British Big Brother

Gets a smackdown!

The European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously on Thursday that Britain’s policy of gathering and storing the fingerprints and DNA of all criminal suspects — even those who turn out to be not guilty — was a violation of the human right to privacy.

The ruling, handed down in Strasbourg, is a severe blow to the law-enforcement policies of the Labor government, which has led Europe in aggressively collecting and retaining personal information on its citizens. Using unusually strong language, the court declared itself “struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the police’s policy of holding DNA material indefinitely in its data base.

Wonder if this will have any implications for U.S. efforts at creating a national DNA criminal database.