Does this Labour government understand the meaning of the word "innocent"

The BBC report that:

"Details of how long profiles of innocent people arrested in England and Wales can be stored on the DNA database are due to be unveiled by ministers.

It comes a year after the European Court of Human Rights said the existing indefinite limit was unfair.

The BBC understands the Home Office is to propose keeping the DNA of innocent people for a maximum of six years. "

I'm sorry but these are INNOCENT people, why should their DNA be kept on file at all?

As I have said before and fear I will have to say again before this Labour government are kicked out of office: "In a totalitarian state all are guilty of something, it is just up to the state to decide who to arrest and when."

The rise of the UK's very own Stasi State

The news that:

"A growing army of private security guards and town hall snoopers with sweeping police-style powers is being quietly established, the Daily Mail can reveal.

Under a Home Office-run scheme, people such as park wardens, dog wardens, car park attendants and shopping centre guards receive the powers if they undergo training, and pay a small fee to their local police force.

Their powers include issuing £60 fines for truancy and dropping litter, and being able to demand a person's name and address on the street.

Under the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme, the number of civilians wearing a special badge, and a uniform approved by the local chief constable, has rocketed by almost 30 per cent in a year and there are now 1,406.

Critics claim Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is quietly seeking to create a third-tier within the 'policing family', with even less training and accountability than the controversial Police Community Support Officers. "

What is Labour's end game? A CCTV camera in every room of every house? Each citizen implanted with a GPS tracking device? Checkpoints every few hundred yard metres where citizens' ID can be checked and DNA samples taken? This Labour government really scare me, I think they are capable of almost anything as they try to keep their hands on power. The idea that a UK Government might postpone a General Election would have seemed incredible 10 years ago, now it is common currency.

We are all guilty, it's up to the Labour Government to decide when to arrest us

The news that Jacqui Smith will push through Parliament without a vote the new legislation on keeping innocent people's details on the DNA database, does not surprise me. This Labour government has shown time and time again that its instincts are totalitarian and anti-freedom. What shocks me is the lack of complaint from the opposition.

Database Britain

This Labour government do seem to have a grasp of literary history, the introduction of their latest surveillance database comes on the 6th of April 2009. The novel 1984, which this Labour government seems to have taken as an instruction manual rather than a warning, starts on 4 April 1984: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen".


The end of the era of internet freedom came this morning as the EU and this Labour government's plan to monitor their citizens' every move takes another step closer to completion. From this morning all internet activity by every internet connection must be stored for one year by the ISP, this includes email traffic, visits to web sites and telephone calls made over the internet. Of course this information will be accessible by police and the security services so as to combat crime and terrorism. Of course in reality the information will be accessed by many public bodies and quangos, including local councils, who will thus be able investigate any number of minor misdemeanours or just look for evidence to embarrass difficult or undesirable persons.

The UK's Labour government who seem to have an insatiable desire to monitor and control every aspect of their citizens' lives was the prime mover for this EU-wide system of recording and it is to the UK's Home Office that we must turn for the justifications:

"It is the Government's priority to protect public safety and national security. That is why we are completing the implementation of this directive, which will bring the UK in line with our European counterparts."

"Without communications data, resolving crimes such as the Rhys Jones murder would be very difficult if not impossible."

And then the excuse that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese:

"Access to communications data is governed by Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which ensures that effective safeguards are in place and that the data can only be accessed when it is necessary and proportionate to do so," he said. "

We all know how well the RIPA safeguards have worked to date, just look through the cases that I and other bloggers have reported and see councils using the Act to fight littering and to check whether parents are abusing school catchment area rules. Now councils and the government will have access to almost unthinkable levels of personal data without any real safeguards.


This database is not an isolated example of Labour implemented state surveillance, here's a few examples that I could think of, please feel free to add your own in the comments:
1. DNA Database - 3 million entries so far of anyone who is arrested, even if never charged let alone found guilty. The data stays on the database forever as it is virtually impossible to have it removed.

2. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems record the movements of millions of vehicles every day and are in the process of being linked to a central database to record every movement you make in your vehicle.

3. Oyster Cards - If you register your Oyster Card, currently still optional, then every journey you take is recorded and stored.

4. Spy in the sky - The introduction of black box type equipment in every car is set for 2013, so every vehicle journey would be monitored foot by foot for speed limit infractions or in the future unauthorised journeys by carbon criminals

5. Every journey outside of the UK now has to be logged in advance along with personal data. How long before this is used to restrict foreign travel by "carbon criminals" or persons suspected of taking currency out of the Peoples State of the EU?

6. ID cards - "papers please"

7. NHS database - It is rumoured that MI5 already have access to the patients records stored on this database; who else might have access soon?

8. Galileo European tracking - the EU's rival to GPS is an unnecessary and expensive system unless the rumours that the Galileo chip will be placed in every new mobile are true. In which case if you own a mobile telephone your every movement will be tracked and recorded, and if you don't own a mobile telephone that will look suspicious.


Welcome to the sort of State surveillance that the Stasi could only have dreamt of. From today the State and its subsidiary vectors of control can monitor every web site you visit, every telephone call you make over the internet and every email you send or receive.

What of the future? I blogged some time ago about the state information televisions in public places ahead of the 2012 Olympics that are likely to become permanent fixtures. How long before CCTV cameras are plentiful enough that they are monitoring every street, to fight crime and terrorism, one every 100 metres... 50 metres... one per house...

Some catch-up articles

1. Charles Moore argues that whether in Northern Ireland or among Britain's Muslims, extremists will exploit the reasonable majority. Here's an extract:

"The extremists are much more aware than we are that the front line of the rule of law matters. So they demand that the front line be broken. Sinn Fein made sure, as a condition of entering government, that Tony Blair would abolish its most formidable adversary, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. One reason that three members of the security forces died this week is that we no longer have the police and security knowledge needed to prevent such attacks.

In facing militant Islam, the police, attacked for "institutional racism" and "Islamophobia", effectively seek "Muslim permission" for legitimate inquiries. This risks hampering proper police work.

Guess whom the Bedfordshire Police arrested in Luton. Not the demonstrators with their revolting insults, but the members of the soldier-supporting public who threw things at them. "

2. Ed Husain says

"We can expect Luton-style protests and worse in the years to come unless the Government gets a grip on Islamism" and includes these thoughts: "It's comfortable for us to think that these are the actions of a small minority – but are they? The vile mob that hurled abuse against returning troops does not operate in a vacuum, somehow removed from other Muslims. Only two weeks ago, the same group of extremists openly marched in Tower Hamlets, Britain's most densely populated "Muslim area". Where was the local outrage against these bigots? The nearby east London Mosque – Europe's largest Muslim institution – sends groups of young vigilantes to hound local prostitutes and drug dealers, but it turns a blind eye to extremism.

This nationwide network of fanatics, who give themselves various names at different times to deceive the authorities – from al-Muhajiroun to the Saved Sect – is an offshoot of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that shares al-Qaeda's aim of a global caliphate, but uses different methods."

3. Was it really Michael Jackson at the London Arena tour announcement. Does anyone really care about the shrill voiced freak whose singing career has left me somewhat unenthusiastic since he went solo.


4. Himmelgarten Cafe explains why DNA profiling is not as accurate as we have been lead to believe:

"Suppose the police have a big DNA database. They find a degraded DNA sample at the crime scene which matches only one in a million people. A name pops out of the database, plod dashes round and makes a swift arrest. If there is no other evidence what is the chance of chummy being guilty?

The prosecutor's fallacy is to say it's 99.999% - there's only a one in a million chance that the DNA sample got the wrong man.

In reality, if the sample matches one in every million people, it must match around 60 people in the UK alone so, if we know no more than the criminal is probably from the UK, the chance of chummy being guilty is 1 in 60, or 1.67%."

5. Rugfish explores Gordon Brown's Monopoly tactics:

"Gordon meanwhile, is on his way to the bank and he's not said a word because the Bank of England is "independent", and it's got "nowt to do with him". It would appear that Gordon is acting more like a silent Monopoly Man with our economy, rather than someone who's a part of the game others have no choice but to play."

6. ExPatYank discusses what is a citizen. Do read the whole very interesting article, here's an extract:

"So increasingly absent the unifying Established Church that had for centuries helped mark out a large part of the “national boundary,” what remains? Shakespeare and Gibbon (and some today) might well have shared the views of certain Muslims regarding the proper fate of a pope. But that doesn’t mean that they would have shared the view that those same Mohammedans Muslims could be just as English as they themselves: how could they be, given they don’t adhere to the Established Christian Church?

Mr Norman and his Independent though, have cracked the exceedingly complicated question. No longer need we ponder it. Yes, we get it at last: if you are born in a barn, you are indeed a horse."

7. Brackenworld exclaims that

"The next person to argue to me that this recession is happening because of "deregulated" banks is going to get a carefully gift-wrapped punch in the face."

Do read the whole piece.

Arrested for taking photos of a sewer cover!

You just couldn't make this sort of story up. BoingBoing.net report the case of:

"Stephen Clarke, a man who was accused to taking pictures of sewer-gratings in Manchester and arrested. Though the police couldn't find any photos of sewer-gratings on his phone (and even though "what a sewer grating looks like" isn't a piece of specialized terrorist intelligence), he was held on suspicion of planning an act of terror, imprisoned for two days while the police searched his home, his phone and his computer. When they couldn't find anything suspicious, they released him, but kept his DNA on file, as the biometric of someone who had been accused of plotting a terrorist act. "

Watch some video of Stephen Clarke's story here...

Why are the "powers that be" so obsessed with photographers, is it as was suggested last week - "because cameras can be used to document offences of the state against civilians; as such, they were considered a tool that can bring about civil unrest and encourage protest against the ... Governments" - and surely it is wrong for Stephen Clarke to be held in a police cell for two days and have his DNA taken even though he was not charged.

What is happening to my Country?

We are all guilty

A report commissioned by the Human Genetics Commission said the DNA profiles of one million innocent people which are currently stored on the national database should be destroyed. Unfortunately this authoritarian Labour government will not rest until every one of us has our details on a DNA database, carry an ID card, is monitored 24/7 and is chipped so our movements are tracked. Take a trip to No2ID for details of how to oppose the ID card and National Identity Register aspects of Labour totalitarianism. Go soon before access to such sites is banned.

Database and Surveillance Britain

Mr Eugenides has the very worrying details.

Entry onto the DNA database now compulsory?

I see that a man fingerprinted and DNA swabbed for non payment of a £2.40 train ticket. Welcome to police state Britain...