When you spend as much time monitoring the threats to privacy in the United States as the the ACLU does, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that the emerging surveillance society is not just an American phenomenon. The political, social, and technological forces that are driving the magnification of surveillance here in the United States are happening all over the world. In fact, as data sharing among foreign governments and multinational corporations accelerates, developments in other countries will certainly affect our right to privacy here in the United States. Thus, it is essential to use a wide-angle when assessing the status of privacy here and abroad.
In the U.S., we're used to having the world's biggest of everything. But when it comes to DNA databases, it seems that the Brits are at least as ambitious. The last two Labor governments of Tony Blair and the practically still-borne one of Gordon Brown have expanded their database at a much faster rate than the U.S. federal government or the states. Over the past decade, the British government waged an aggressive campaign to expand the country's DNA database by collecting the private genetic information from increasing numbers of U.K. residents, including children, and many others who have not been convicted of any crimes at all. By 2007, the British DNA database included the profiles of over 4 million people, and had become the world's largest. We reclaimed that title when the U.S. federal government and the states began to collect DNA from innocent people, but the Brits still got us beat per capita.
Late last year, however, it seemed likely that Prime Minister Brown was going to be forced to reevaluate the Labor government's policies of unrelenting expansion of the DNA database. In February, the European Court of Human Rights heard the case of two people who were forced to submit their DNA to the national database in spite of the fact that they had never been found guilty of anything. They argued that they hadn't done anything that would warrant this violation of their right to privacy under international human rights agreements, and in December, the Court agreed with the plaintiffs. They returned with a unanimous decison that the retention of DNA samples and profiles from innocent people violates international law and that they must be destroyed.