This morning, the news media are reporting a startling recommendation by one of the UK’s most senior judges: that the Police National DNA Database (NDNAD) should cover every citizen in the UK, and every person who visits the UK. You can listen to Lord Justice Sedley talking with the Information Commissioner on the BBC’s Today programme here.

Bioinformation can reveal extremely private information about an individual’s family relationships and physical health. As we wrote in our submission to the Nuffield Council of Bioethics consultation on the forensic use of bioinformation, the Open Rights Group opposes the DNA sampling of the entire population, and can see no circumstances under which it should be considered.

However, Lord Justice Sedley’s recommendation does highlight the urgent need to address the regulations governing the NDNAD. Currently, DNA records of innocent people, including thousands of children, are kept indefinitely. There is no clear process for getting your DNA records off the database once you have given them to police, even if you only did so as a witness to a crime. Ethnic minorities and young males are disproportionately represented on the database, which is already the largest of its kind in the world. Lord Justice Sedley is right to call the current state of the NDNAD “indefensible”.

If you want to find out more about the NDNAD, visit Genewatch UK’s excellent information and action page, which has lots of suggestions about how to get your voice heard on this issue, as well as information about how to get your records off the database.

ORG is just back from a weekend in Berlin planning digital rights campaigns with groups from across Europe.

European Digital Rights (EDRI) is an umbrella body for 25 groups (including ORG) from 16 countries that coordinate their work on European legislation affecting privacy, copyright and related issues. EDRI just held its general assembly and also co-organised a meeting of activists fighting data retention laws.

The main topics of discussion were the EU Data Retention Directive and how far it had been implemented in member states; EU progress on a new privacy framework for European law enforcement agencies; Internet filtering; and the current status of European attempts to criminalise intellectual property rights infringement. The UK is not alone in strong-arming Internet Service Providers into retaining information about their customers’ communications, and blocking access to sites alleged to contain child pornography. Denmark and Italy are also leading government efforts in these areas.

The campaigners at the meetings discussed possible ways to fight back against Internet censorship and surveillance. One plan under consideration is to develop an ISP code of best practice on customer privacy, based on EDRI-member GreenNet’s Privacy and Data Retention policy. EDRI plans to conduct a survey of ISP practices, national legislation and policies.

EDRI also welcomed the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a new member. EFF European Affairs Coordinator Erik Josefsson attended the meeting on EFF’s behalf.

A fuller report on these meetings will be included in the next EDRI-gram, which is always a useful resource for news of developments in Brussels and across the Council of Europe.

In a speech to the National Council of Voluntary Organisations this morning, Gordon Brown announced he would be convening a Speaker’s conference on voting reform:

Today I am proposing to the Speaker that he calls a conference to consider, against the backdrop of a decline in turnout, a number of important issues, such as electoral registration, weekend voting, and the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons.

The Speakers Conference could also examine, in parallel with the Youth Citizenship Commission, whether we should lower the voting age to 16, so that we build upon citizenship education in schools and combine the right to vote with the legal recognition of when young adults become citizens.

Notice that remote electronic voting is absent from the (albeit non-exhaustive) list of potential topics for discussion. This is unusual, as increases in voter turnout is the most often-supplied reason for introducing e-voting into the UK electoral system (even though evidence to support this assumption is rarely forthcoming).

The Governance of Britain green paper produced by the Ministry of Justice before Parliament’s Summer recess mentions remote electronic voting specifically (see para 150). Are the Electoral Commission’s recent recommendations (not to mention the observations of ORG’s volunteer electoral monitoring team) persuading Government to reconsider?

Is e-voting off the agenda?