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Convicted Hacker Adrian Lamo Refuses to Give Blood
CaliforniaCCW writes "Hopefully everyone here remembers the case of Adrian Lamo, a so-called 'gray hat' hacker who plead guilty to one count of computer crimes against Microsoft, Nexis-Lexis and the New York Times in 2004. He got a felony conviction, six months detention in his parents' home, and two years of probation. Today, as a condition of his probation, he must provide a sample of his DNA in the form of a blood sample, something which he has refused to do. Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA? Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?"
He was convicted of a computer crime. How likely is it that, if he does something similar in the future, it will be of any help to the authorities that they have his DNA on file? I suppose, though, the same goes for fingerprints. If the law is not specific on the subject, I think he has a right to refuse.
I'm pretty sure that because he's a convicted felon, that he doesn't posess the same rights as a regular citizen. I don't think he can even vote. Bummer to get caught.
Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA? Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?
Nice transitions from convicted felons to "everyone" there.
> "Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?"
I'm still yet to be convinced that the government should, or needs to have, a record of everyones fingerprint, let alone DNA.
For example, they can't vote
is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?
Why the fsck should *everyone* provide fingerprints to their government?
Ah, yes, but don't forget that the government is largely immune to patent litigation, and so are government contractors if it suits the politicians' pet projects well to do so. Check out the fibre optic flexible waterproof splice incident reported in recent months. The owner of the design would have been due several million from the contractor who raided his patent were the government and its contractors were actually required to obey the law as the Constitution demands. I know your post was meant to be a "funny" but the whole patent and government immunity thing rubs me the wrong way.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
As has already been mentioned several times, those "basic freedoms" you speak of apply to law-abiding citizens; there is no such protection for convicted felons. And, indeed, he plead guilty.
There is plenty of freedom at work here. His freedom to refuse. Note that they are not tying him down and forcing a needle into his arm. His freedom to choose more court proceedings and possibly a five year prison sentence over violating his religious beliefs.
The law is the law, but in this case the law is probably pretty weak, since he did offer up his DNA in another form. I am willing to bet that a judge might very well order the probation department to accept his alternate DNA, if he behaves himself.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
There are some important differences between fingerprints and blood that get glossed over by calling them both just means of identification. Blood has historically been regarded as much more private than fingertips. Plus, the more we learn about genetics, the more powerful that DNA becomes. The government could theoretically start analyzing it for different genetic traits. They could probably clone you someday soon. Not that they couldn't just follow you around and pick up your hair, of course, and sure, they have no policy of doing any of that stuff, but governments always abuse their powers sometimes. I can understand the guy's reluctance.
On the one hand there is clear neccessity for the governement to establish a foresnic identity system. Finger prints, photographs, age, weight, height, eye color, build, race and gender are all legitimate and well established metric the government collects and wisely uses in our collective best interest.
One the other hand, DNA is quite different. You can learn from DNA things the govenrment is not entitled to know. Your lineage, your health prospects, your allegries, and any number of personal attributes. From blood you can learn even more. e.g. are you HiV positive.
So saying DNA and bllod are one more in a long line of useful tools is not a gimme. We have to think it through.
It is quite clear that infinite knowledge of people is not neccessarily in societies best interest. Or at least our society does not agree that it is. And crime deterence is not the sole purpose of governement. protection of privacy and civil lberties needs to be considered. For example, even prisons and navy ships, the most well watched populations on the planet, do not fully prevent crime. And we certainly would not be willing to subject ourselves to that kind of scrutiny just to reduce crime. So there must be a trade between security and liberty and risk. One should not just blindly always trade liberty for security becuase the trade off is without limit.
Yet coming back to DNA. unlike everything except finger prints, it's something that ubquitously taints crime scenes, and it's utility is thus so much above any othe rmetric it's foolish not to atleast consider a DNA databse of former felons and possibly even citizens at large. One solution to this might be DNA hashing. perhaps there is a way to hash a DNA sequence in a manner that would be sufficient to establish presence at a crime scene. Or maybe atleast probable cause for further testing of a particular individual without actually having the governement retain DNA samples of innocent people.
An approach to this would be to identify a long list of biological diversity markers then weed out all the ones know to be associated with any health condition. Then hash these in a way that preserves just enough features to establish likely identity between two samples without revelaing any further details. The govenrment would be required to destroy the original samples and to delete any of the pre-hash specific information. This would have to be done in a manner we can trust them to actually execute this policy. I think this could be done and just to make the point, here's how. Have all testing done in labs in non-networked computers with small hard disks. This would be a physical layer to prevent overt records retention. One could of course imagine ways this could be subverted on a case by case basis but it would impede wholsale collection.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Easy. We're pretty sure we know the extent of information that can be determined about you by your fingerprints. Not true for DNA. Not only do we not know the complete extent of information that can be determined from your DNA, with what little we do know, it is already too much. More than mere identification, for sure.
Well, except that one can easily avoid this type of collection by the rather simple expedient of not committing felonies.
When they came for the felons, I said nothing, because I was not a felon...
You can't take the sky from me...
There is a huge world of difference between DNA and fingerprint samples. You leave fingerprint evidence behind when you commit a crime with your bare hands. On the knife or the gun or the doorknob, what have you. But with DNA, you may have simply walked by a crime scene coincidentally, DNA samples sloughing naturally from your body as you go.
DNA is much, much more easily abused than fingerprints. There are vulnerabilites with DNA samples that people do not anticipate when they try to say the two are the same.
Has it ever occurred to you that the legislature can in principle make you a felon just by passing a law against breathing air?
This is not a joke. It's happening already. My guess is that well over half of all Americans have committed a sufficient dollar amount of music piracy to qualify as felony. The fact that you personally think that you are capable of avoiding felonies is irrelevant. If the government wants to make you a felon, then believe me, you will be made a felon.
There are cases on the books where even the text of the laws themselves are not available for you to read. Google for "secret laws" if you don't believe me.
We used to make jokes about (with German or Russian accent) "show me your papers" and we used to say how horrible it was that they needed internal passports there. Now we have all the same stuff here, and for the same reasons.
The term "felon" has long since been emptied of useful content anyway. If "felony" meant truly heinous crimes, like murder or rape, it would be one thing. But please, filling out some government forms the wrong way is a felony. Having pot or related paraphernalia on you can be a felony. Fact is, the vast majority of felonies are in no way violent, and yet we treat any "felon" like a child rapist. "Convicted felon" is our society's equivalent of yelling "witch!"
Yet, they are us, and we elected them.
Are you so sure?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Well said and a reason I respect Libertarians although I do not consider myself one. And why don't I consider myself a Libertarian? Because big private corporations ALSO work hard to screw us and the world over, do Microsoft, Enron, Nike, Global Crossing, and large oil companies ring a bell? The real problem is allowing any large organization public OR private control over your life either physical or economic. And yes we may be reliant on corporations for computers, medicine, etc, and the government for roads and other infrastructure, but the goal should be to give large organizations the absolute minimum control over our lives we need to survive.
Libertarians who fail to realize the corrosive effects of private greed are blind, and leftists who fail to realize the terrible power of the state to oppress us are also blind.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
What would worry me even more is if they started moving towards a bastardized old school "inquisitorial system", and start keeping people in remand for a long periods of time for trivial matters. Say they catch you j-walking (or something equally trivial): you are arrested, your DNA is taken, and then they start fishing to see what else they can charge you with. Things start to get blurry and you end up with some sort of Guantanamo Bay situation. Don't get me wrong, I don't like terrororists. But I also don't like secret police and secret trials... that gets too close to Nazi Germany, and Soviet (and some might increasingly say the new Putin-ized) Russia.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.