DNA of innocent still to be retained for six years

08:02 by Editor · 0 Post a comment on AAWR

Innocent people, including thousands of teenagers, will still have their DNA profile kept on a national database for up to six years, the Government will announce.

Ministers have ignored growing demands to radically reduce or scrap the proposed period the samples of people arrested but never charged or convicted of crimes are retained.

Instead, in one climbdown, those suspected of the most serious offences will see previous plans to hold their details for up to 12 years halved.

The Home Office is to publish revised proposals over the retention of innocent DNA after its original plans in May faced a fierce backlash from liberty groups and MPs.

They were drawn up in the wake of a European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that a blanket policy of retaining profiles of innocent people indefinitely was illegal.

The original proposals, contained in an amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill which is passing through Parliament, were dropped at the final moment in the face of growing criticism last month.

However, the revised plans mean no change for the majority of adults, even if only arrested for a minor offence, with their profiles still kept for up to six years.

But those who are suspected but not convicted of serious sex or violent offences will now be kept for six instead on 12 years.

The same applies to 16 and 17-year-olds.

It is understood the Home Office will propose separate rules for children under 16 who are arrested but not convicted.

It emerged last month that more than one in 10 people – 5.5 million people in England and Wales – now have their details stored on the DNA database.

It includes up to 850,000 DNA profiles, plus a similar number of fingerprints, of people never convicted of a crime and the Home Office has been accused of doing only the bare minimum to abide with the European ruling.

The original proposals had also faced claims that they were based on incomplete research.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, demanded that his details be erased from the database when no charges were brought against him after his arrest over Whitehall leaks last year.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: "Alan Johnson just doesn't seem to understand that there is a fundamental principle at stake here – that people are innocent until proven guilty.

"But the reality is that it's now almost certainly too late for this Government to make any changes before the election and so it will fall to a future administration to do the right thing and end Labour's draconian approach."

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, added: "It seems the Government still refuses to separate the innocent and the guilty and maintains a blanket approach to DNA retention.

"Nobody disputes the value of DNA and anyone arrested can have a sample taken and compared to crime scenes. But stockpiling the intimate profiles of millions of innocent people is an unnecessary recipe for error and abuse." continues here


Editorial :
Have you got that, has it sunk in, this regime will keep the DNA or fingerprints of innocent people, read that again, innocent people, people who have done no wrong, individuals categorised, detailed and stored. Their argument of course, is that the storing of said information may lead to future arrest, that is to say, some of those innocent people, may commit crime in the future ,which is akin to “grounding” an adolescent, “because you just know they’ll transgress. Please forgive me whilst I reach for my foil-hat but is there another agenda, is there a drive for the state to have complete control of the individual, we must remember here that it is not only in the area of DNA that the state now wish to intrude, they monitor the innocent here, more than anywhere else in the world, by the use of a multitude of CCTV cameras, “for our own good of course” (sic).

And just recently the plans to monitor and collect social information under the misnomer, the “Intercept Modernisation Programme”, were put on hold recently, although only until after the next election, meaning one supposes, that we must rely upon the Conservatives to protect our civil liberties, a forlorn ambition at best. Yet the drive to collect data upon innocent civilians is far from over, for in postponing the Intercept Modernisation Programme, they instead invoke the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), an act that should solely be used against terrorists and criminals but is increasingly being used against the civilian population of this country.

Yet as a nationalist I realise fully that a terrorist can be simply anyone, anyone that dissents from current orthodoxy, anyone that has the potential to do so and anyone who holds an ideological counterview. Quite simply myself, I realise that it is highly likely that I am monitored, that solely because of my viewpoint agencies take it upon themselves to correlate information and I am I believe, not alone. Currently our details are kept by companies Telco’s use such information to aid their own businesses and such information may be held for some months and in a real sense the companies retain only indexing data in order to bill customers and so forth. Such information is of course fairly minimal consisting of time, date, duration, yet under the IMP the scope would change and websites visited, recipients details and web addresses would be held, in effect every action monitored, stored and collated, yet remember you are innocent, innocent, yet they remove such a presumption.

Again the tinfoil-hat, all forms of government control, governance is exactly that, the controlling of the majority by the minority, yet it is how the minority exercise control that matters not the fact that they do so. Certainly governance is not in itself an evil, as social animals we must have leaders, must have some control but not tyranny, which indeed we also naturally rebel against, although it must show itself, be somewhat overt, for the group to act as one against it, it is at this point I introduce you the concept of mission creep. Mission creep is basically legislation introduced for one purpose yet used for another, such as the storing of DNA on a database for convicted criminals, crossing over into future preventative measures, that is to say, the storing of DNA of innocent individuals, “just in case”, which entirely goes against its original purpose, crossing over from crime prevention into espionage against the people, the bill footed of course by the very people spied upon.

Has there ever been such a needed bogyman as the terrorist, such a boon for state tyranny, such a rallying point for the blind, such an antidote for commonsense, I realise fully that I go against current nationalist thinking on this however, commonsense and a small vestige of intelligence, leads me to conclude, that the threat from terrorism is somewhat minimal and indeed any threat we face is self-inflicted by the actions of our government and their partners in crime. There is quite simply no worldwide network of Islamic terrorists operating in tandem against the west, yet such fairy stories permit duplicitous and treacherous government to augment restrictive law and allow for certain misguided sections within nationalism to lay siege the wrong target and after all, an easier opponent is always a better option for ones survival.

There are concerns of course, concerns that the common man may adopt encryption, more especially after the hardening of stance concerning file-sharing, a practice in which individuals download content of each other via peer-to-peer networks or P2Ps.
Of course encryption can be broken but it is a time-consuming process and given the extent of coverage this regime wishes to maintain and the vast amount of data on individuals, should we all adopt encryption methods, then of course their job of monitoring the innocent becomes somewhat harder. Yet we shouldn’t have to hide, shouldn’t be forced into considering such methods, government should be there for its people and not against it, perhaps I am an idealist but don’t you agree?




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