[Surveillance-Studies-l] Fwd: UK DNA database errors raise concerns

[Nils Zurawski]

infos zum datenschutz in england...


>Sender: Research and teaching on surveillance <SURVEILLANCE at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
>From: Eric Toepfer <toepfer at ZTG.TU-BERLIN.DE>
>Organization: Zentrum Technik und Gesellschaft
>Subject: UK DNA database errors raise concerns
>To: SURVEILLANCE at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>
>from the recent EDRI-gram newsletter - Number 5.23, 5 December 2007:
>A strange reminder of Gilliam´s movie "Brazil".
>
>Eric
>
>+++
>
>UK DNA database errors raise concerns
>============================================================
>
>The largest DNA database in the world covering details on about 4.5 million
>people including information on every person arrested, convicted or not, and
>on 900 000 children raises questions as inaccuracies and administrative
>errors have been found in its records.
>
>Incorrect dates, spelling mistakes and duplications have been found by Data
>Quality and Integrity Team of the DNA database unit. These mistakes can lead
>to innocent people being accused of crimes and wrongly arrested. Information
>added to incorrect profiles has also obliged the police to erase affected
>records.
>
>The DNA Database Unit had also admitted in a report in May 2007 that between
>1995 and 2005 it failed to load 26 200 records to the DNA database because
>of errors, which resulted in 183 undetected crimes.
>
>In August 2007 statistics released by the Home Office were showing around
>550 000 files with wrongly recorded or miss spelt names. This created big
>concerns among civil rights groups. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of civil
>rights group Liberty, considered it was already bad that the database
>included innocent people which had never been charged, many children and a
>large percentage of ethnic minorities. "Now it turns out we don't know the
>accuracy of the data. How many Postman Pats and Donald Ducks have entries on
>a system worthy of the Keystone Cops?" she commented.
>
>A spokesman from the National Policing Improvement Agency stated that most
>of these errors have been corrected but admitted errors are still possible.
>"Between January and November 1,450 demographic discrepancies have been
>discovered and rectified. Some of these are spelling errors, date taken
>amendments and Force code amendments (...) The Custodian Accreditation
>Service has identified and logged 111 unexpected results - possible errors -
>for the financial year 2006/07 that have resulted in the deletion of a
>profile or an amendment to the profile."
>
>John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley and an Internet
>entrepreneur who is investigating the reasons of the occurrence of so many
>errors stated: "It is important that people recognise Government databases
>are not necessarily 100 per cent accurate (...) It is quite clear you can't
>trust the Government with your personal information. They need to massively
>tighten up the way they deal with these issues."
>
>Innocents fear DNA database errors (26.11.2007)
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/26/ndna126.xml
>
>Outrage at 500,000 DNA database mistakes (27.08.2007)
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/27/ndna127.xml
>
>EDRI-gram : UK Home Office plans to fingerprint children starting 11
>(14.03.2007)
>http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.5/uk-fingerprint-children
>
>****************************************************
>This is a message from the SURVEILLANCE listserv
>for research and teaching in surveillance studies.
>
>To unsubscribe, please send the following message to
><LISTSERV at jiscmail.ac.uk>:
>
>UNSUBSCRIBE SURVEILLANCE
>
>For further help, please visit:
>
>http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help
>****************************************************


-- 
Dr. Nils Zurawski
Universität Hamburg
Inst. für kriminologische Sozialforschung
Allende-Platz 1
20146 Hamburg
Germany
tel. +49 (0) 40 42838 3329
fax. +49 (0) 40 42838 2328

Projekt zu Videoüberwachung: http://www.surveillance-studies.org/blog