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Hat tip to a wonderful post from South Africa about Britain's surveillance culture in which Chris Rodrigues reminds us that it was Nicolae Ceausescu who often pushed the surveillance state in totalitarian Romania with the now much overused saying that "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to worry about".

We hear it all the time in Britain whenever someone starts complaining about the "surveillance state", as if just not being a criminal makes it okay to have your movements tracked, your DNA held on file or your telephone tapped. And yet again, in the wake of the two high profile convictions last week of Steve Wright and Mark Dixie, people have been calling for a full national DNA database.

Whilst it's not a terribly palatable subject, one wonders just how many DNA samples one might collect from a prostitute. Their work gets pretty intimate. One of these two fiends was on the existing database yet that doesn't seem to have been enough for the police - they want us all on the database, so they can trawl through every little sample they find at a crime scene, presumably using more computer power than Los Alamos to match up then round up casual crime scene visitors who will have nothing to do with the crime yet inevitably some will end up having to explain their innocent presence there.

No, it's time to call a halt to this expansion of the creepy, big brother state. My DNA is part of me. I may unwittingly leave bits of it lying around all over the place but to take some off me for cataloguing and storage is it seems to me a breach of habeas corpus. You're asking to hold a little bit of me in perpetuity, like a miniature electronic tag so you can reel me in whenever my DNA appears anywhere near a crime.

The fact is that Steve Wright and Mark Dixie were caught and were convicted. The existence or not of their DNA on a super-duper database doesn't seem to have prevented justice being done eventually. Good old police work was what did for them. That's where it should stop.

I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven.

Anyone not already outraged by the treatment meted out by the military, both British and American on our citizens from Tipton should have been watching:

The Road To Guantanamo: - Channel 4's new drama from multi award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom – The Road to Guantanamo – created huge international impact and won the prestigious Silver Bear for Direction for Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross in competition at The 56th Berlin International Film Festival.

...tonight.

You can say all you want about the necessity to do certain pretty nasty things in time of war, about rules of evidence not functioning properly in a foreign country you are trying to subdue, and who knows whether the lads from Tipton are telling the God's honest truth (though personally I am more inclined to believe them than all the FUD that comes out of the security services), but it seems to me that heads should roll for their treatment and that of others still in GTMO and other members of the gulag archipelago.

Impeaching Blair is too good for him. I hope he's watching and can still say what he said to Parky last week about conscience and being judged by history and his God.