Big Brother has gone biometric and our freedom is at risk

ALTHOUGH your story of a German town considering the idea of identifying the source of dog poo by DNA was included in your lighthearted “world apart” column (March 3), it does raise important issues about the use of DNA-based identification and the creation of all-powerful databases which are open to abuse and will create far greater problems for a free society than those they will solve.

It is ironic that Germany, of all countries, is considering the introduction of a DNA-based register of dogs (and so their owners), for it was the compilation and computation of similar registers (ably performed by American punch-card machines) that allowed such an efficient extermination of Jews and other non-Aryan or social “misfits” from the mid-1930s onwards.

Unfortunately, such episodes cannot be confined to history for while we may rightly shudder at the use to which national population registers were put in the past, we cannot ignore the very real threat from the assembly of even more comprehensive databases that is occurring in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the USA today.