Fuckwittery From David Aranovitch

David Aranovitch, writing in the Times, appears to be auditioning for the Guardian, positing as he does, a highly illiberal approach to our liberty. Indeed, the every title of the piece sets the tone (but, so does my riposte…):

Ignore the paranoid fantasists

Ah, yes, the cry so often used by Neil Harding; those of us who oppose the database state are mentally ill. No, we are not mentally ill, we can see perfectly clearly the dangers inherent in the obsessive data gathering going on. Accusing us of being paranoid is merely a cheap trick designed to shut down dissent.

It has become an intelligentsia default position, or IDP for short, that we in Britain are – as one of my favourite intellectuals put it the other day – “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”. The Oxford academic and writer Timothy Garton Ash told a BBC interviewer that more information was now collected by the State on British subjects than was available to the East German secret police, or Stasi, from their army of informers.

Hmm… Anti-intellectual, too. That we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society is not some sort of paranoid fantasy, it is an observable fact. That this administration has not used it in the manner that, say, the East German one would have, does not mitigate the situation. We cannot know that future administrations will be benign. Better, therefore, not to give them the opportunity in the first place.

I hear this all the time. A very clever person said to me at the weekend that the ubiquity of CCTV meant that she felt “constantly watched”. This too is an IDP.

No, it is not – indeed, the term intelligentsia default position is a construct of Aranovitch’s and I’ll not recognise it as being a definition at all – it is a piece of bunkum this man has manufactured in order to undermine the position of those who disagree with him. It fits into the same camp as “islampohobe” – designed as it is to shut down debate. There is no such thing as IDP. The reason this “very clever” person feels constantly watched is because CCTV has become so pervasive it creates a panopticon effect. Those who dismiss this feeling of unease as paranoia display their own ignorance of human psychology – Aranovitch being one such.

It shouldn’t have surprised me then that last week a pitbull national radio interviewer failed to ask the most basic question of a woman who was arguing for the dismantling even of the DNA database that we currently possess.

He could have asked her about the case of the Dearne Valley rapist, for example. Between 1983 and 1986 James Lloyd raped four women and attempted to rape two others in South Yorkshire. He was never caught, his victims never received any kind of justice, nor was society protected from him. Until, in 2006, a cold case review led to the attacker’s DNA being closely linked with 43 samples on the national DNA database. One of those was Lloyd’s sister, whose DNA had been taken when she was convicted of drink-driving in 2000.

I’m inclined to say; “so fucking what?” to this piece of nonsense. One case does not make an argument for eroding the privacy of a whole population. It is disproportionate. Those of us opposed to expansion of the DNA database are not arguing for its removal, we are insisting that it should only carry information on people convicted of crimes. That is a reasonable position to take. As I pointed out a day or so ago, keeping the DNA of 60 million people will create unnecessary noise and lead to false positives and inevitably miscarriages of justice. To those who believe that it could not happen to them, it being a simple matter of someone else’s problem, there is a nasty shock waiting in the wings. Well, I for one, have no desire to be detained at her majesty’s pleasure for years on end awaiting the outcome of an appeal because plod got it wrong. Far better that they do not have my DNA in the first place, that way they can’t make the mistake and I get to keep my liberty. After all, we have this quaint concept of innocent until proven guilty. Not something Aranovitch seems to value.

The use of DNA evidence in tracing and – last week – convicting both the Ipswich murderer Steve Wright and the necrophiliac Mark Dixie was further proof, as far as they were concerned, of the benefits of as large a database as possible.

Bollocks! It is proof of no such thing. David Aranovitch appears to think that CSI is a documentary programme. DNA is useful as a form of evidence. It can, at best, demonstrate that an individual was at the crime scene. It does not “prove” guilt. The larger the database, the more noise is introduced. The more likely that innocent people will be pulled in and questioned for no good reason. It will make for lazy policing. And, I cannot reiterate this enough – such is the faith that people have in DNA, juries will convict the innocent because their DNA at the scene “proved” their guilt.

This officer was then accused by Ms Chakrabarti, in a display of genuine chutzpah, of “using high-profile cases like the murder of Sally Anne [Bowman] to showboat”, and a spokesman from another group, Justice, spoke of the “grave injustice” of using the Wright case to argue for the taking of samples from “innocent” people.

The only chutzpah I see here is from Aranovitch who demonstrates his own lack of rectitude with each dismal line that he writes. The man is an idiot and Chakrabati was spot on.

But what of the trade-off? Garton Ash hinted that there was one when, in a recent article, he rather uncharacteristically told “nanny” that she could “eff off to East Germany. I’d rather stay a bit more free, even if it means being less safe.” In the case of shrinking the DNA database that preference would certainly leave Lloyd still unpunished for rape and Steve Wright quite possibly could have killed again.

See? We must be “safe” no matter what the cost to innocent people who may be locked up while the guilty go free. Garton Ash is right, the illusion of safety is not worth the loss of liberty and only a terminally ignorant fuckwit would think otherwise. Step forward, David Aranovitch, you win this month’s Neil Harding award for totalitarian fuckwittery. Well done. Now go fuck off to some totalitarian hell-hole that practices the type of illiberal behaviour that you appear to wish imposed upon the rest of us. Oh, and while you are at it, have you nipped down to your local nick and volunteered your DNA? If not, why not?

So would Garton Ash really rather be freer and less safe to the extent of having less chance of catching a rapist or murderer?

Yes. Absolutely. Unequivocally. Rather free in the jungle and taking my chances than life in a gilded cage.

It’s a brave position, but he and other upholders of the IDP should now be asked to spell it out.

It is not brave, it is pragmatic. It is a realisation of just what the alternative means. And I did just spell it out.

Then we would see that one problem is how to assess the rights of victims of crime, as well as potential victims. How do we measure my right not to feel discomfited by CCTV or DNA testing, against that of, say, Justine Kelly, who was 18 – one year older than my oldest daughter – when she was raped by Lloyd, and who said that seeing him sentenced “and facing a life sentence has helped me to finally feel at rest”.

This is a non sequitur as well as an appeal to emotion. Such decisions should be devoid of such consideration – that is how law is supposed to work. There is no “right” not to be a victim of crime. If we become victims of crime, then it is reasonable to have in place a criminal justice system that identifies the perpetrator and punishes them. Removing them from society if necessary. A nationwide DNA database is not only fraught with technical difficulty as pointed out by one of the commenters on this article:

DNA testing does not profile the whole genome, just a few markers on it. That means it is not infallible – there’s about a one in 10 million chance of two strangers having the same DNA match. That chance is much higher for people who are related especially siblings and parents/chlidren. So stick 60 million people on a register and for each crime you’re going to throw up 6 matches from random people unconnected to the crime and probably a few more from relatives of the individual. All but one of whom are innocent but will inevitable be treated as suspects – not because they were seen near the scene of the crime, or had a motive or connection with the victim, but simply on the basis of a random DNA match.

A point Aranovitch appears too stupid to comprehend, but is massively disproportionate – the general population is no more inclined to be criminally minded than any other population.

As it happens I don’t feel “watched” by CCTV

Well, bully for you.

and I think it is a paranoid fantasy to imagine that we are “under surveillance” in the way that informers kept the Stasi up to date with the conversations of their subjects.

Ah, yes, the old Neil Harding trick again – we are all mentally ill. It is not paranoid fantasy; it is observable fact. We are under surveillance. Some of us would rather that we were not. Where we go, with whom we go and what we do when we get there is no one else’s business.

I also believe it is perverse to shun biometrics that merely give real effect to ineffective measures we have long taken in this country, such as insisting on car numberplates and passport photos.

Oh what a bollockbrain this fuckwit is. Biometrics are not a holy grail. They are at best, a juvenile technology. The government’s own trials revealed that they were unreliable. Our biometrics belong to us, it is up to us how we use them. So, for example, I’m happy to use my thumbprint instead of a password on my computer, while I would vigorously oppose any attempts by government to obtain that information. It is mine, I share confidential information only with those who are trustworthy. Government does not come into that category – again, this is an observable fact.

“We should not hold information on innocent people,” says that unlikely IDPer, David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, lest we become “a nation of suspects”. On that basis let us burn our passports and smash our numberplates.

Well hello Arty McStrawman, it’s been a while since I saw you. Aranovitch appears to have been taking debating lessons from Neil Harding and makes as much sense. David Davis is absolutely right; the government does not need this information and should not be gathering it. That the state gathers some information is not an excuse for them gathering yet more. Such an argument is arrant claptrap.

As to innocence, well most of us are innocent. But Lloyd’s family never suspected him of rape, Wright’s wife was sure he couldn’t be a murderer, and Dixie’s friends had not an inkling of his capacity for extreme sexual violence. There has never yet been a would-be bomber whose family didn’t proclaim his normality.

This is a variation of the old nothing to hide, nothing to fear mantra so beloved of the hard of thinking. We must prove to the state that we are, indeed, who we say we are and prove to the state that we are indeed, innocent. Bollocks to that. I am under no obligation to prove any such thing.

A database of existing offenders in particular categories also means that certain ethnic groups are far more likely to be recorded than others, and therefore are far more likely to be successfully prosecuted in future. The Sheffield appellants case is partly based on a claim under Article 14 – the right to non-discrimination – of the convention.

This was why, in September 2007, Sir Stephen Sedley, one of the judges at the original appeal, argued that the existing system was “indefensible” and called for an extension of the database to all British citizens and UK visitors. For which, of course, he was immediately set upon. But I think he was right; and no, I won’t eff off to East Germany.

Sedley was wrong, too. You do not deal with discrimination by extending the discrimination, for fuck’s sake.

Well, no, effing off to East Germany won’t do much good, the Stasi ain’t there any more. I recommend North Korea, it should be much more to your liking. Much as I despise politicians (you noticed) journalists such as Aranovitch come a close second. I can tolerate ignorance and stupidity – but ignorance, stupidity and the blatant flag waving for totalitarianism in a national newspaper is a disgrace.

David Aranovitch, totalitarian idiot and fuckwit.