DNA legislation: how the courts view your identity.

As part of a job application last month I wrote a draft blog post about DNA legislation. I thought I would put it here for posterity’s sake:

Last month the United States Supreme Court made a ruling that was in direct opposition to the European Court of Human Rights. The ruling, bought by the case ‘Maryland vs King’, was in regard to the collection of DNA of those in custody. It held that ‘taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment’. In contrast, the case ‘S and Marper v United Kingdom’, brought to the European Court of Human Rights in 2008, ruled that DNA collection of those in custody was in direct breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees ‘the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’. In the ruling the

European Court said Article 8 ‘would be unacceptably weakened if the use of modern scientific techniques in the criminal justice system were allowed at any cost and without carefully balancing the potential benefits of the extensive use of such techniques against important private-life interests’.  This disagreement between the courts highlights the ethical ambiguities that have arisen from the widespread adoption of DNA databases in the last 15 years.  Where should we draw the line between the state’s duty to maintain law and order and the individual’s right to privacy?

Data Compression: What it is and how it works

Data compression is used everywhere. Mp3, mp4, rar, zip, jpg and png files (along with many others) all use compressed data. Without data compression a 3 minute song would be over 100Mb and a 10 minute video would easily be over 1Gb. Data compression condenses large files into much smaller ones. It does this by getting rid of data that isn’t needed while retaining the information in the file.

Does that mean information is different to data? Yes. Lets take an example: I ask Bob who won the Arsenal game. He then launches into a 30 minute monologue about the match, detailing every pass, throw-in, tackle etc. Right at the end he tells me Arsenal won. I only wanted to know who won, so all the data Bob gave me about the game was useless. He could have compressed the data he sent into two words, ‘Arsenal won’, because that’s all the information I needed. Data compression works on the same principle.