The UK Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has posted a comment piece on The Guardian website as a response to the Human Genetics Commission Report on the UK police National DNA Database (NDNAD). It basically says, there’s a long history of balancing security and liberty, we’ve got it right and we won’t be changing anything – all padded out with a lot of nothing. Johnson seems like a decent person (unlike many recent holders of this office) and it seems a shame that he’s reduced to producing this substandard waffle in defence of the indefensible. I do wonder what it would take to convince this government, which is now clearly on its last legs, that they were wrong about anything…
ubisurv 
Of interest:
UK jails schizophrenic for maintaining right to silence
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/
The million dollar question – how to prevent crime, without violating peoples private life?!
^ Surely the question here is whether this particular ‘violation’ of privacy does prevent crime?
Excatly. And I don’t think there is any evidence that a DNA database ‘prevents’ crime. Not even the police would claim that, I think. It is of course useful in investigations into crime once it has occured, and in securing convictions, but surpirsingly not quite as essential in as many cases as people might imagine. And not error-free or ‘certain’ either.
Clicked through that poster’s link and realised I was responding to spam!