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What Will We Do With Innocent People's DNA?
NevDull writes "As creepy as it may be to deal with identity theft from corporate databases, imagine being swabbed for DNA samples as a suspect in a crime, being vindicated by that sample, and never even being told why you were suspected. This article discusses a man, Roger Valadez, who's fighting both to have his DNA sample and its profile purged from government records, and to find out why he and his DNA were searched in the BTK case. DA Nola Foulston said, 'I think some people are overwrought about their concerns.' -- convenient as she wasn't the one probed without explanation. The article then mentions that 'In California, police will be able in 2008 to take DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony, whether the person is convicted or not, under a law approved by voters in November.' What will be the disposition of the DNA of the innocent?"
Do some analyses to enable you to categorize from an unlabeled sample.
<cyn> Imagine how useful that could be!</cyn>
I think some people are overwrought about their concerns.
Yes, I am.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I don't think it's really about samples - the man hardly needs his skinflakes or his hair bits back and he sheds it all around anyway. As for the data it represents? Why, "we" keep it forever, of course. He is just the first in line, I'm willing to bet that within 20 years "we" will have a database of DNA samples from all "our" citizens - or whoever accepts my bet wins my slightly weathered tinfoil hat.
Getting a driver license gets you fingerprinted and yur picture taken in many places, including California. Yes, we will keep these things forever, just in case.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
"What will be the disposition of the DNA of the innocent?"
Wait, let me guess. Same as the disposition of the photographs and fingerprints of the innocent?
I don't get it. How is the potential for abuse any higher just because the sample is DNA? To me, the benefits of being able to solve a years old case based on DNA samples outweighs the risks of abuse within the system. Lets give the cops the tools they need to put the crooks away. Just make sure there are no loopholes in the law that would allow the government, as well as insurance companies and the like to access and use the results to discriminate against people.
everyone is always a potential suspect.
What of the poor sap who has an affair with someone who happens to get raped/murdered on her way home.
That his sperm has been found in her body and definitly matches means he's guilty?
How do you prove you had consentual sex with a now dead women. There are many such instances were the DNA found at the scene does not mean guilt. It seems to be the rule of thumb these days. If the DNA is there you are deemed guilty.
if the people have given the state the right to spy on them, tag them, track, divide and thus conquer them, then the people have lost their innocence. it will be difficult to find it again because corruption doesn't kill innocence, it defaces it and leaves it the subject of mockery. in this way, the mean spirited ride the tides of entropy over their and in fact all unborn children.
can corruption be eased-off, or must it be broken?
"No one is innocent!" --Agent Rogersz, Repo Man
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Here is a big difference. While your kids are going to have totally different fingerprints and even pictures, their DNA to you will be largely similar. So by taking your DNA, you are putting your kids and your relatives in the database as well. If there is a partial match with someone in the database, they will just go after all his relatives and eventually find the right one. They just got a recent mass murder case solved when a daughter of a suspect volunteered to give a DNA sample, when he refused.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
While I was in the US Navy, they started a DNA cataloging program, which they claimed was only intended to help identify people in the case of death. They claimed that the information would never be shared and would be discarded after discharge.
It has been 8 years since I was discharged. Want to bet that my information is available to law enforcement, even though I have never been convicted or accused of a crime?
That's one fingerprint. It helps you verify that a cooperative person actually the license holder. However, it is of little use for forensic purposes.
Blair is also trying to compulsorily fingerprint everyone and tie together ALL the computerised data held on people through a unique National Identity Number.
Oh, he's also going to track our daily movements through automatic CCTV facial recognition & the ID Card audit trail.
This law has been passed by House of Commons and is currently being debated in the House of Lords. Unless the Lords block it, I'm emigrating somewhere less Orwellian. Anyone want to swap citizenship? I'm serious...
All of this means that any law or policy that increases data collection is not only dangerous, but the data usually gets used for other things beyond the original purpose - information *does* want to be free. Anything that hangs an unique identifier on data, such as a National ID Card Number (or SSN, or SIN, or driver's license number), makes it easy for data to be imported into other systems and aggregated together. Anything that hangs a non-unique ID onto something, like a firstname+lastname, increases the chances that data will be imported into other systems incorrectly, combining your data with known criminal SameFirstInitial+DifferentMiddleInitial+SimilarLas tname who lives in a different city. In both cases, you'll never get the data expunged.
On the other hand, Moore's Law also means that applications that used to be unthinkable are now routine. When mainframes costs tens of millions of dollars and needed to be fed punchcards and stored stuff on magtape, writing database applications took a couple of years and a large budget, so only critical applications that could be used by lots of people got written. These days, a cheap desktop computer can hold lots more data, and any random civil servant can run a Spreadsheet query or simple fill-out-the-form database application for anything they feel like, such as tracking their ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend's phone bills. And most of that data could really fit in a pocket-computer as well, so next year that same civil servant or telemarketer can take a picture of your face or license plate using their camera-phone and look it up for some arbitrary reason (currently it takes a laptop for the license-plate lookup, and it's being done to nail parking ticket non-payers.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you don't want to use an M80 just get a spritzer bottle full of some DNA containing fluid and spray it everywhere all over a crime scene. I wonder if you could extract DNA sequences from barber shop cuttings and do this?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Do we want a society, where just being born with certain genes is enough to warrent government keeping tabs on that person?
In pretty much every society your genes alraedy make a big difference. In certain parts of North America, for instance, those of us with dark skin or certain "looks" are more readily suspected of crimes than others. The new advances in DNA will just make this discrimination more applicable to white people as well. Maybe that's a good thing, it'll make the existing problem much more obvious.
And in many places (Michigan, Illinois) it doesn't require a fingerprint and they don't store the photograph except on the license.
Ironic that the places with *incredible* problems with machine politics are the ones whose policies are more protective of the citizenry, isn't it?
(Excepting of course the sad tendency of Chicago cops to get promoted for beating the heads of innocent citizens to a pulp, and the sad tendency of Detroit politicians to never have to actually *do* anything to improve their city and still getting re-elected.)
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
(Puts on tin-foil hat)
They could also compare DNA to aptitude tests, and found out what genetically makes a soldier good. Not that this would be used for making gentically modified soldiers (god forbid), but it could come in useful when recruiting.
When properly used, this is not a problem. "Properly used" means that you find your suspects using traditional methods, and afterwards run a DNA test on them. Get a match there, and you've got your criminal. It's a Bayesian thing, basically.
What is not proper is to start with DNA, and test the criminal's against all the people you happen to have DNA on file for, looking for a match.
Using DNA to find suspects is only good when you either have a comprehensive database that has DNA from everyone, or your tests are so accurate that they really do uniquely identify people. Like I said, I don't know if they are accurate enough for that. A few years ago, they were not.
How is DNA any different?
Who says it is?.
This same argument has been going on in regards of what to do with photographs and fingerprints of people after they are aquitted.
After a person is cleared on the offence there is no additional benefit to society to keep their personal information which outweighs the invasion of privacy that person suffers for having that information be on the "Record".
For an innocent person, having their fingerprints show up in a criminal database is an invasion of privacy. That is their personal data which the state took from them without their consent.
Insofar as the legal system is founded on the principle of presumption of innocence and respect for the rule of law. A person who is aquitted ought to be left alone as much as possible, and free to go about their business as if they were never accused in the first place.
There is no legal status in this society of "innocent, but not really".
As for your contention that EVERYONE gets fingerprinted. That is not necessarily true.
As least in Canada, there is discretion on the police as to whether or not they choose to take fingerprints. They have the authority in certain cases, but they can skip it if they dont see any necessity.
I would be suprised if most jurisdictions had a rule which said police MUST take fingerprints even if they dont want to.
incidentally.. in Canada, the policy of police departments (at least RCMP and Toronto Police) is to destroy or return fingerprints and photos of a person if they are aquitted of all charges upon request.
It is that policy (to destroy on request) which caused the Ontario Supreme Court to rule that the law allowing fingerprint retention on any basis was constitutional. It is likely I think, that if police started refusing to destroy fingerprints on an ad hoc basis, then the Court would rule that they must.
anyway.. this is Canadian law which few of you care about.
Look up R. v. Dore if you care about details.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
'In California, police will be able in 2008 to take DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony, whether the person is convicted or not, under a law approved by voters in November.
This bugs me for a different reason. Will they be able to do this whether there was any DNA evidence at the scene of the crime or not. Seems like profiling rather than detection.
What about the guy from the blood bank, who needs money? He just took my blood, but steals the pack instead of putting with everyone else's. Now he can withdraw from my account, because after all, it's *my* blood, and only I would be using it to withdraw cash!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
In the US whats the law on criminal records - do you have access to everything the police have on you? can they give it to other people? This is gonna be a very important issue especially if finger-print scanners make it big - which i think is a very bad idea, using biometrics means a) if someone gets a copy theres no way to 'change your biometric pin number' and b) stealing your biometrics can mean cutting off your finger.
You need to at least have the right to know exactly what personal data any organisation has on you (a right enjoyed by the EU)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The problem is that unlike a fingerprint where I can throw it up on a projector in the court room and show the crime scene sample against my own and demonstrate to the jury that the DA is so desperate to convict me for a crime I didn't commit, they're willing to claim my fingerprint is a match on one point.
Harder to do that with DNA. Instead, you get some "expert" coming in to say "yes, the DNA matched." And then you end up like Houston, with dozens of cases that turned out to be total bullshit. Hundreds of DNA retests, probably at taxpayer expense. Stories like this one where even after finding out the guy couldn't have matched the semen from the rape kit, keeping the guy around because he was picked from a lineup way back at the beginning and the victim doesn't want to change her mind and the DA only believes DNA evidence when it boosts his conviction count, and he finds it more convenient to shuffle the case to someone else than to take the heat for that view himself.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
So you'd be for cameras in every house too because it might help solve just one crime right? Why not..thats what your logic leads to.
If you had bothered to RTFA, you'd know that out of 18 DNA-drag nets, only ONE actually helped collar someone...and it was limited to 25 people that had access to the victim. The rest (where thousands of samples were collected) DID NOT HELP AT ALL.
So, whats the point?
in the Baton Rouge Serial Killer case. Out of more than ten thousand tips, about 14 were about me. This is because I'm a usenet troll and death metal drummer/lyricist.
I just hope they don't use it against me in the future...
BeDoper - We're not just about BeOS anymore.
Oh, I laugh...
i le.php?id=07
While I understand where you are coming from, I think you may be naive to the point of stupidity.
You would come forward as a good person, as a good citizen, as someone who seeks the truth.
The police have no such agenda. Their agenda is to provide society with a sense of law and order. That they regularly pin crimes on the most likely suspect is proof of the fact. No one knows the truth, the truth is rarely "outed" during a trial. We solve crimes by pinning them on the most likely person. It gives the appearance of law and order. The most likely suspect is often merely the last person to a see a victim alive, a close family member, a husband, a good friend. God help you if you fail to have an alibi, if you were sitting at home alone watching TV.
Now I could give a shit about Scott Peterson, but take the example anyhow. Scott Peterson had a pregnant wife, Laci. Many couples become estranged during a wife's pregnancy. Scott took a lover, Amber Frey. Juries don't like cheaters. Cheaters are liars and untrustworthy. FWIW, a very large number of people cheat all the time and we all know that fact. Laci was eventually found in the San Francisco bay, a place where Scott Peterson went boating on Xmas eve. Now, I don't know about you - but many people made much of the fact that Scott went boating on that day - as if it were beyond belief that someone would do such a thing just because he needed to get away or to think for a while. To wrap up, Scott Peterson was convicted because he was cheating on his wife, and was seen boating on the vast body of water in which Laci's body was later discovered. I am not saying that there aren't more details, but those are the main details.
They pinned it on him and gave him the thumbs down routine. The man will die largely based on mere speculation. There's not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence in the whole case. There's an alternate defense explanation for everything the prosecution claims.
A culture of spectacle and sacrifice doesn't care about the truth, it cares about appearances. We pin crimes on the most likely to be guilty, not those that are truly guilty. And there may be a universe of difference between those two categories. Is Scott Peterson "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"? Hell no, but society hates to imagine that there is a murderer loose somewhere. Society likes to nail someone so that the collective can rest easy at night.
Now it turns out that one of my old professors at law school is one of the point men for the whole DNA as evidence movement, his name is Larry Marshall. His big break for DNA evidence came in the Rolando Cruz case. Read about it here: http://www.innocenceproject.org/case/display_prof
The salient bits are: "...under pressure from the community and in the midst of an election year..." and "...a sheriff's department lieutenant recanted testimony he had given in previous trials." Wow, do I mean it's often just politics and cops that lie? Hell yeah...
I quit law school because Larry Marshall gave a speech in which he informed all of us idiot law school students that the most important thing about the practice of law was how the judge was feeling, what kind of day the judge was having. Did the judge just have a fight with his wife? Is he feeling poorly? Does his stomach roil because of the steak sandwich he had at lunch? That's the guy that will decide all of your motions. He probably won't even read your motions except for during the five minutes before he must render a decision while he trembles on the toilet seat before entering the courtroom. If anyone read anything, it was some poor fuck law clerk that rendered an opinion via post-it note on how the judge should decide the issue.
You know how you play 3D shooters instead of doing your homework? Judges are just like you...
So, would I come forward and admit I was the last person to see some now dead chick alive? I would like to say yes, but the real answer is no. In the adversarial process, you are a suspect until you are excluded as a suspect by the evidence. Does that sound like "guilty until proven innocent"? Yes, it does sound a lot like that.
But the larger problem is what minimal amount of evidence the public (jury) is willing to base their opinion upon. I was in California temporarily and talked to some permanent residents of the state who were typical juror candidates (towards the end of last year, in the midst of the trial, before a verdict had been reached). And the 4 or 5 people I talked to all agreed that they would convict Peterson based upon the following facts: 1) An affair while his wife was pregnant. 2) He went out on a boat on Christmas day in the same area that the body washed ashore. Scary eh? I tried to probe them as to why they felt this was sufficient evidence and they claimed things such as "intuition"; that he just seemed like such a shifty and immoral character that the only explanation for those two facts must have been that he murdered his wife.
(1) I am Scott Peterson, and I told my mistress that my wife was dead, even though she was still alive, because ...
...
Response: It was a lie and it was easy to explain to her. It would stop any further questions because Frey would think it was too emotional of a area to go.
(2) I am Scott Peterson, and I rented a car, even though I had my own, and I drove it 80 miles away and sat looking upon the site which would, in the future, be the place Laci's body and the body of her infant were found, because
Response: It would be cheaper to take a rental than to have driven his truck. A car is easier to drive in San Fran than a truck. He was at the bay to see where the easiest place was to launch his boat and go fishing.
(3) I am Scott Peterson, and I asked the police for grief counseling while there was every reason to think that Laci was still alive because...
Response: His wife was missing, he was suffering grief because of her being gone. Grief isn't only for when someone dies. They have grief counselor's who work when someone is abducted.
Your analysis is great! It reminded me of The Shawshank Redemption, although it's fictional.
***BEGIN SPOILER SPACE***
Andy Dufresne was convicted for murder because they found a motive and many other evidence that points out the fact that he had a similar gun and was near the location during the murder. However, for those that have watched the movie, he had a valid reason for everything, but it just wasn't as believable as him killing his own wife. After years in jail, the real truth comes out, but it's too late now.
***END SPOILER SPACE***
I really like your analysis on the fact that the law and order is merely a way for the government to give us a sense of security. of course, we hope that the people convicted are truly guilty for what they're convicted for, but with many people claiming not guilty, it becomes really hard to tell. Then there's the cases where we know the defendant is definitely guilty, but we just don't have enough evidence and have to let him walk.
But I'm curious. how do you suppose the justice system can improve. Judge by peers I learnt was an Scandinavian idea where the peers (well, only men back then) were the ones who decided if you were guilty or not and you had a chance to defend in front of everyone once a year. and during this time, all the cases collected year long will be decided. However, if the person doesn't like the decision, he's able to choose to fight and all his friends/relatives will fight the plantiff's friends/relatives and the winner of course gets to decide on the decisoin. The coolest part about their laws was the "eye for an eye". if you killed someone in family X, the people from X are legally allowed to kill someone from your family.
I sidetracked there for a moment, but jury system is good, but how does one make it better without impeding on the people's freedom and anonymity.
HD Trailers
Exactly right!
If you are a law abiding citizen, never beat your
wife or dog or kids, always pay you taxes on time,
never have a difference of opinion with your
neighbor or coworker or politician, attend church
or mosque or synagogue every week, never engage in
extramarital or kinky sex, then you really don't
have anything to fear.
But if you deviate from the straight and narrow
path dictated by the government or society's
"norms", you might risk being considered as a
suspicious person, or worst yet as a "security
risk" to the state. A spiteful neighbor or
aggressively "upwardly mobile" coworker might just
report you to the FBI, DHS, or even your employer.
(The toll-free numbers and websites have been with
us since shortly after 9-11-2001.)
No one is allowed to know if they are now under
suspicion, thanks to some of the more onerous
provisions of the USA Patriot Act (I). Breaking
into your home or auto or computer or office files
for "intelligence gathering" can be done on the
sly. But if you don't get that promotion, or that
new job, or that bank loan, or if "official looking"
vehicles always seem to be around you but you
never get that ticket for rolling through a stop
sign, don't be alarmed -- you just might be the
subject of an "investigation".
Since your photo, fingerprints, and DNA are no
longer really your property, but that of the state,
and these "ID markers" can be easily acquired by
a five minute "black bag" job for planting on a
crime scene, don't worry about it. Take another
Vallium, enjoy life while you can, and realize
that the police state that you always read about
in your "Cold War era" novels is here today.
Only now, your personal data is scattered around
between secretive 3 letter agencies and commercial
databases. If you think that MATRIX and CAPPS
is bad now, just wait until a National ID law
passes, and you are required to donate specimens
for their databases. The future is coming fast --
think "Minority Report", "Matrix", Fahrenheit451",
"1984" and "Solient Green" all rolled into one.
This happened to me. During the Baton Rouge serial killer investigations, when they thought the killer was a white guiy, I was targeted and tested to eliminate me as a possible suspect. The cops were really very nice about it and so far as I know, I haven't been cloned, so what's the big deal?