Widely reported today (here and here, for instance) are the proposals to allow the Police to retain fingerprint and DNA data on anyone arrested for a crime, even if they should later not be charged.

I don’t think that it is unreasonable for suspects in an investigation to provide this sort of identifying data. Anyone innocent of a crime should be confident that this should help exclude him or her from the investigation. It’s the fact that the data will be retained by the Police that causes me some concern (and this is the major change to the law here – which is being introduced as an amendment to the criminal justice bill). Lord Falconer, a Home Office minister, was interviewed on the Today program this morning, and he came out with a figure of 300,000 when asked how many people arrested each year were later released without charge. All these people would have their data held by the police under these proposals.

As I’ve discussed before, I generally feel uncomfortable about the state holding large databases of deeply personal information on the general population. Measures like this may seem fairly small when reported individually, but it’s important to look at the broader picture. Over the last few months alone, there has been discussion of the “Entitlement Card” (read “ID card”) scheme, the communication data monitoring proposals and now this. The sheer quantity of data identifying you, what you do and who you talk to that the state wants to begin collecting is growing fast. Then juxtapose this against other developments such as the reports of suppression of dissent occurring in the States and I for one begin to feel uncomfortable.

Changes to the law which involve increases in the quantities of data being held on people by the government should be debated openly and honestly, and not put through as amendments to broader pieces of legislation. All I’m really doing here is backing calls for such a debate.