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I don`t know why the DNA of innocent people is not treated the same as the retention of fingerprints used to be. If you had your fingerprints taken and you were not proceeded against or you were found not guilty you had an automatic right to witness those fingerprints being destroyed. Nowadays everyone is automatically arrested, no matter how minor the offence is, so that their DNA can be taken purely to swell the numbers on the database. Regard by the police for one`s personal liberty and their use of common sense seems to have gone out of the window. The arrogance of the government knows no bounds. By imposing these time limits the government is failing to acknowledge that many indivduals on the database are completely innocent and their samples should be destroyed at the earliest opportunity. The retention of innocent people`s DNA for such a long time defies any sort of logic; but is symptamic of this governments approach to many issues of late when it does not like to admit that what it has done has been plainly wrong.

- B Gare, Norfok Gorleston

A Home Secretary - a trumpeter of law and order - intent upon circumnavigating a court ruling so that she can impose her own rules, creating and maintaining a database by stealth in the same way as she is seeking to impose ID cards.

John of Aberdeen rolls out the old Chestnut about innocent people having nothing to fear, and appears to suggest it should be a tool to check upon parentage.

I have nothing to fear except an unacceptable intrusion of my privacy, and the possibility of my genetic code being released to others without my knowledge or permission.

Who is to say what else it might be used for? Returning to John of Aberdeen’s point, the government and its agencies could identify mothers who had been unfaithful to their husbands, and vice-versa. If Hitler’s Germany had a DNA database, how much easier it would have been to root out non-Aryans and those with genetic differences that would threaten the physical purity of their master race.

Yes, innocent people may have nothing to fear under current laws, but the interpretation of existing laws can be- and are - stretched; and where they can’t be stretched our parliamentary control freaks - who seem to believe that the a new law is the solution to any problem - introduce new ones by the bucket-load. Note that in ten years, Blair introduced an average of 2685 new laws per year (one every 45 minutes) 98% of which were introduced by Statutory Instrument – a procedure that allows less time for debate and scrutiny.

- John, Dorset, UK

John - have you volunteered to put your DNA on the database then? And encouraged your family to volunteer their DNA as well?

You trust this government with confidential data despite their continual failures to proect it.

And you also trust every British (or EU) government from now until the end of time not to abuse the power you want to give them.

Strange how despite the current DNA database crime has not fallen dramatically isn't it?

- Butch, London, UK

I'm sick of this 'what have the innocent got to worry about?' arguement. We have a history of 1000 years of the legal presumption of innocence. To store the data of millions of people raises the presumption that those people will commit an offence. Yes some will, but the overwhelming majority will NOT. On a practical note a recent incident in Germany shows that the system is not infallible. A lab technician's dna contaminated dozens of samples, and the police thought they were dealing with a serial criminal, she was lucky not to be convicted. Finally look how civil servants have been slipshod in keepintg data confidential. Simply the Government is not to be trusted.

- Jeremiah, London

Another serious issue concerning DNA Storage is that for many years now it has been reported by various News Agencies that the Americans have been taking out Copyright Protection on peoples personal DNA.

This could lead to very serious and alarming consequences. How do we not know that UK Govt are not trading in your DNA right now?

- Carl Barron, Christchurch, Dorset

Why would any innocent person be worried about their DNA being known and on file? It is long past time that everyone's genetic code was checked at birth to make sure they were fathered and mothered by those named on the birth certificates and that DNA checked to give that child a chance to have any required medical treatment at the earliest possible opportunity. The staggering fact is that in the West between one quarter and one third of all children are not fathered by who they were told fathered them and that includes one quarter and one third of everyone reading this. We have to stop being afraid of DNA and start using it to improve things and that includes DNA profiling babies because believe it or not babies grow into murderers, child abusers, rapists etc however cute and cuddly they may look today. Strangely people actually behave better if they KNOW they are going to get caught for a crime.

- John, Aberdeen, UK

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