You’d Need a Heart of Stone
A high-flying city lawyer was fired from her £150,000-a-year job after a ‘routine security check’ revealed her DNA was held on the national database – over a ‘false allegation’ made against her.
Lorraine Elliott said that she felt ‘gobsmacked and depressed’ after bosses spotted her file during ‘background clearance’ checks as she was just about to start work on a new project.
The mother-of-three today described her reputation as having been ‘tainted’ after she was dismissed from her post following the discovery of her DNA profile – despite never having been charged with an offence.
Terrible. Appalling. This is the disgraceful state of affairs brought about by the obsessive and paranoid database state. Is this not the very thing that those of us opposed to the creeping surveillance state warned about? If my response seems a little light on gravitas, it’s because of this:
Ms Elliott was just about to take up working on the government’s own national identity card scheme which required the routine checks to be made before she was ‘cleared’ for the role.
Oh, my. Oh, my. The irony. Delicious.
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Update: The link to the Mail seems not to be working.
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Update: The Economic Voice has more.
This effectively creates a new class of criminal, the ‘guilty innocents’. We used to have a system where you were either guilty or you were innocent. Now you can be left in limbo for 6 years. Remember also that the government’s original plans, but for the intervention of the EU, was for indefinite holding of DNA! Food for thought.
Had she not been going for a job that requires police background clearances she may well never have realised the repercussions of these new rules. Most people will just dismiss this as an isolated case to be ignored, but it could easily happen to anyone by just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just because it may happen infrequently doesn’t make it right.
Quite. Remember, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
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Update: The Telegraph elucidates further.
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