Do you have a privacy right to your DNA?

NY Times:

The European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously on Thursday that Britain’s policy of gathering and storing the fingerprints and DNA of all criminal suspects — even those who turn out to be innocent — was a violation of the human right to privacy.

The ruling, handed down in Strasbourg, France, is a severe blow to the law-enforcement policies of the Labor government, which has led Europe in aggressively collecting and retaining personal information on its citizens. Using unusually strong language, the court declared itself “struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the police’s policy of holding DNA material indefinitely in its database.

Britain has several months to decide how to respond to the ruling, but the current law will have to be amended. In a statement, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said she was “disappointed” by the court’s decision.

“I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice,” she said. Britain’s DNA Database contains the profiles of more than 4.6 million people, some 860,000 of whom do not have criminal records. Privacy experts say that this represents a higher proportion of Britain’s population than do similar databases in other countries.

“They’re in the vanguard of doing this, is the polite way of saying it,” said Daniel P. Cooper, a partner at Covington & Burling, a corporate and business law firm that filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of Privacy International, an advocacy group. “They have the biggest database in Europe, and possibly globally, for law enforcement purposes.”

Human rights groups applauded the court’s decision as a welcome check on the powers of the state.

“Forty percent of Britain’s criminals are not on this database, but hundreds of thousands of innocent people are,” said Anna Fairclough, the legal officer of Liberty, a British group that advocates for human rights. The court, she said, “has protected the privacy of British people so poorly let down by our own government.”

The government argues that information on the database collected from suspects in past crimes has helped investigators solve thousands of fresh cases in the past eight years, including at least 53 murders and 94 rapes.

...

I can think of few things more useless to the government than my DNA data, but I can also think of no reason for me to be concerned about them having it.

How paranoid do you have to be to fear that your DNA records could in some way comeback to haunt you. I am sure that somewhere in the bowels of the government records on my service in the Marine Crops, they still have my finger prints and blood type. I think I was also fingerprinted when I got a securities license. If these things wound up in some government database I think it would have zero effect on my life. I certainly have no plans of committing a crime that would cause them to be of interest.

I can see how those with a criminal intent might be concerned about evidence that could tie them to a crime. I can't see why I should be concerned about that.

technorati tags:
political news | news | world news
More at: News 2 Cromley