You're not being forced to carry any card, are you?
No, although were ID cards to be introduced then it's not a hop, skip and a jump before it was mandatory to carry an ID card in the name of 'anti-terrorism'. If you think that carrying an ID card is going to combat terrorism then where is the evidence, from those countries that do make it mandatory to show that it has been effective? But even if it, for the moment, isn't mandatory, by custom and practice, it will be to all intents and purposes because of the interpretation put on it by banks, shops, libraries...in fact anyone.
We are, as a society, obsessed with proving who someone is and for what? What has it actually achieved?
Why would anyone bother to track your movements anywhere?
Of course, none of the items mentioned
here are valid...all figments of imagination. And Liberty is just a daft set of woolly-minded sandal-wearing tofu-eating meddlers, I suppose?
If you don't like a bank asking you, for example, where the amounts of cash you deposit came from, perhaps you won't mind if some of it gets stolen and the crime goes undetected because - in your world - such questions couldn't be asked. That's errant nonsense and has no causal link between the two. Has those daft Money-Laundering regulations actually stopped money laundering? I don't think so.
Keeping more people’s records on the DNA database will make it more effective - that's a mathematical certainty - ....?
There are many mathematicians and statisticians out there who would beg to differ. But then what do they know?
The purpose of retaining an individual’s DNA profile on a database is to treat them as a suspect for any future crime- AND?
STASI springs to mind or any other totalitarian state, for that matter.
Keeping DNA profiles from convicted criminals has been shown to be effective, as has collecting more DNA from crime scenes. But keeping DNA profiles from unconvicted people on the Database has not helped to solve more crimes. Well, DUH! of course it hasn't, they haven't offended yet.
You're missing the point.
The number of false matches will increase as the Database gets bigger - Not proven or even necessarily so - the matching technology will improve exponentially, as it has done since inception.
Really? See reply above re statisticians.
DNA evidence is not foolproof. There are two ways mistakes can happen. Your DNA can be at the crime scene because you were there earlier or later in the day, or because your DNA has been transferred from somewhere else. Or, there might be a false match between your DNA and someone else’s. False matches can occur by chance, especially if the DNA profile from the crime scene is not complete, or if you are related to the real suspect. So what? You don't really imagine that someone's liberty and/or conviction turns on an incomplete profile do you? With the current CPS attitude, they wouldn't have prosecuted Guy Fawkes even if he was just about to light the fuse!
I agree re your comments and the CPS. Ian Tomlinson springs to mind and that decision by the CPS, frankly, stinks. But back to DNA and false matches. So I have no other alibi. I might also have happened to be driving by as monitored by the ANPR movement database. I might not be prosecuted in the end but I am going to have a **** load of grief trying to confirm my innocence.
The National DNA Database Annual Report 2005/06 states that between May 2001 and April 2006, 50,434 matches with crime scene profiles, or 27.6% of the total number of match reports, involved a list of potential suspects, not a single suspect, being given to the police, because matches with multiple records on the Database were made. Of these topical and up-to-date statistics, how many went on to resolve the offence?
You're missing the point again. It is saying that out of over 200,000 matches to a crime scene, your infallible DNA matching system produced over 50,000 of possible multiple matches...not one individual per match but a LIST of individuals.
I did ask for alternative strategies, but none have been offered. Tub-thumping is all very well, together with most NIMBY standpoints, but sensible, practical and workable alternatives seem very short on the ground - I wonder why? Smile
The current system works quite well, doesn't it? I agree that the police force has been shackled by over-bureacracy and a Labour Govt inflicted obsession with targets. It's also the first time that I have seen NIMBYism associated with the concept of liberty.
The demise of the effective use of "D" Notices, together with the mind-boggling increase in the televising of police and other agencies' methods, etc. has contributed to the sort of society we live in.
How does that work? Any evidence to back it up? Are you saying that we should ban investigative journalism as it is counter to proper policing with integrity? Ian Tomlinson's case wouldn't have come to light.
Removing excellent detection methods because of the sensibilities of some individuals is a backward-looking, almost head-in-the-sand attitude.
No-one is suggesting getting rid of DNA matching. What many of us are objecting to is the concept of mandatory ID cards or the mandatory collection of everynes' DNA profile. Guilty unless proven innocent.
Not, you understand, that I've got any strong feelings about it either way, having spent a large part of my working life being strangled by ever-increasing bureaucracy and holier-than-thou attitudes from people who were (and still are) never going to be affected by the resultant, dumbed-down and unsatisfactory outcomes.
I don't dispute the over-bureacracy nor the mindless obsession with targets that has been inflicted on the country by bloody Labour. Get rid of all that by all means but the logical outcome of what you are proposing is a police state.