Overlooked - Liberty

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<strong>Overlooked</strong>: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain 71 • Private companies, for an annual fee, retain the samples from which the data contained in the NDNAD are derived. These samples contain vast amounts of genetic information, including health-related information. There is nothing to prevent these companies using samples to develop mini databases of DNA records. • The Database is also connected to the Police National Computer. This could exacerbate privacy implications because connections can be drawn between sets of personal data. Similarly PNC records are now retained indefinitely as a result of the link to the Database, whereas before they would have been weeded out after a short period of time. Furthermore, information contained on the PNC is visible to a wider range of non-policing bodies. In short, the effect of the NDNAD is not limited to that database but has a wider impact on other police records. • It is possible in the future that connections will be made between the National Identity Register and the Database. A recent Home Office document on the NIR explains that “it will have links with other Government systems to share identity data” and even suggests that the biometric data element of the NIR will, in fact, be stored on “existing biometric systems” 151 . If the bioinformation in the NDNAD were to form part of the NIR, this would represent a significant extension of the stated law-enforcement purpose of the Database. Linking the NIR with other biometric databases is clearly already part of Government thinking. The former Prime Minister Tony Blair made this clear when sending an email to the 27, 000 signatories to an anti ID card petition on the Number 10 website. In it he said “I believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register.” Voluntary DNA samples DNA is occasionally provided voluntarily. This might occur if a victim of crime provides their DNA for elimination purposes during the course of a criminal investigation. Samples might also be volunteered to the police in response to requests for people in a geographical location to rule themselves out of a crime investigation. At present over 12,000 volunteer samples are contained in the Database. The samples that are retained may be used in the future in the same way as samples taken from convicted criminals. A person who has volunteered for their DNA to be put in the Database has no right to have this bioinformation removed. This can prove to be problematic both in principle and practice. If a person’s consent is needed to take a DNA sample then it might be expected that they are able withdraw that consent and consequently to require their sample to be removed. This might raise practical concerns if people are aware that any bioinformation they voluntarily provide could be retained for future use, they might be less inclined to co-operate. In the long run it might be that a failure automatically to destroy any sample provided to the police might hinder investigations. Uses of DNA samples Some of the uses of DNA potentially raise ethical issues. The police are currently in favour of the recovery of physical information on an individual (from crime scene DNA where there is no match to 151 Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme: Safeguarding your Identity, Home Office, December 2006, pages 7 and 11.
72 <strong>Overlooked</strong>: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain an NDNAD entry) in order to obtain information about the appearance of a perpetrator. This could represent a move into a class of genetic marker of considerable importance to an individual. Such markers could, for example, carry information on disease liability (for instance, a gene involved in facial appearance could well carry variants that might cause congenital malformation in a carrier’s offspring). This information might give the police access to inappropriate medical and ethnic information. The technique known as “familial searching” could also lead to privacy concerns. Familial searching is the process whereby the NDNAD is used to assemble a list of possible relatives of the owner of a particular DNA sample. The list of possible relatives is obtained by identifying individuals whose Database profiles show a statistically significant similarity to a profile from a crime scene sample but which do not exactly match the sample profile. Each familial search throws up 50-150 possible relatives and about 80 searches are being undertaken each year. The consequence of this is that many innocent individuals might be brought into a criminal investigation on the basis of the familial match. Familial searching could also unwittingly reveal to the police information about private personal relationships. A genetic link between individuals could be previously unknown to one or both parties and police investigations may make this information known for the first time. This is a relevant issue given that an estimated 1 in 30 people in the UK are mistaken as to the true identity of their biological father. Familial searching also risks disclosure by police of the fact that an individual has been arrested to their family members. Twenty or so research projects using the NDNAD have been allowed since 2000. However, the procedure for approving research uses of the NDNAD lacks transparency. It might prove to be in the public interest to provide greater detail about the nature of these projects. This could include an ethical review of applications to use the database and the associated samples for research purposes. Without tight regulation, there is no reason why a great variety of tests could not be conducted on many of the millions of genetic markers in human DNA to reveal highly sensitive information about ethnic origin, physical appearance and disease liability.
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