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That just isn't quite right. Police officers have a legal duty to act as law enforcement officers while off-duty under a variety of circumstances. They are not just private citizens.

Example: Colorado Springs Police Department Operations Manual

http://www.aele.org/law/2007LRSEP/colo-springs.html

I don't know about that. Judging from this web site which purports to be "law enforcement training" written by Emory A. Plitt, Jr, Associate Judge of the Circuit Court in Bel Air, Maryland, you're wrong. Now, unless you're a lawyer or a judge with credentials equal to or greater than the Honorable Emory A. Plitt, Jr. then I think you lose this one.

Can an officer search a person at the time of arrest?

The Fourth Amendment allows a number of exemptions from the general rule that a warrant is needed to search. One of these exemptions is a search incident to an arrest. If the arrest is lawful, the search of the person arrested is lawful. There are two reasons for a search incident to an arrest: (1) to find and remove any objects or property which may be used as a weapon against the officer or others and (2) to seize any contraband or evidence of a crime which could be destroyed, lost, stolen, etc. if not immediately seized. These searches are considered to be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The search may occur immediately at the scene of the arrest and/or upon arrival at the station.

I'm pretty sure that saving a DNA swab does not fit into reasons 1 or 2, above.

Are there any general rules which apply to all strip and body cavity searches of arrested persons?

Like many situations that officers must deal with, there is no one Supreme Court case or other appellate court case or cases which set forth all the rules for you in one place. As a result of the many lawsuits over these kinds of searches, there are some general rules which apply to all such searches: ...

6) Strip searches should never be done randomly or at the whim of an officer;

7) The mere fact of an arrest does not allow a strip search or body cavity search just because the person was arrested;

Regarding fingerprinting, while the primary purpose of fingerprinting is identification, DNA is a whole different beast. For instance, DNA from a relative can be used to implicate someone else for a crime, and the use of DNA collected one person against someone who was never arrested is pretty clearly an egregious violation of privacy. Remember, it's not just the arrested person's privacy that you're violating, it's their entire family.

No, I don't think you understand HIPAA very well. It DOES allow for a number of disclosures without patient consent:

To law enforcement

To treating physicians and other clinicians, for public health activities, for health oversight purposes, to protect against personal and material harm

Even for marketing

And a raft of others.

This is not the bogeyman you are looking for.

Source, please. Pagers use a radio broadcast, IIRC it is not illegal to snoop them, especially considering there is no security barrier to break. Plus no warrant is required for law enforcement to snoop them either, which lends credence to the idea that they are public broadcasts.

It is illegal to record pager messages, as it constitutes a wiretap. A cellular phone is also a radio, but that doesn't mean that's a radio station. The difference is that a a radio station is intended for a wide audience, while a cellular phone call is a private conversation. It was also illegal to listen into the old unencrypted analog cordless phones that operated in the Mhz range and so could be picked up on police scanners.

You're simply mistaken to believe pagers taps don't require a warrant. It's a search, and was held as a wiretap as recently as 2008 by the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Quon v. Arch Wireless Oper. 2008.. Even EPIC lists "pagers" as one of the things they track in wiretap statistics.

motherload:
http://www.aele.org/law/Digests/empl94.html

For all the arguments that the world should be transparent and that information should be free.... where are the advocates for it in this scenario?

Innocent until proven guilty. DNA doesn't change that.

Anti-discrimination laws... DNA doesn't change that.

Potential to find out if you are pre-disposed towards certain preventable diseases? DNA does change that.

I say DNA should be taken at birth AND by law it should be analyzed and compared against the population. Also by law your DNA should not be allowed as a determining factor in any kind of discrimination. DNA should be taken again at puberty and at age of majority and then again each time you have to renew your ID in person (new picture every 8 years, new DNA sample).

DNA could be used as biometric ID when provided in person in a controlled environment and should be required to sign a long term contract of any sort. However it should be used like a password... blind comparison by the general public. A sample is taken then matched against the database... no details need be disclosed in general use.

No more major identity theft... no more getting a state ID based on a forged Birth Certificate and stolen SS card.

No more cuckolded husbands or boyfriends paying child support for another man's child.

No more bad credit due to ID theft or clerical mistakes.

No more hiring of a person only to find out that they have a history of litigating nuisance law suits fishing for settlement money.

No more mistaken rape charges, murder charges, etc.

As long as the data, DNA in this case is available to you as well as the government... I don't see any problem. Transparent data is neutral.

Privacy laws need to be updated to be about transparency of data rather than protecting the data from the government. Private citizens should have the exact same access to data collected about them that the government has. They need to be updated to have very strict language regarding abuse of access to said information so that low level gov workers who might have access will never use it except in a lawful and on a necessary basis.

The problem with fighting this sort of eventual legislation is that DNA is already being collected and will in the future be collected more and more whether for state purposes or medical purposes or commercial purposes. It (DNA) is way too useful for a variety of reasons to not be collected.... and we have no laws in place to guarantee that this information about you will not be abused.

If your DNA was a part of your medical record THEN it could be protected by existing laws regarding use of that information. If it was collected at birth or as a part of a standard physical then law enforcement would have to get a court order for the information much like finding out your blood type.

In fact HIPPA already covers this as far as providing evidence to law enforcement after an accident or as part of an investigation.

"..pain compliance verses the incapacitation ability..."

"..Drive Stun causes significant localized pain in the area touched by the TASER but does not have a significant effect on the central nervous system. The Drive Stun has a lesser chance of incapacitating a subject but may assist in taking a subject into custody."

This is relatively new. Until the 1990s, it was safe to talk to the FBI. But it no longer is.

So just keep insisting that you want your lawyer present. And you have to be very clear about it. Courts have held that "I think I should talk to a lawyer" is not sufficient to invoke the 6th amendment right to counsel. You have to make an unambiguous statement.

That's supposed to stop interrogation, but it doesn't always. Eventually, if you keep insisting, they usually give up and let you talk to a lawyer.