The DNA snatchers: Police arresting innocents just to grab genetic details for Big Brother database

Police are arresting innocent people in order to get their hands on as many DNA samples as possible, senior Government advisers revealed last night. 

The Human Genetics Commission said the Big Brother tactic was creating a 'spiral of suspicion' among the public.

The panel - which contains some of Britain's leading scientists and academics - said officers should no longer routinely take samples at the point of arresting a suspect.

They also called for all police - including support staff - to place their own DNA on the national database in a show of solidarity with a public being routinely placed under suspicion.

By law, officers are only allowed to make an arrest if they have ' reasonable suspicion' that a person has committed a crime.

But the HGC, which has carried out a lengthy review of the merits of the database, said evidence had emerged of police arresting people purely so they could take their DNA.

Its chairman, Professor Jonathan Montgomery, said: 'People are arrested in order to retain DNA information that might not have been arrested in other circumstances.'

The claim, which was backed by evidence from a senior police officer, delivers a significant blow to the Government's defence of the database - which contains more than 5.6million samples.

Campaigners have long feared officers were carrying out mass sweeps of the population to load their samples on the database, and make future crime fighting easier.

The result is one million entirely innocent people having their genetic details logged by the state.

The Commission said one of the consequences of current DNA laws was that young black men are 'very highly over-represented', with more than three quarters of those aged 18-35 on the database.

Professor Montgomery warned this was creating a 'spiral of suspicion' among sections of society.

A retired senior police officer, a superintendent, told the commission: 'It is now the norm to arrest offenders for everything if there is a power to do so.

'It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained.'

Officers in England and Wales are entitled to take samples from everyone they arrest for a recordable offence.

Proposals within the Crime and Security Bill - published last week - will for the first time put a time limit, in most cases six years, on how long profiles are stored when the alleged offender is either not charged or later cleared.

But there are no plans to reduce police powers to take samples on arrest.

One possibility is to only take DNA when a suspect is charged - making it harder for police to target innocents for their DNA.

In a 110-page report, the commission said more detailed research is required to evaluate how useful the database is in helping to solve crimes, describing current evidence as 'flimsy'.

It accused politicians of using single case studies where the database has secured a conviction instead of carrying out a rigorous evaluation of its scale and function.

Latest Government figures show the costs of running the system - the largest in the world - have risen dramatically, to £4.3million from £2.1million in just a year.

Over the past two years, more than 1.17million new profiles have been added to the database but the number of DNA-related detections fell from a peak of 41,148 in 2006-07 to 31,915 in 2008-09.

LibDem spokesman Chris Huhne said: 'The Government's cavalier attitude to DNA retention has put us in the ridiculous situation where people are being arrested just to have their DNA harvested.

'Ministers make no distinction between innocence and guilt and as a result everyone is treated like a suspect.'

Liberty warned police were being given a 'perverse incentive' to arrest individuals just to get their details on the database.

Tory home affairs spokesman James Brokenshire said: 'For too long the Government has had a policy of growing the DNA database for the sake of it, regardless of guilt or innocence.'

Tories last night attacked reported Government plans to charge innocent people a £200 fee to apply to have their names removed from the national DNA database.

And they called for England and Wales to follow the Scottish model by not retaining the DNA of such innocents, save in exceptional circumstances. The Government has proposed such DNA should be kept for six years. continues here

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Secret CCTV cameras fitted INSIDE people's homes to spy on neighbours outside

CCTV cameras are being fitted inside family homes by council 'snoopers' to spy on neighbours in the street outside, it was revealed today.

The £1,000 security cameras have been placed inside properties but are trained on the streets to gather evidence of anti-social behaviour.

Each device is linked to a laptop computer and accessible online by police and council officials 24 hours a day.

But the trial inside two homes by Croydon council in south London has sparked new fears about invasion of privacy and Britain's ‘surveillance society’.



And critics said the extra surveillance was only needed because police had failed to tackle the problem.

A council spokesman said the cameras would allow the authorities to respond quickly to anti-social behaviour and gather evidence for criminal prosecutions.

He denied they would be used to spy on neighbours and said more cameras could be installed if the pilot proves a success.

But critics say the scheme has echoes of the East German Stasi secret police, which recruited members of the public as spies.

Charles Farrier, of No-CTV, said that the move was ‘a step further in our Big Brother society’.

He said: ‘There is no evidence they act as a deterrent and we should be concentrating on the root problem anyway and working to gel our communities.

Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, warned the cameras would create a 'culture of fear and mistrust'.

He said: 'People accept these cameras into their homes because they are afraid.

'The council might be installing them with the best intentions, but the end result is a culture of fear and mistrust driven by a failure on the part of the borough and the police to have proper law enforcement in this area.

'Better to have real action from the failing authorities than to extend once more our surveillance society.'

A Croydon spokeswoman confirmed that the cameras cannot be seen from the street and refused to say in which areas they had been installed.

Residents taking part did not want their families or locations identified for fear of reprisals.

Images can be viewed on a computer and accessed remotely and the evidence used to take people to court.

The trials have been running for the past week.

But some local residents have backed the idea. Kirenna Chin, 30, said: ‘Louts use my hedge as a bouncy castle and urinate in my front garden. It's very intimidating.

‘It's a fantastic idea to fit hidden CCTV. If they offered me one I would definitely take it.’

Gavin Barwell, Croydon's cabinet member for community safety, said: ‘This is good news for residents.

‘These CCTV kits give us another weapon to fight anti-social behaviour quickly. We'll be working together with the police to put them to best use.’

Croydon has one of London's most advanced CCTV networks. continues here

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DNA of innocent still to be retained for six years

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?

US creates military command for cyber battlefield

The US military announced a new "cyber command" designed to wage digital warfare and to bolster defenses against mounting threats to its computer networks.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates formally established the command -- the country's first -- that would operate under US Strategic Command, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

The command will begin operating in October and be fully operational in October 2010, Whitman said.

The move reflects a shift in military strategy with "cyber dominance" now part of US war doctrine and comes amid growing alarm over the perceived threat posed by digital espionage coming from China, Russia and elsewhere.

US officials say China has built up a sophisticated cyber warfare program and that a spate of intrusions in the United States and elsewhere can be traced back to Chinese sources.

The officer widely expected to lead the command is Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the director of the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA).

Alexander has described cyberspace as the new military frontier that could shape the future of national security, comparing it to sea or air power.

But some analysts have raised concerns that a more aggresssive approach to cyber security poses a possible threat to privacy and civil liberties as well as potential diplomatic dilemmas.

The Defense Department said the command would streamline various cyber efforts across the armed forces and would not amount to a "militarization of cyberspace."

Officials have said the command would likely be located at Fort Meade, Maryland and that the Pentagon would not be taking over security efforts for civilian networks from other government agencies.

The US military relies on 15,000 networks and about seven million computers, with more than 100 foreign intelligence agencies trying to hack into US networks, according to Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn.

"Our defense networks are constantly under attack," Lynn said in a speech last week.

"They are probed thousands of times a day. They are scanned millions of times a day. And the frequency and sophistication of attacks are increasing exponentially," he said.

The threat ranges from teenage hackers to criminal gangs acting as cyber mercenaries to foreign governments, Lynn said.

Lynn cited cyberattacks that shut down Georgia?s government and commercial web sites during Russia's military incursion last year.

Defense officials have said the cyber command would focus on security efforts along with offensive capabilities to ensure "freedom of action in cyberspace" for the United States.

The precise details of US cyber military power remain secret, but it includes technology capable of penetrating and jamming networks, including the classified Suter airborne system, analysts say.

The technology has been reportedly added to unmanned aircraft and allows for users to take over and manipulate enemy sensors.

Reported breaches of the US electricity grid and of networks used by aerospace contractors building the F-35 fighter jet have underlined concerns over cyber security.

Last year, several thousand computers in the Defense Department were infected by malicious software, prompting the military to ban troops and civilian staff from using external memory devices and thumb drives.

In the proposed defense budget for fiscal 2010, the administration has proposed increasing funds for training to triple the number of cyber security experts from 80 to 250 per year.

President Barack Obama has put a top priority on cyber security and announced plans for a national cyber defense coordinator. continues here

New cyber chief to protect against computer attacks

Prime Minister creates security post after warnings of electronic espionage

The Prime Minister's move comes amid fears that the computer systems of government and business are vulnerable to online attack from hostile countries and terrorist organisations.

Neil Thompson, a senior civil servant, will be charged with protecting the national computer network.

Last month, President Barack Obama said he was making it a "national security priority" to protect the US computer network from attack and that he would set up a "cyber security office" in the White House to lead the counter-attack against hackers.

Mr Brown's plans were endorsed by the Cabinet yesterday after a presentation by Lord West of Spithead, the Security minister. Concern has grown in Whitehall that hackers are targeting its computer systems and those of Britain's largest companies.

Officials have said the biggest threat comes from China, but they have also expressed worries about the activities of criminal gangs based in Russia.

There are also fears that terrorists could switch to online attacks to try to cripple the national infrastructure.

Britain has discussed ways of boosting computer security with foreign allies including the US. President Obama said that terrorist attacks could come "not only from a few extremists in suicide vests, but from a few key strokes of a computer – a weapon of mass disruption".

British security representatives have been observing cyberspace procedure used by the Americans. They include how US forces lured senior members of al-Qa'ida into a trap by hacking into the group's computers and altering information that drove them into an ambush by US and British special forces in Anbar province in the middle of last year. Defence sources say that the Americans are moving cyber-warfare equipment into Afghanistan. The technology was used to block Taliban anti-aircraft defences.

According to security sources the US has commissioned research to study what it will take to close down enemy power stations and communications including air transport. The American authorities have barred Chinese companies from taking part in joint projects with its firms on a number of sensitive projects, something, it is claimed, the British have failed to do.

The security services have warned recently of renewed activities by Russian and Chinese intelligence in cyberspace research with the potential to interfere with communications in the UK. Four years ago, the Government issued a formal warning to Whitehall departments and business that they faced "trojan email" attacks from the Far East on an "almost industrial" scale.

Last August, the Government's first national risk register also highlighted Britain's vulnerability by cyber spies. It said: "The UK does remain subject to high levels of covert non-military activity by foreign intelligence organisations. They are increasingly combining traditional intelligence methods with new technical attacks, for example attempting to penetrate computer networks via the internet." continues here