A View From Middle England - Conservative with a slight libertarian touch - For Christian charity and traditional belief - Free Enterprise NOT Covert Corporatism

Friday, July 15, 2005

Get the marigolds out - New Labour's about!

If and when New Labour's Orwellian ID scheme comes into place, we better watch out. The National Fingerprint database will have us all as potential suspects. Mixed up with bombings, murders, frauds, all manner of crimes, just because we touched some unsuspecting item which left a print!

The present law, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, states that "Fingerprints taken from a person by virtue of section 61(6A) above must be destroyed as soon as they have fulfilled the purpose for which they were taken." This won't be the case with Blair's new database! All our digit impressions will be there for all time.

This interesting piece of analysis from Out-Law.Com - "Scene of crime fingerprints are however an entirely different matter. These will be of varying quality, in many cases they will only be partial prints, and although it is possible to use some automation to narrow the search, human expertise is needed in order to establish a reasonable degree of certainty. Trawling a database of the entire UK population would therefore produce a fairly large number of possible matches, but would then require a very large number of fingerprint experts to narrow them down. At which point, other problems would arise. At the moment possible matches obtained by the police will almost always lead them to a suspect who has already been arrested for something, and who will therefore not necessarily be shocked, stunned or outraged by being asked to account for his movements on the night in question. Once the fingerprint database of the future is live, however, that will not be the case, and it will only be a matter of time before a false match IDs a nun. Or a Home Secretary!"

So we could all face the potential of a six o'clock wake-up call from the police! Some bright-eyed detective has a list of fingerprints found at the scene of a crime. So you have to spend that day, and maybe more, trying to remember why you were where you were and giving some sort of decent explanation!

Is this what we really want in our country?

http://www.out-law.com/page-5528-theme=print

0 comments:

Post a Comment