Charles Stross looks at the situation in Britain:
NDNAD, the UK’s National DNA Database, run by the Forensic Science Service under contract to the Home Office contains DNA “fingerprints” for lots of folk — 5.2% of the population as of 2005, or 3.1 million people. Some of them are criminals; some of them are clearly innocent, but were either charged with a crime and subsequently found not guilty, or had the misfortune to be detained but not subsequently charged (that is: they’re not even suspects). The Home Office takes a rather draconian view of the database’s utility, and objects strenuously to attempts to remove the records of innocent people from it — it took threats of legal action before they agreed to remove the parliamentary Conservative Party’s Immigration spokesman from the database (which he’d been added to in the course of a fruitless investigation into leaked documents that had embarrased the government) — so if senior opposition politicians have problems with it, consider the prospects for the rest of us.
In use …
Whenever a new profile is submitted, the NDNAD’s records are automatically searched for matches (hits) between individuals and unsolved crime-stain records and unsolved crime-stain to unsolved crime-stain records — linking both individuals to crimes and crimes to crimes. Matches between individuals only are reported separately for investigation as to whether one is an alias of the other. Any NDNAD hits obtained are reported directly to the police force which submitted the sample for analysis.
Now, this in itself is merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy: but its use as a policing intelligence tool is indisputable. While there are some very good reasons for condemning the way it’s currently used (for example, its use in the UK has sparked accusations of racism), I can’t really see any future government forgoing such a tool completely; a DNA database of some kind is too useful. So what interests me here is the potential for future catastrophic failure modes.
Now that we’re pretty certain that DNA evidence can be easily faked, the focus of how it can be used in investigations must shift from “presence proving guilt” to “absence implying innocence”.
[…] Racism – Big Brother in Your Pocket – Health Care Rats Come Out of the Woodwork – Carol M. More on DNA as a crime-fighting tool – quotulatiousness.ca 08/21/2009 Charles Stross looks at the situation in Britain: NDNAD, the […]
Pingback by Posts about racism as of August 21, 2009 | Discrimination Law News — August 21, 2009 @ 11:15