There is a certain economy to the way in which non-governmental reports seem to be commissioned these days. Yesterday the Joseph Rowntree Reform Foundation published a report - Database State - variously described as coming from a “panel of experts” and as being “the first comprehensive review of Britain's major databases”. One of its authors, Ross Anderson, told reporters that the nation's “database state has become a financial, ethical and administrative disaster”.

The economy I referred to comes from this having been Professor Anderson's view before he was ever commissioned to survey the issue, let alone report on it. Like almost every other member of the report's team he is part of a body called the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a charity one of whose purposes is to combat what it considers to be the pernicious spread of the “database state”. The FIPR, which was commissioned by Rowntree, has on its advisory council the excellent Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, and the tireless Phil Booth, of the anti-ID card campaigning group, No2ID.

I am not impugning the nobility of the cause or the intellectual integrity of those espousing it. The point I am making is that, as far as I can see, not a single member of the report team came to the table with a contrary view. Nevertheless, their report was treated as though it had emerged from a body of dispassionate academics engaged in open inquiry.

Nor am I in a position to quarrel with their assessment of all the 46 governmental databases that they whip through in extra-quick time in their 44 pages of analysis (the rest being introduction, glossaries and appendices). I can summarise by saying that they give these systems a traffic-light triage, in which ten get red lighted and are recommended for scrapping or redesigning, 29 are on amber and only six are pronounced to be kosher.

So I took one example from the red-light ten - the National DNA Database, which the report described as “holding DNA profiles for approximately 4 million individuals, over half a million of whom are innocent (they have not been convicted, reprimanded, given a final warning or cautioned, and have no proceedings pending against them) - including more than 39,000 children”.

I want you to hold that word “innocent” in your mind as we proceed. The report is, in one way, pushing at an open door, since the present structure of the DNA database has effectively been ruled illegal. At the end of last year the European Court of Human Rights judged that the retention of the DNA of two people (one a minor), both originally suspects in crimes but never brought to trial, was contrary to their right to privacy. The court's reasoning was based, in essence, on two beliefs: that DNA contains so much information that its “retention per se” interfered with the right for respect for one's private life; and that DNA could be used to establish genetic relationships between people and that this capacity in itself rendered retention an interference with private lives.

The current database is an accreted system, in which those who have come into contact with the law and whose DNA has been taken, have tended to stay on the database. Some of these very accretions have been responsible for the solving of cases, including murder and serial rape. No one, as far as I know, disputes this. Even so the European Court described the retention of both the DNA and the fingerprints of the two appellants as “blanket and indiscriminate”, a “disproportionate interference” and “unnecessary in a democratic society”.

What the Rowntree report doesn't tell readers was that the case had come before the European Court precisely because the law lords had originally dismissed it in 2004. We'll return to that, after asking what the Rowntree authors now want done. Because they don't say, exactly. They do say that the existing DNA database should either be scrapped or redesigned, but they don't suggest how. I phoned one of the authors and asked him, but he charmingly admitted that he didn't know. He spoke a bit about Orwell and Kafka and his “fear of the State that can never forget anything”.

It was with some surprise that I also discovered that he and his co-authors had never really interrogated the fact that their use of the word “innocent” implied that others were “guilty”. Now, the DNA database does not exist primarily to solve old crimes for which people have been convicted, but to be ready to help to solve new ones. Should a sample on the database match one at a crime scene - or fail to - then someone may be suspected or eliminated from suspicion.

So what on earth does “innocence” in this context mean? As Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood put it in his contribution to the 2004 judgment by the law lords, if one fears Orwellian misuse of samples “it would apply no less to samples taken from the convicted as from the unconvicted and logically, therefore, it would involve the destruction of everyone's samples”.

Given that we are talking about unsolved crimes, and not those for which people with criminal records have been convicted, we must ask why - in the implied view of the Rowntree authors (and of David Davis, Chris Huhne of the Lib Dems and almost all the other civil liberties bandwagon jumpers) - any one person should be regarded as, prima facie, more guilty than any other.

The answer can only be expedience. If DNA retention is a breach of privacy for the reasons that the European Court gives, it is equally a breach for those convicted of crimes, as it for those who have never been charged or found guilty. A just society would surely regard it as “proportionate” to treat everyone in the same way. The civil libertarians must know this, but are not prepared to defend the unpopular - convicts - from such unique treatment. They are, in that sense, cowards.

Some of our judges have long believed that treating the convicted as though they were automatically more guilty of a future offence than the unconvicted, was unsustainable. One or two have, as a consequence, supported a universal database in which we are all equally guilty and therefore equally innocent. Others, such as the senior law lord whom I met last week, regret the European Court's decision and regard the current muddling-through as the fairest system you're realistically likely to be able to construct.

But it is a fantastic irony, and a testament to the stupidity of the way this debate has been conducted, that the DNA database the Rowntree authors and their cohorts seem to have ended up supporting, by default, is the most discriminatory of all. Perhaps in future they should try discussing these things with people who don't agree with them.

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