International Law

Home Office spinning about 6 and 12 years data retention for innocent people's DNA profiles and Fingerprints

The smug and complacent, yet incompetent and untrustworthy, Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her side kick Vernon Coaker, have been spinning their grudging response to the European Court of Human Rights Judgment against them in the Marper case, regarding their illegal and immoral retention of innocent people's DNA human tissue samples and analysed DNA profiles on the Police National DNA Database. This also applies to the 10 finger and palm print Fingerprints of innocents on the IDENT1 database.

Read their latest fake "public consultation" (as if anyone believes now that they will somehow "listen" to the public who bother to submit formal responses):

• Keeping the right people on the DNA database (1Mb .pdf)

• Keeping the right people on the DNA database - Annexes (3Mb .pdf)

Annex B contains a list of the the names of the data fields which currently make up a DNA Database profile record.

Annex C has some academic research commissioned by the Home Office from the Jill Dando Institute to explain the Home Office's dubious choice of 6 and 12 year retention periods. This paper by the criminologist Professor Ken Pease OBE, is based on a "sample" of Metropolitan Police Service cases, in the "No Further Action" (NFA) category, not from the entire National DNA Database.

There is a hint that the Home Office were lobbying for 15 years data retention in the case of Fingerprints. Note that Professor Pease mentions the evils of Eugenics, something which the NuLabour police / nanny / database / surveillance state politicians, apparatchiks and spin doctors did not dare to mention in their press releases and interviews.

Annex D has a "monetised impact assessment" full of obscure figures e.g. they assume it costs 90p per year to refrigerate each DNA human tissue sample.

All of these figures look to be guesses, or evidence of bloated costs e.g. £15,000 to write and test a computer program to automatically delete records off the databases after a set period of time, something that should only take a couple of lines of computer code to program (such standard routines almost certainly already exist in the data backup software)

These new style "impact assessments" are starting to appear across Government, but they still do not provide enough detail of the basic assumptions and omissions, to make much sense.

There is no good reason why the other "samples" which the Police are legally empowered to take from you (by force, without your consent, if necessary) should not also be destroyed once they have been properly forensically analysed and processed:
i.e. oral swabs (skin cells from the inside of the mouth, used for DNA analysis) , saliva, blood, urine, semen, pubic hair, other human tissue.

That should also apply to the Non-Biological Samples i.e. photographs ("mug shots"), footwear impressions and dental impressions (classified as "intimate" samples), and to Samples taken for non-DNA analysis purposes e.g. alcohol or drugs related analyses.

N.B. Obviously none of this applies to Crime Scene samples.

Read the GeneWatch UK Press Release, who, like all the other numerate and principled people who oppose this potentially genocidal policy, are unlikely to be mollified by these "fake consultation" documents.

Home Office drags its feet on DNA database removals

Full post as published by Spy Blog on May 07, 2009 (boomark / email).