Civil Liberties

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Senior British Judge : All UK 'must be on DNA database, including overseas visitors'. This is after confirmation that Orwell was right : he was being spied on for more than two decades. Looks like Britain is rolling out the "welcome" mat for all

All UK 'must be on DNA database

  • The whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has said.
  • Lord Justice Sedley told BBC News the current England and Wales database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was "indefensible". He added it would be fairer to include "everybody, guilty or innocent" on it. "It means where there is ethnic profiling going on disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities get onto the database. It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free."
  • The Home Office said the database of four million profiles had helped solve criminal cases, but to expand it would raise logistical and ethical issues.
  • The DNA database - which is 12 years old - grows by 30,000 samples a month taken from suspects or recovered from crime scenes. It is the largest in the world.
  • The data of everyone arrested for a recordable offence in England and Wales - all but the most minor offences - remains on the system regardless of their age, the seriousness of their alleged offence, and whether or not they were prosecuted.
  • But Professor Stephen Bain, a member of the national DNA database strategy board, warned expansion would be expensive and make mistakes more likely. "The DNA genie can't be put back in the bottle," he said. "If the information about you is exposed due to illegal or perhaps even legalised use of the database, in a way that is not currently anticipated, then it's a very difficult situation."
  • Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights organisation Liberty, said a database for every man, woman and child in the country was "a chilling proposal, ripe for indignity, error and abuse".


Though by the same logic of the Judge, since disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities have prison experience, then everyone should also be put in prison to get that same experience

This is just a symptom of the Orwellian menace seeping through society. Classified papers released on 4th September 2007 proved Orwell was right : he was being monitoring for more than two decades by the intelligence services.


MI5 confused by Orwell's politics. Orwell monitored for more than two decades

  • MI5 did not believe George Orwell was a mainstream communist despite monitoring the socialist writer for more than two decades, records have revealed.
  • Orwell is best known for books including 1984 and Animal Farm, which criticise totalitarianism, and other works attacking inequality, including Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.
  • Other MI5 records released by the National Archives reveal a rather basic approach to intelligence gathering.
  • Kent policeman Pc Ivan Smith resorted to hiding in a toilet to listen in on apprentices from the Royal Navy dockyards at Chatham discussing strike action in December 1941.
  • American musician Alan Lomax was put under surveillance by MI5 as a potential communist, and his BBC TV shows in the early 1950s were monitored by Special Branch.


Why MI5 spied on Orwell for a decade

  • 1984 author suspected of being a communist
  • Newly released files reveal Special Branch blunders
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