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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.
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?
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...
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.
Libertarian dude sed:
"You quote Shell using the local police and/or military for their purposes. Were I a local, I would blame the government here; just as the company that wants my land to build a hotel on is not at fault, the government is at fault if they allow it to be taken."
And do you honestly think that Shell wouldn't have hired mercenaries to do the same thing if that had been cheaper or easier? As the record obviously shows Shell as a company is quite willing to do ANYTHING to continue their operations in the Niger delta. The point is, is that Shell is quite willing to kill innocent people to continue it's oil drilling operation in Nigeria. It is exactly this sort of case that makes me mistrust Libertarians despite their excellent well honed admirable contempt they hold towards the state. When it comes to HORRIBLE deeds committed by corporations suddenly Libertarians are as slippery as Bill Clinton talking about what the meaning of is, is... Lets see some more honesty here, BOTH corporations and governments will commit horrible deeds when they think they can get away with it, only by holding BOTH corporations and governments to merciless scrutiny and calling them on their bad deeds will we see any decency, liberty, and a sustainable way of life. Making apologetics for the owners of Nike's production facilities quite literally raping their own employees only makes you look like an asshole, which is really too bad because your original post about not trusting the government not to misuse DNA data was quite excellent. I no more trust Nike to subcontract to other private shoe making corporations that will respect human rights than I do the government to hold my DNA data or my phone records. NEITHER the government, nor Shell, Nike, Haliburton, Bechtel, Microsoft, Monsanto, Maxxam, Wal-Mart, Exxon, etc have earned my trust by engaging in consistent ethical behavior. If you wern't blinded by your Libertarian ideology you would be more honest and admit that, yet for you suddenly crimes become non crimes when committed by private corporations. THAT is why I have some respect for Libertarians outspokenness about the evils of government but do not consider myself to be a Libertarian.
Please apply the same high standards to the conduct to private organizations that you apply to governments, thank you.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?