Jock's Place - DNA database - Comments

Barbed wire economics

Paulus — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:27:16 +0000

I used to travel to Argentina regularly soon after the Falklands war. I was working in agriculture and interviewed ranchers. I can't remember the rate of inflation at the time – it was in the hundreds of per cent. I do remember that Uruguay, which had an inflation rate of about 35%, was regarded as the Switzerland of South America. At that time inflation was so fierce that ranchers would do their accounts by converting all monetary sums into bales of barbed wire.

Argentina is an odd case.

Jock — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 22:26:34 +0000

Argentina is an odd case. When their monetary system simply disintegrated a few years back, they had to find alternatives to keep the place going - hence all those stories about "swap shops" creating a barter economy. The only absolute reason for a "legal tender" is that there needs to be something which is accepted for the purposes of paying tax - and they didn't have one effectively. So there were instances of local government for example swapping services or supplies rendered for the tax bills - paying your tax in kind effectively. So it's no wonder they have a weird relationship with tax!

I don't know if that's the whole reason behind NHS not having money to stop MRSA etc, but I certainly believe that its monopoly position and the protectionism of doctor licensing and so on creates huge "economic rent" in doctors' salaries, which can't help. It seems to me that exclusive drugs deals must be part of it too.

Tax

Paulus — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:53:28 +0000

I recently heard a programme on the BBC World Service on the subject of tax in South America. People there, notably in Argentina, just don't pay tax because they believe the money will disappear. They think it falls straight into the pockets of politicians. They’re probably right. When I hear about the level of MPs’ expenses I am afflicted by similar qualms. But the waste in the civil service is worse. The tax take increases and public services are cut while at the same time improved productivity in the private sector reduces the real cost of goods and services.And then you have moments like this one (lost data disks) – when civil servants demonstrate how incompetent they are. There are many such “aha” moments – Child Support Agency, criminals lost by the Home Office, piles of unsorted files on asylum seekers, unregistered workers in the Home Office, Asset Recovery Agency abandonned. You can see where the money goes. There may be corruption, but it pales into insignificance when placed alongside the waste that results from incompetence. I try not to follow day-to-day politics. It is far too depressing. But am I right in thinking that a large part of the reason why the NHS cannot cope financially despite the huge injection of cash is that the negotiation with doctors was botched? Their payout absorbed far more money than was intended, so there is not enough to pay nurses or to stop people catching MRSA and C difficile.By the way, I like your idea of a double-key system to unlock data which ensures your presence every time a civil servant looks at your file. However, you can imagine Sir Humphrey explaining exactly how much it would cost and how many more civil servants it would need to implement.

See, that's why blogs like

Jock — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:54:00 +0000

See, that's why blogs like http://thinkhard.org/ are so much better at this than I am. I'm sure there's a lot I've missed. In my defense I woke up at half six this morning and found the news story and set about half an hour or so of commenting on it!The other aspect that has been commented on quite a lot today in the news is how it also eliminates the innocent from enquiries. Which is one of the weakest arguments for it in my opinion. If you are a suspect and DNA can clear you, then you can have your DNA taken there an then to eliminate the possibility.

Excellent post. One thing

Alex — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:40:24 +0000

Excellent post. One thing though - is it surprising that there are more black people on the DNA database, given that they commit more crime on average? Also, you could have trashed the figures the judge gave about how much crime DNA solves. He said 20 000, out of total crime of about 5.5 million. In other words, 0.36% of crime. As as you say, it doesn't actually 'solve' the crime - it provides corroborating evidence. All for the benefit of setting up the apparatus for the most intrusive police state in history. Wonderful.

I don't think I missed that

Jock — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:35:47 +0000

I don't think I missed that Tristan. IN my post about Lynne's comment on the database a few days ago I said that our DNA is a part of us and here I've repeated that and that it should be subject to habeas corpus. That's what I meant by that anyway if it didn't seem that way!

There's one point I think

Tristan Mills — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:57:58 +0000

There's one point I think you've missed - that this is the government claiming ownership over us and our identity, just as the National Identity Database/ID card scheme is.

If the state owns even part of us, then we are slaves, at least in part.

As I say - it ought to be

Jock — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:50:30 +0000

As I say - it ought to be subject to habea corpus as "part of us". But I did think of your blog when I wrote that piece. Because it is in a very real sense part of that modern day panopticon. With everyone on a DNA database, even if successfully limited to just the police, we would just never know when we were being checked out to see if we fitted a particular crime scene or victim.

The sccray thing is I've seen several comments about this judge that he's "usually quite liberal" or words to that effect, nad that therefore he must be right.

I'm sure someone told me a few weeks back that the "civilian" regulations on DNA were based on the idea that our DNA is an essential parrt of every individual and so could not be held, patented and so on in any way. That idea should be applied to state applications as well - holding a piece of my DNA is holding, against my will probably, a peice of me, in case I ever do anything that they might want to check me out for. As crime prevention goes, it's like holding each and every one of us hostage as a guarantee of our future behaviour.

A dangerous tool

Paulus — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:31:24 +0000

I cannot agree with you more. We are far too trusting of the government and its officers. Miscarriage of justice and maladministration are widespread. The recent instance of a man, exonerated and released on appeal, being charged for board and lodging for the time he was held in jail shows just how insensitive the functionaries can be.

It is too easy to say it couldn’t happen here when we think of what the Nazis did. It could. Remember that their wholesale campaign of government sanctioned murder did not start with the Jews. It started with true blooded Germans who were mentally or physically handicapped. Because the government was trusted, no-one stopped them. They had proved to themselves that they could get away with it, so they moved on to the next undesirable group.

We cannot predict the colour of the next government, or its taste for bigotry, and we cannot trust any government machine with the sort of power that a universal DNA database would provide.

Instead of making the database fairer by widening it, we should make it fairer by making it smaller.

First we should limit the occasions when it is legal to demand a DNA sample. Then we could allow the police (and no-one else) to keep and access DNA which has been legitimately taken from people against whom no charge was made, but for a period no longer than, say, three months. This should give them more than enough time to crosscheck against past crimes. At that point, they should be required to destroy all records. There could be provision for an exceptional extension of this period, under the supervision of a court, in cases of an ongoing investigations. Finally there should be a range of crimes and misdemeanours, such as less serious motoring offences, where the DNA would also be removed from the database after a fixed period.

Oh - okay. Looks mostly

Jock — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 21:11:29 +0000

Oh - okay. Looks mostly good. I'd scrap the whole lot personally. Or at least could only hold DNA while a criminal had unspent convictions. But maybe even the concept of "unspent" has now gone?

DNA

Mark Pack — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:45:44 +0000

Jock - Lynne's views on DNA have featured several times on her website and blog. This article probably is the best summary:
http://www.lynnefeatherstone.org/column104-dna-database.htm