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California Initiative to Expand DNA Database
vervais_sucks writes "A California attorney is personally bankrolling, to the sum of $1.3m, an initiative to require law enforcement to take DNA samples of every person they arrest for a felony." The (lengthy) initiative is available here (search for DNA on the page).
If you want to use something as evidence you have to have the real thing. You can still use the hash for quick lookup, though.
I know someone who's a convicted felon. Want to know what the conviction is for? Graffiti.
That's right, he sprayed graffiti on someone's house when he was 18 and now he's a felon for life. And he gets a DNA sample taken.
How about people with more than $200 of pot on them? People who accidentally cut fiberoptic cables while digging in their backyards?
Do people not realize how idiotic laws are in this country? More than 30 states still consider it a felony to have sex out of wedlock!
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
You don't need to be charged with a thing if you are driving with a license, you have already given consent to have a blood and/or a hair sample taken because of the contract you signed with the state agreeing to your legal ward position and under their care to be permitted to travel.
..." yada yada, that's enough.
It's in effect in all 50 states and in DC now. Some areas are already doing this at "random courtesty checkpoints", where everyone is stopped and checked, and if you refuse, they are authorised the use of force to make you comply, all the way to strapping you down. This initiative in california is just a way to mandate a sampling procedure at every (felony) *arrest*, but it's already legal to do so at every traffic stop-no matter the reason,no arrest is required, no charges, merely if they choose to do it, they can mutter "suspicion of
FWIW/YMMV
The ACLU is doing what they can to slow or stop it.
Here's some informative blog entries:
http://www.jefallbright.net/node/view/1780
http://www.socallawblog.com/archives/001186.html
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
They already do.
a few years back i was falsely accused of breaking into and thieving half a dozen houses in broad daylight. a felony crime.
well, there i am, at home in my pajamas one morning and a knock at the door. two police officers, one local, one state trooper, ask if they can come in. being completely naive and a bit frightened i let them in.
they tell me that half a dozen homes were robbed in broad daylight and that neighbors said they saw a man fitting my dark complexion driving up and down the street days in advance of the robberies.
i explain (to no avail) to the officers that i had been on that road exactly *once* in my life (the day before) when i accompanied my girlfriend to her friend's home to feed her cat while she was away.
the officers didn't care what i had to say and they proceeded to play good-cop bad-cop and tell some enormous lies about me in the process. one of them asked if he could use my bathroom and then proceeded to case my home.
then they told me that they needed to take my picture and fingerprint all of my fingers. after about one hour they finally left.
after a few weeks had passed (in which i heard nothing from the police) i called the police department to find out what was going on. it took a couple weeks to get through the police bureaucracy, but eventually someone was able to tell me that i was no longer under suspicion.
when i expressed concern about having my picture and fingerprints taken and said i wanted them back i was told that wasn't possible. after expressing my displeasure and complaining to various people in the police department eventually my picture and fingerprints were released to me.
unfortunately, my friend who is a police officer told me that my picture and fingerprints had been scanned and sent to the national FBI database. when i asked him about having them removed from that database he gave me a look that indicated the possibility of that happening was as likely as a cold day in hell.
that experience taught me how easy it is to have your unique unchangeable biometric information stolen and forever stored in government databases just waiting to be abused.
The kind of evidence viewed in court is actually a photograph of electro-migration(?) gel of actual DNA that has been cut up by some emzines. There used to be a real zoo of quasi-standards = different emzines showing different 'markers'. A 'match' of course implies the same testing proceedure for the DNA from the crime scene and suspect.
Now in the proposal under discussion, it kind of suggest that since they are talking about doing 'searches' (for matches) they are possibly only talking about saving the results of 'processed' DNA (not the actual DNA sample). If this is the case then it somewhat implies unifying everything under one testing proceedure (one set of emzines and 'markers'). This somewhat limits what can be viewed/stored. ie. a good test for some kind of cancer might be a rather poor test for identity or things like paternity.
In summary, storing on a computer the results of a specific DNA test for identity is NOT the same as storing all those various test that have been developed for pathology. It is a shame, also, that in a few years we will almost certainly have better DNA test (better emzines, markers, machines) and better DNA test for identity. But the money and time will have already been spent building a data base using obsolete technology.
I am a corrections officer, in a southern state.
We DNA anyone brought in for a felony, or when their charge is one of several on a special list, like Battery on a Teacher, Anything having to do with Domestic Violence, etc.
We DNA through a Buccal Swab (Cheek cell swab with a big Q-tip). If and when someone is convicted, they are DNA'ed again, with a blood sample.
The database is never purged, and once in, you are in. Period.
Do I agree? I take these samples, and when they trained us, we swabbed each other. I made damn sure my swabs went in the garbage. Let's leave it at that.
Computer Geek Turned Cop, Oh, the irony.
As a registered voter in the state of California (Oakland), I wish to express my concern regarding your DNA initiative. As such a policy will likely be emulated by other states in the future, I must request a strong system of checks and balances be implemented to protect citizens from potential abuse, as amending them after-the-fact will be difficult. It is important that such measures look far into the future when determining regulation.
I am aware that your proposed policy is, in part, to aid in the capture of criminals by scanning suspects in advance of a trial. I agree that this would be of great benefit in many cases. However, I must suggest that it is a violation to persons wrongfully arrested, as they will then have their DNA committed to file without cause. Even with provisions requiring that DNA samples for persons acquitted of wrong doing be destroyed, such a system has too great a potential for abuse.
My requests are simple and do not inhibit the usefulness of such a system:
1. DNA should only be taken from CONVICTED felons, rather than on arrest. This protects innocent citizens who are wrongfully arrested.
2. DNA samples must be expressly limited to criminal identification, without the possibility of use by other organizations (employers, insurance companies, etc). Also, future technologies and methods of identifying potentially violent or aggressive predisposition in suspects may also one day be abused in profiling, creating an unfair bias.
3. All DNA matches must be proven in a double-blind test by an independent party, to prevent corruption of evidence.
4. DNA samples should only be taken in relation to violent crime and other extraordinary circumstances. Felony charges for fraud, wire tampering, and other white collar crimes do not warrant DNA samples at present, regardless of their nature.
Thank you for your consideration,
Signature
***
I would encourage other Californians to send similar concerns to Mr. Harrington (please don't flame him).
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
well i live in california and had the unfortunate luck to walk around the corner just after a felony had been committed, and wouldn't you know it i matched the perp's description. although i was never arrested, it was close. it was only my age and clean record that kept the law at bay. the detective kept calling me at work and home, laughing at me on the phone, threatening to have me dragged from my workplace or home in handcuffs if i would not cop to a lesser charge. he assured me he could convict me, and that my guilt or innocence meant no difference to him. after awhile (about three calls) i said "charge me, so i can turn myself in, but stop calling me at work or home. let's get this overwith". he stopped calling and i never heard of it again. needless to say, i am pretty much left-of-center now and have little or no trust of the police or the government of my state (california) or my country (the USA). to me, the people running the government of this state and country are incompetents that deserve, well, to be homeless at a minimum, something far worse (say jail) at a maximum. have a nice day everyone, i hope it doesn't happen to you!
In fact, most forensic DNA work was originally done using RFLP mapping, which doesn't involve sequencing anything at all. Sequencing is relatively recent. Most (all?) of the databases are still based on RFLP.
If you bothered to read the literature, you'd find that there's been a great deal of study of exactly how reliable it is in various circumstances. Also, if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that there's no a priori reason to care about what percentage of the genome is examined; the question is how much variability there is in the part that is examined. Additional variability in the unexamined parts has nothing to do with the reliability of the test.
A criminologist is a social scientist who deals with the motivations and social contexts of crimes. You are thinking of "criminalists", or "forensic DNA examiners", who are the people who do crime lab work.
I know a lot of these people personally; it so happens that one of my parents was involved in the development of forensic DNA from the beginning. Some of the people I know are involved with things like the Innocence Project. Some of them are private practitioners who typically testify for the defense; if those people have a bias, it's toward clearing people, not toward nailing the innocent.
I have never heard any of them say that they would never use DNA evidence to uniquely identify somebody. Not once.
I have heard many of them say, loudly and repeatedly, that there are circumstances under which they wouldn't use DNA to "finger" anybody, including, but probably not limited to, cases where there's a possibility that a close relative of the suspect was involved, cases where samples were degraded or contaminated. I've never heard them say that they'd never do it. I have heard them say, rather vehemently, that DNA is a lot more reliable than the old serological tests that put a lot of people into prison in the 1970s and 1980s.
Of course, DNA is also more reliable than eyewitnesses, but then almost anything is more reliable than an eyewitness.
No, you can't apply DNA, or any other technique, mechanically, but to say that it's intrinsically unusable is just silly. It's about the most reliable thing out there.
Think about how you're using it.
DNA also can tell you a lot more about a person than a fingerprint. Even if you don't have the person's DNA on file, you can still develop a profile of the person given a good DNA sample. You can get the person's race and sex, at the very least. All that having a fingerprint of a person tells you is that they have a finger.
This is complete BS. A DNA fingerprint does not work on the same markers that are used for determining these features. You will get the person's gender (e.g XX or XY) but that is it. It will not tell you that person's ethnicity, age, eye color, tendency to get diabetes in old age, or anything else that other genetic testing can determine.
It is just a pattern that happens to be unique to a particular individual (or set of individuals in the case of identitical twins) that came from a particular zygote.
Please keep the hysterical FUD to a minimum.
and I want non-convict DNA records to be deleted
That's a nice theory and in theory it's the way they do it with fingerprints but reality is somewhat different.
I found myself arrested for a felony I didn't commit and fingerprinted. Well $15,000 and a grand jury later the charges went away -- no conviction, no plea bargin, they were dismissed and/or dropped. New York State law requires them to return my fingerprints and all photographs to me (or destroy them).
That sounds just fine right? Nope -- guess what? Whenever you are arrested the policy agency typically forwards your fingerprints to the FBI -- the FBI isn't obligated to delete them if the charges turn out to be unfounded. The best thing that can happen is your state can "ask" them to delete them.
So now the Feds have my fingerprints -- not a damn thing I can do about it. Ponder that for a moment before you get all gung-ho about taking DNA samples (what's next? Retina scans?) of people when they are arrested. For my humble opinion it should be when they are convicted.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.