UK - our privacy belongs to us not the government

[buckthesystem]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jh...8/04/do0404.xml

Our privacy belongs to us not the Government

By Sam Leith

The British police, I was bleakly surprised to read in The Daily Telegraph this week, have the biggest single DNA database in the world, with more than five per cent of the population logged, including nearly a million children under 17.

Is that big enough? The police, their response to a Home Office consultation about their powers now tells us, don't think so. If they get their way, next time you're arrested on suspicion of failing to scoop your dog's poop, they will be entitled to keep a permanent record of your DNA. Does that strike you as a bad thing? It does me.

I should make clear here what I think the police request is about. I do not imagine a cabal of senior police consciously fantasising about a surveillance state in which Plod Is The Master Now. Nor do I imagine that a similarly totalitarian instinct exists among those in government

The police take the view, quite correctly, that having a DNA database covering as many people as possible will make their job easier. Let us say you find some DNA at the scene of a murder. Imagine the saving in time, effort and expense if it happens to match the DNA of someone you caught speeding a few years ago; and imagine the hoops you have to jump through, if you don't have a match, to drag samples from a Soham-ful of potential suspects.

Of course the police - strangled as they are with red tape, pinched in budgets, garotted with paperwork and government targets - will seek to make their lives easier. That doesn't make them lazy, or penny-pinching. It makes them sensible.

What's more, it is not just a matter of "making the job easy" so there's more time for tea and biscuits. They calculate - again, correctly - that dangerous criminals are, on average, more likely to be captured (or even deterred) before they have the chance to offend again if their details are on a database.

Their intentions, I say, are largely good. And yet they are dead, dead wrong. We know with what particular brand of tarmac the road to hell is surfaced. It is in the nature of the state to want to extend its powers; and it is in the interests of those it serves to resist.

The argument that the police have made for the extension of their powers was paraphrased in one newspaper, somewhat scarily, as being: "Just because a person initially commits a low-level misdemeanour such as dog fouling, it does not mean they will not progress to the gravest crimes." The idiocy of that - with its weaselly double-negative - doesn't need much unwrapping. The implication is that allowing a dog to foul a footpath is - to borrow a term from the likewise idiotic war on drugs - a "gateway crime" that could lead on to armed robbery, say, or ritual murder.

In the comics I grew up reading, the reductio ad absurdum of this was expressed by the futuristic lawman Judge Dredd's arch-enemy. Judge Death hails from an alternate world, where the authorities reason that all crimes are committed by living people. Seeking to strike not just at crime but at the causes of crime, they set about killing off the population.

Correlation and causation, as any scientist will tell you, ain't the same thing. Even the most fanatical broken-windows theorist knows that; and nobody believes dog fouling is the first step towards murder. The "gateway crime" argument is being advanced in bad faith. What this is actually about is the police asking the Government to extend the powers of the state for its convenience. The argument in favour of the establishment, de jure, of a compulsory national DNA database has been lost. This is the first attempt to sneak it in - without any proper argument at all - de facto.

That is why it needs to be resisted. It is based on the alarming rationale that there exists an absolute divide (one expressed in an abrogation of your right to privacy) not only between all those who have ever broken any law and the rest of the population but also between all those who have ever been suspected of breaking the law and the rest of the population. That's not the characteristic view of a free society. Our privacy is something that belongs to us: not something the Government gives us, on probation, as a favour. They serve us: not vice versa. This may be a matter of principle, but it is one that could scarcely have more profound practical importance.

(for rest of article go to link)