A senior judge, Lord Justice Sedley, has made the extraordinary suggestion that DNA samples from every citizen in the United Kingdom and visitor to our shores should be stored in a database.
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What, ask Judge Sedley and friends, would the innocent have to lose by having such information kept by Big Brother?
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Throughout the 20th century, there were other states in the world - Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Hitler's Germany - which thought it was all right to treat their citizens like slaves and automatons.
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It is surely fundamental to any law of liberty that if we have not done anything wrong, we should not be compelled to reveal our identity, to offer samples of blood, urine or DNA to the authorities merely because they want it.
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How long before such a database actually exists, and we begin to receive letters: "Dear Sir/Madam/Hybrid - it has been drawn to our attention that your DNA reveals..." and Big Brother would take upon himself the right to say that we should not breed, because we had some supposedly undesirable inherited characteristic?
Judge Sedley and Lord Winston would probably say that this was a science fiction fantasy. I think it is all too likely that, once they possessed all the DNA evidence about all of us, the evermore intrusive government, which already thinks it is responsible for what we eat, smoke and drink, would tell us whether we could or could not breed.
Read the rest.
...
What, ask Judge Sedley and friends, would the innocent have to lose by having such information kept by Big Brother?
...
Throughout the 20th century, there were other states in the world - Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Hitler's Germany - which thought it was all right to treat their citizens like slaves and automatons.
...
It is surely fundamental to any law of liberty that if we have not done anything wrong, we should not be compelled to reveal our identity, to offer samples of blood, urine or DNA to the authorities merely because they want it.
...
How long before such a database actually exists, and we begin to receive letters: "Dear Sir/Madam/Hybrid - it has been drawn to our attention that your DNA reveals..." and Big Brother would take upon himself the right to say that we should not breed, because we had some supposedly undesirable inherited characteristic?
Judge Sedley and Lord Winston would probably say that this was a science fiction fantasy. I think it is all too likely that, once they possessed all the DNA evidence about all of us, the evermore intrusive government, which already thinks it is responsible for what we eat, smoke and drink, would tell us whether we could or could not breed.
Read the rest.
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