A good example of how this is a bad thing: A guy in the UK was arrested when he helped stop a fight outside a pub. Police later apologised and he was never charged with any crime - but his fingerprints and DNA had already been taken. A few months later, he received a letter, asking him to come to a local police station. He went to the police station and was promptly arrested for "theft of post". Apparently, the police had found his DNA on letters from the postal system that had been stolen and then recovered. After some investigations by his lawyer, it was found that the letters on which the police had found his DNA were his own - he had posted some letters, which were amongst those stolen. This is a clear example of why the police are far too stupid to be allowed to have any such database. There is another issue: forensic DNA matching is good enough to distinguish between one in ten million. That means that for a UK population of 60 million, one might expect to get 6 matches for a given DNA sample. If you are unlucky enough to have your DNA on the database and happen to match a sample in this way, you are effectively screwed because juries are told that DNA evidence is incontrovertible. Then there's the issue of planted DNA evidence - there is some evidence that this may already be happening and innocent people are being framed, either by the real criminals or by over-enthusiastic policemen, keen to reach a monthly target. Lastly, there's the more sinister concept of trying to identify people with "criminal" genes. Some companies in the USA are already trying to identify job candidates who may be genetically disposed to certain ilnesses, so as to avoid higher medical insurance costs. It is not much of a stretch to get into the area of trying identify undesirable personality traits, as in the film "Gattica".

I think it stinks. I sometimes wonder if Orwell - by writing a novel that is so horrifying in its depiction of totalitarianism - unwittingly sounded the death knell for British Democracy. Great thinkers like Churchill and Hardy would never have accepted such a database, particularly a general database that includes the innocent.