for life at the Old Bailey only hours after Wright, 49, was given a whole-life sentence for the murders of five Ipswich prostitutes.
Wright had been arrested after a DNA sample from one of his victim’s bodies matched the profile loaded on the database after his arrest for a minor theft.
Mr Cundy said: “I am all for a national DNA register, with all the appropriate safeguards. If there had been one at the time of Sally Anne’s murder we would have known who it was that day. It could have protected everybody else out there. For nine months between Sally Anne’s murder and the arrest one of our biggest fears and was that this man could attack again. A national DNA register could solve that.”
Richard Ottaway, Miss Bowman’s local Tory MP, said: “A universal DNA database is necessary to solve these crimes.”
The Home Office has published proposals for extending the existing database by taking samples from people detained for minor, or non-recordable offences, such as not wearing a seatbelt.
Ministers are understood to be awaiting the outcome of the European court case before deciding whether to proceed with the expansion plans.
Human rights lawyers will argue in Strasbourg that a juvenile acquitted of attempted robbery and Michael Marper, who faced charges of harassment that were later dropped, should have their profiles removed from the database. South Yorkshire police, which arrested both, has refused to destroy their records.
Peter Mahy, their solicitor, said: “This is the most important case on the human rights implication of retaining biometric data.”
He said his clients were concerned about the uses to which the samples might be put and the lack of independent oversight of the national database.
All 14-year-old children in England will have their personal details and exam results placed on an electronic database for life under a plan to be announced tomorrow.
Colleges and prospective employers will be able to access students’ records online to check on their qualifications. Under the terms of the scheme all children will keep their individual number throughout their adult lives, The Times has learnt. The database will include details of exclusions and expulsions.
Officials said last night that the introduction of the unique learner number (ULN)was not a step towards a national identity card. But it will be seen as the latest step in the Government’s broader efforts to computerise personal records.
Last night teachers’ leaders, parents’ organisations, opposition MPs and human rights campaigners questioned whether this Big Brother approach was necessary and said that it could compromise the personal security of millions of teenagers.
The new database — which will store a “tamper-proof CV” — will be known as MIAP (managing Information Across Partners). To be registered on the new database every 14-year-old will be issued with a unique learner number. Unlike the current unique pupil number now given to children in school but destroyed when they leave, the ULN will be used by government agencies to track individuals until they retire. Ultimately, it will create a numbered database for every citizen aged 14-plus in the UK.
The MIAP is part of a push for more government departments to share information on ordinary citizens with each other. The new Education and Skills Bill to raise the education leaving age from 16 to 18, for example, contains sweeping powers for local authorities to access information from schools, health agencies and social services to track young people between the ages of 16 and 18.
Margaret Morrisey, of the National Association of Parent Teacher Associations, said that plans for MIAP, which will be compulsory for all 14-year-olds throughout the UK, would fill parents with horror.
“I suspect there will not be more than two parents in the land who would have faith in the Government that this information will be secure,” she said.
A spokeswoman for MIAP, which will come under the auspices of the Learning and Skills Council, said that the database had the support of more than 40 “stakeholder organisations” from across the education sector.
Original plans for MIAP drawn up by the Government in 2003 suggested that the database could be linked to identity cards, raising the prospect that once pupils were in the system they might be forced into accepting an ID card.
The spokeswoman said that this plan had been shelved for the time being. “At the moment there are no plans for the Unique Learner Number to be used by the ID Card system,” she said. She added that the purpose of the system was to support the education, training and careers guidance of the learner, “not security, taxation or access to government services”.
The database would enable students to build a lifelong record of their educational participation and achievements that can be accessed through the internet. The system would be password protected and would have two points of entry. Students could look up their full records and personal details by using one password. They could then give another password to employers to give them access to a restricted view of the information online.
John Dunford, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Given the track record of government IT disasters and the possibility that all these children’s records will end up in Iowa, this is a worry.” While accepting that it would be helpful to keep centralised records of pupil achievement, he questioned the need to put it online.
Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said: “The government has a terrible track record in managing complex IT programmes. Recent events have shown that sensitive personal data is not safe in ministers’ hands. There must be profound worries not just in terms of civil liberties, but also in terms of the security of young people with a project like this”.
He added that it was a “classic ministerial muddle” to press head with the new database while awaiting the outcome of a security review into a separate planned database, known as ContactPoint, containing personal details of all 11 million children in England, including names, addresses, schools, GPs and, where applicable, social worker. The ContactPoint review was ordered last year after HM Revenue and Customs lost two computer discs containing the banking and personal details of 25 million people. This was followed by the disappearance in Iowa of three million UK learner driver details, and the theft of a laptop containing personal details of 600,000 people who considered a career in the forces.
However, Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, is said to be satisfied with the security arrangements made for the new database, which is expected to go online next September.
More than 100,000 people in Kent have been added to the DNA database in the last five years it has been revealed. According to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act, 103,830 samples were taken and more than a quarter were from people under 18.
All DNA collected is stored permanently on the national database.
Det Supt Colin Croucher, of Kent Police, said the swab samples were regularly used in cases of burglary and vehicle crime.
“And of course it was very significant in the case of the M25 rapist a few years back,” he added.
Mr Croucher said the force was keen to ensure that it had “the best opportunity to be able to use DNA appropriately and to have DNA samples on record.
“So where the law’s allowed us to take those samples, we’ve taken them,” he said.
DNA collected ranges from people who voluntarily give police a swab in order to eliminate themselves from investigations, to convicted rapists and murderers.
Since 2004, the data of everyone arrested for a recordable offence in England and Wales - all but the most minor offences - has remained on the system regardless of their age, the seriousness of their alleged offence, and whether or not they were prosecuted.
Opponents are worried about the number of innocent people whose data is still on file even though they have not been charged with a crime
Phil Booth, of the NO2ID campaign against identity cards, said: “This policy of putting on DNA samples and DNA profiles that shouldn’t necessarily be there is undermining the matching process itself.
“There’s the danger that someone may be fingered incorrectly, and it’s already beginning to happen.”
A key component of the UK ID card scheme, the central database of fingerprints, may be abandoned, according to a leaked Home Office document obtained by the Observer. The document doesn’t suggest entirely scrapping fingerprints, but instead suggests that their value should be assessed for each group of the population enrolled.
So how does that work? Well, for the ID scheme as originally planned, it clearly doesn’t. From David Blunkett onwards Home Office ministers have presented biometrics as the system’s USP, the one single factor that makes it entirely certain (in their view) that you are who you say you are. And, they have claimed, the ability to check those biometrics against a central register would give us the ‘gold standard’ of identity. But if you don’t necessarily collect everybody’s fingerprints, then you don’t have a complete national biometric register, so you might as well save yourself a pile of money, chuck away any notion of online biometric checks as a matter of routine, and forget any ideas you still had about a national biometric register.
Quite a few of the claimed ‘benefits’ of the ID scheme go out of the window if you do this. The police cannot trawl the register in order to match crime scene fingerprints, nor can they use their mobile fingerprint readers to identify you or to prove that you are who you say you are. Effectively, the ID card would be chip-backed picture ID, with the security of the chip only of value in circumstances where a reader was used.
Except, apparently, for some groups. Immigration Minister Liam Byrne recently reiterated his commitment to issuing the first biometric ID cards to foreign nationals from November of this year. Having this group carrying biometric ID cards makes sense to the government, in a racist sort of way, because it should already have biometrics for many of them via the biometric visa programme. But not all foreign nationals require a visa, so perhaps not all foreign nationals will turn out to require an ID card - at least initially.
But even if the Home Office were to abandon ID card fingerprints for everyone bar the foreigners it’s fingerprinting already, it would still ultimately be fingerprinting most of the rest of us, as the Identity & Passport Service (IPS) is currently scheduled to start collecting fingerprints at passport renewal from 2009. The UK isn’t a Schengen signatory and therefore isn’t obliged, as the Schengen states are, to add fingerprints to passports, but has committed to do so.
Which presents us with a puzzle. The ID card has up to now been envisaged as, effectively, a small format passport - you collect the biometric data for the passport and squirt it onto the passport chip and the ID card chip, same thing, different shapes. But there’s always been a need, if the ID card is to be universal, to collect biometric data from that part of the population that doesn’t have a passport. And if you’re not going to do that, then the passport and the ID card start to become different beasts, with the passport the ID that’s more strongly tied to the individual, and the ID card being rather less so.
The picture is not wholly coherent, which is as one would expect from an organisation looking for savings and shortcuts in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the ID card disaster.
Meanwhile in separate leaks, the Home Office is considering beating young drivers with a stick to get them to sign up for ID cards. Well, sort of - see here. ®
ABC breaks the ice for us: in the future, and not too far into it, the process of getting and renewing a driver’s license will become more difficult, stressful, and fraught with all manner of unnecessary nonsense supposedly designed to protect us from terrorists, or rather CIA patsies paraded about to frighten us into submission, and as well prevent illegals from taking to the roads, never mind Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and West Virginia allow illegals to hold a license, thus demonstrating the above is little more than a threadbare excuse.
Of course, when the rubber meets the road, we discern the real reason — a national ID, complete with RFID and possibly biometrics, is all about easing us into the control grid.
According to apparatchik Michael Chertoff and the commissariat of Homeland Security, the whole affair is a matter of national security. “We are now over six years from 9/11,” Chertoff impatiently declared, “we live every day with the problems of false identification. Simply kicking this problem down the road year after year after year for further discussion, further debate and analysis is a time-tested Washington way of smothering any proposal with process.”
In other words, never mind that most people oppose Real ID and civil libertarians warn of vexing abuse, Chertoff and the neocons are itching to get us all in lumbering databases, the next step in a plan that will ultimately result in the chipping of the population at large.
“I think the time has come to bite the bullet,” Chertoff continued, “and get the kind of secure identification I am convinced the American public wants to have,” or rather the government tells them they must have, as most people hate the idea and eighteen states have passed legislation rejecting the law and Congress has refused to put any money into implementing it.
But never mind. It is a win-win situation for AOL, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, all who stand to clean up if Chertoff manages to force his card on Americans at large. “The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) sent a letter to Congress this week begging for more federal funding for Real ID,” Privacy Digest noted last October. In addition to the above corporate culprits, we can add Digimarc and Northrop Grumman, “companies that specialize in creating high-tech ID cards, as well as Choicepoint and LexisNexis, data brokers that make their money selling personal information about you to advertisers and the government. These companies stand to make millions in contracts from states who are struggling with a federal mandate to overhaul their licensing systems and share more data by the May 2008 deadline,” a date right around the corner, thus explaining Chertoff’s impatience.
“Real ID is so unpopular because in addition to being a $23 billion unfunded mandate, it will build a vast national database of personal information, expose us to a greater risk of identity theft, and move us ever closer to a total surveillance society.’
It may also be a way to keep “terrorists” off the roadways — not the Muslim cave dwelling brand of terrorist, mind you, but the kind that exercises his or her right to petition the government under that rusty old anachronism, the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
As we know, thousands of Americans are on the Federal Aviation Administration’s No-Fly List and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center has compiled a terrorist watch list of over 700,000 people. Moreover, as Dave Lindorff writes, the government is in the business of passing this information out to private companies. “The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI made its list of people with even remote links to terrorism — having associated, perhaps inadvertently, with a terror suspect, for example — available to a wide range of private companies, from banks and rental-car companies to casinos.”
And who exactly are these primary terrorists, the ones you don’t want to associate with, that is if you ever want to fly again? They are “law-abiding Americans” who were detained and questioned — we used to call this harassment — “based on their political viewpoints,” according to Nancy Chang, a senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “I think what they are doing is harassing people who are opposing the war and publicly speaking out against administration policy,” John Dear, a Jesuit priest and member of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, told Lindorff.
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Back in 2003, we learned that the FBI “collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and … advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads,” the New York Times reported. Of course, this is simply a continuation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, initiated in the 1960s to “neutralize” the opposition — i.e., render activists not only politically impotent, but often wreck their lives as well.
In 2006, we discovered that COINTELPRO didn’t go away, as the official history would have it, but lives on to this day at the Pentagon. “An antiterrorist database used by the Defense Department in an effort to prevent attacks against military installations included intelligence tips about antiwar planning meetings held at churches, libraries, college campuses and other locations,” reported the New York Times. The database, known as Talon, “showed that the military used a variety of sources to collect intelligence leads on antiwar protests, including an agent in the Department of Homeland Security, Google searches on the Internet and e-mail messages forwarded by apparent informants with ties to protest groups.”
In short, the FBI and the Pentagon are still in the business of compiling lists and checking them twice, and many if not most of these people end up grounded, as noted above.
Now we have Chertoff and ABC telling us the same rules may soon apply to driving a car. As Chertoff told ABC, the Real ID is about preventing “terrorists” from driving — with illegal immigration tacked on as a selling point — and, if the behavior of the FBI and the Pentagon are any indicator, the real terrorists are not Muslim guys who were trained on U.S. military bases and had a fondness for cruising topless bars, but are antiwar activists and other troublemakers.
Soon enough, many of us – those who believe the Constitution says what it means — may be reduced to walking to work and the grocery store… that is until a Real ID card will be required to hold job or buy a loaf of bread.
News that the US government is in the process of constructing an international “wanted” database to share biometric information on a grand scale should be treated with caution. Biometrics - including DNA and fingerprints - are a vital weapon in the fight against crime. And cross-border crime is a growing problem. I am determined that Britain should work with our allies, in Europe and beyond, to defeat it. But giant databases that don’t have adequate privacy protection systems are not the right way forward.
The details of how the US system will operate are still opaque. They may bring forward proposals we should support.
But I won’t be holding my breath. It is typical of the US administration to go for overkill: giant solutions that sound great on paper but are based on unproven and even unworkable technologies. The “son of Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system, which would attempt to shoot down incoming missiles, is a case in point. It’s cost billions but not only does it anger countries like Russia, it doesn’t even work.
Unfortunately, it is also typical of the UK government to doff its cap and sign up to any idea that emerges from Washington, however kooky. We’re signed up to son of Star Wars. I expect we’ll be signed up the FBI’s “Server in the Sky” too, whether it’s the right thing to do or not.
Biometrics are invaluable, but they are not 100% failsafe: nothing is. Remember: it’s the US terrorism operations that put Yusuf Islam (the musician formerly known as Cat Stevens) on a “no-fly” list.
And once data is in the hands of the US authorities, there is no getting it back. We already send them massive amounts of information about air passengers, through a deal brokered by the European Commission, without any guarantee it will be properly safeguarded once it reaches the US. It would be foolhardy to start sharing further information without a simple guarantee: that data collected under UK law should continue to be protected even after it leaves Britain.
We should share information when other countries can guarantee data protection standards that match, or exceed our own. Otherwise, who knows which one of us will be on the no-fly list next.
Senior police officers are discussing plans to create an international criminal database that could hold biometric data, the Home Office confirmed.
An FBI plan for a “Server in the Sky” - which might hold iris, palm prints and other personal biological information - is being discussed to help fight terrorism around the world, a newspaper reported.
The network could hold information from millions of criminal suspects pooled by the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the paper said.
The plan is likely to raise concerns about data security in the wake of a series of embarrassing data loss blunders by the Government and its agencies.
The Home Office confirmed the existence of “Server in the Sky” but stressed discussions were at a very early stage.
A spokesman said: “We are aware of the proposed project. As you would expect we consider a wide range of initiatives as we constantly look to enhance our investigative capabilities.
“Relevant safeguards are always considered as part of this process.”
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police confirmed it was in discussions with the FBI but emphasised the plans were at a preliminary stage.
The FBI told reporters the database would include details of major criminals such as international terrorists.
A spokesman said: “Server in the Sky is an FBI initiative designed to foster the advanced search and exchange of biometric information on a global scale.”
More than 100,000 people in Kent have been added to the DNA database in the last five years it has been revealed. According to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act, 103,830 samples were taken and more than a quarter were from people under 18.
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