Minority Report

[Stuart M]

It's quite a good short story, but it seems that the new head of forensic services at the Association of Chief Police Officers, Gary Pugh, thinks it's a manual for how to run society in future. He urges that "children who exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life" should go on the DNA database. Well, actually he says they should become "eligible for the DNA database", like it's some sort of privilege. Lovely. Perhaps he'll next suggest they should put all the black kids on it first, followed by the Muslims. After all, the former group are statistically more likely to be involved with crime, and the latter more likely to be terrorists to start with, eh?

And there was this delightful little snippet from Mr. Pugh further down the article:

'Fingerprints, somehow, are far less contentious,' he said. 'We have children giving their fingerprints when they are borrowing books from a library.'

Apparently, it's all so uncontentious that a) it's been banned in China as being an infringement of children's liberties (yes, that's in China), and b) there's a long-running international campaign to get it stopped.

[Dreadful Scathe]

they use biometrics at libraries now ? not my local one anyway...

and to Godwin the thread on the 2nd post I believe Hitler was a good attentive catholic boy, so there'd have been no need make him...er..eligible for the dna database
Not that Hitler did anything illegal anyway, being in charge as it were, which just goes to show - someone, somewhere, someday in the dystopian future is going to have a field day when they want to take control of the populace. We know what you did/read/thought last summer - report for "re-alignment".

[RedFox]

I agree; it's disgraceful. What's worse is that so few people seem concerned by the direction that we're heading in. Or don't even realise that we are heading in a direction. How long before everyone gets microchipped at birth, I wonder?