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DHS to Begin Collecting DNA of Anyone Arrested
Foobar of Borg writes "The AP is reporting that the US will soon be collecting the DNA of anyone who is arrested by a federal law enforcement agency and any foreigner who is detained, whether or not charges are eventually brought. This begins to bring the US in line with the UK which, as discussed before on Slashdot, is trying to collect DNA of 'potential criminals' as young as five. DHS spokesman Russ Knocke stated that 'DNA is a proven law-enforcement tool.'"
If you let the balance of power fall too far to the state, it's grossly naive to think it wont lead to use of that power over you, your friends and your children. History supports that as do numerous social studies.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
It's one thing to single out certain segments of the population for greater scrutiny if the greatest proportion of violent crimes is perpetrated by that group. It's another thing entirely to use that as an excuse to tag and release citizens just because they act like animals.
There has been very little that has been good since the DHS was formed. Maybe it's a matter of them preventing bad things from happening, but the tighter the grip, the more problems will seep through their fingers.
...anything you say or DNA will be held against you in a court of law.
crowbar??
Some criminals already plant cigarette butts in stolen cars, to confuse the evidence and implicate innocent people, and I predict more of this. It's not hard to collect fake evidence from someone else's trash, to place at the scene of a crime.
To avoid identity theft, not only should you shred everything with your name and address, but now you also need to flush or incinerate everything with your DNA on it.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The ultimate form of revolution is tax cuts. The more you cut taxes, the more the government will collapse.
Yeah, that's worked really well over in the US for the last 8 years.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
That's simply not true. DNA and fingerprints are taken on arrest, regardless of whether or not you are charged. There is no system in place to remove this data once it is taken, even if you are found to have been wrongly arrested (I have had first hand experience of this).
How else could there be over 3 million, almost 5% of the population on the database?
As a British citizen I can't decide which scares me more, DNA databasing or CCTV cameras. I can't wait to move to Patagonia.
Under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 if you are arrested for anything more than a minor offence (no need to be charged) your DNA can be taken and stored on the UK National DNA Database. It does not get destroyed.
I would argue that the rich get tax cuts, the poor get social support and the middle class gets the shaft.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
That's simply untrue. The "rich" (*those making over $200,000/year) who make up about 5% of the population pay the vast majority of taxes in this country. You can't cut taxes on the poor when they already don't pay them. The bottom 50% (income bracket) of people in the country pay about 3% of taxes. That's right. 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States#Tax_distribution
Unlike fingerprints, once you build up a sizeable DNA database, you can also to a certain extent work out the DNA of people related to the person whose DNA you sampled. (or more accurately, from the DNA, you can establish that the DNA of perpetrator was relative of someone in your database). This "creep" allows you to effectively have a DNA database for the entire population with only a small proportion of records.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
In the real world, the U.S. taxcode is extremely progressive. The rich pay a far greater share of ALL taxes than anyone else.
The data shows the progressive tax structure of the U.S. federal income tax system on individuals that reduces the tax incidence of people with smaller incomes, as they shift the incidence disproportionately to those with higher incomes - the top 0.1% of taxpayers by income pay 17.4% of federal income taxes (earning 9.1% of the income), the top 1% with gross income of $328,049 or more pay 36.9% (earning 19%), the top 5% with gross income of $137,056 or more pay 57.1% (earning 33.4%), and the bottom 50% with gross income of $30,122 or less pay 3.3% (earning 13.4%).[9][10]
From Wikipedia.
It's bullshit to say that taxation in the U.S. is somehow regressive, or that the poor pay for everything.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Heck, just find one of his altar boys. DNA all over.
(paraphrasing)
If you're in a free society, it's not safe. You can either have safety, or freedom. But you can't have both at the same time.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
While on the surface it may appear to be no more onerous than the fingerprinting system in use today, a DNA database would have far greater potential for abuse. What happens if they decide to use the DNA to detect ancestral or genetic heritage? Not to Godwin the thread, but technology like this would have clearly been misused in the not so recent past.
With the recent abuses of the Patriot Act, I don't trust the government not to overstep the stated purpose of this policy either.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You, sir, have a strange notion of "vast majority". According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 5% (for whom the average income is $457,400) of the population account for 41.4% of all tax revenue*. That percentage is a far cry from a "vast majority." Perhaps you meant the top quintile (average income = $214,500) who account for 67.2% of the tax revenue. The effective tax rate for this group is 25.2%.
How much blood do you expect to extract from the lowest quintile (average income = $15,800) anyway? Sure their effective tax rate is only 4.3%, but increasing their tax rate to 25% won't have much impact on the massive deficits to which we've grown addicted.
*Like so many tax critics, you have forgotten that income tax is but one source of tax revenue. Once you account for the additional sources (social insurance, corporate income, and excise taxes), the picture changes considerably. The upper quintile account for 58.5% of income tax revenue, but only 41.4% of all revenue.
How are you comparing a corporation's income to a private citizen's income?
Tell us how much an Exxon CEO's income tax is compared to his income, then the same proportion for someone in the "bottom 50%" (less than $30k/yr gross income).
Look, once you have the ability to use DNA fingerprinting, it's more or less inevitable that authoritarian groups will mount a long-term plan to use it. And for every group like the Innocence Project which is using it to exonerate people, there's five groups that go out after a political protest with mops and buckets to grab DNA samples of people who were there to run through the Federal Crime Database.
I'm not *for* this, I'm simply noting that once the science is there, trying to stop it being used in obvious ways which have some tangible social benefits (rape becomes very, very much harder to get away with) is very hard, even if the social costs (political protests become hard to get away with too) are also very real.
I have a partial solution to this problem.
http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php
It's a proposal - done on a DoD grant - for using strong cryptography and division of powers to separate the biometric database from the identity database, so that all the metadata about a DNA sample - name, for example - is encrypted in a way which requires court orders to retrieve and - *critically* - stored by a separate agency so that it requires three separate groups to work together to bind a name to a DNA sample.
* the DNA database must run the sample
* the Court must agree to decrypt the name information when it is presented
* the Identity database must agree to provide the encrypted data to the court
This approach gives excellent security to the individual, and acknowledges the simple reality that we can't make DNA analysis and other biometric technologies go away. We have to use other technologies to counterbalance them (strong crypto) rather than hoping to turn back the clock.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
As a Canadian living close to the border, I'm feeling less and less welcome, and much less likely to pop over to the US to spend my dollars shopping or sight-seeing, given the growing risk that I'll be detained, finger printed, DNA stolen, laptop hard-drive taken or copied, and given a terrorist risk rating.
Really, "welcome" to the land of the free.
Here's hoping the coming election brings SOME kind of change.
Poor people pay a greater percentage of their total income in taxes than rich people do. Rich people get more of their income from capitol gains that are taxed at a lower rate than income taxes. Also, poor people are disproportionately affected by sales taxes, since they spend a greater percentage of their income.
Your numbers only account for income taxes paid. Your numbers don't tell us anything about the actual tax rate paid by individuals. Using these numbers to claim that the US tax system is not regressive is completely disingenuous. Look at the next paragraph in the wikipedia article you quoted:
You're not telling the whole story here, and you know it. Shame on you.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just because you can barely afford the payments for your Ferrari and 500k square foot house, not to mention the monthly trips down to the caribbean for hookers and blow doesn't mean that you aren't rich.
There was a similar discussion on another board I frequent. Part of the difficulty in defining 'Rich' is that many try to use income to define it, but in reality it's more a statement of wealth. For example, a sole proprietor of a business could have a gross annual income in the millions, yet not be 'rich' because 99% of that is immedietly spent as business expenses.
Still, one guy made a general rule of thumb that I liked:
Poor - Income at or below basic expenses; IE unable to save
Middle Class - Has the ability to save money/live better.
Rich - Independent of work; capable of living indefinitly off of assets.
I don't read AC A human right
And the figure that Exxon supposedly pays in taxes never seems to include the money they get back in "incentives" for drilling for the oil that they then sell to us at inflated prices.
What we have these days in the US is socialism for the richest Americans. When Morgan Chase was able to buy Bear Stearns with the 29 billion that the government gave them, it was one of the biggest handouts in US history.
And last week the Fed announced plans to loan money to banks (which include brokerages that are not banks) at 2.5 percent, and then turn around and allow those banks to loan OUR money back to us at 30 percent credit card rates, that sure sounds like a handout to me.
George Bush has presided over the greatest transfer of wealth in our history: from the working class to the rich.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Has your children's teacher ever been arrested for being involved in a protest against the government ...
...
..If you want to work for the government don't protest .. ... If you want to work for a large company don't protest.. .......
Note you won't be told *what* they were arrested for they just won't be teaching anymore
So if you want to be a teacher don't protest
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Corporate taxation is always voluntary. Any company that doesn't like its taxation level can simply disolve as a standard corporation and become any of a number of pass through entites that don't pay corporate taxes but pass all taxes on to the people who were once their shareholders.
For a huge company like Exxon, with many, many foreign investors, corporate investors, etc, this would admittedly take about three to five years to fully transition, as it couldn't just remain monolithic and declare itself a single S-Corp or LLC . There would have to be a number of staged pass through entities which separated stockholders ineligible to join S-corps from ones who were, for example, until all stockholders ended up members of an S-Corp, partnership, LLC, or even a sole propritorship that had contracts with other parts as needed. But, the corporation itself would avoid more and more taxes every year of the transition.
So why not? Corporate immunity. Whatever taxes Exxon pays, it thinks are worth it to reduce its shareholder's liability for 'incidents' such as the Exxon Valdez. If those taxes were ever too high, as determined solely in Exxon's own opinion, they could pick from several of the many alternatives and transition.
This doesn't stop corporations from complaining that their voluntary taxes are too high just like an individuals non-voluntary ones.
Who is John Cabal?
There was a similar discussion on another board I frequent. Part of the difficulty in defining 'Rich' is that many try to use income to define it, but in reality it's more a statement of wealth. For example, a sole proprietor of a business could have a gross annual income in the millions, yet not be 'rich' because 99% of that is immedietly spent as business expenses.
Still, one guy made a general rule of thumb that I liked:
Poor - Income at or below basic expenses; IE unable to save
Middle Class - Has the ability to save money/live better.
Rich - Independent of work; capable of living indefinitly off of assets. I agree that "Rich" is relative, which is why I get pissed off when someone says that tax cuts only benefit the rich and only the rich get tax cuts. I live check to check with absolutely no money left over. Trust me, I will benefit more from a tax cut than Bill Gates. Granted, he may get a few million more that I do, but what's a few million to a billionaire? Now, an extra $100 a month for me means that I can get that big credit card paid off four years sooner and/or be ready for when an "emergency", like my car breaking down happens! That is HUGE to me.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
My apologies that you found my post "high and mighty." However, it turns out that the minimum income needed to be in the top 5% is only ~$125K. If we define rich as income >= $200K, then the rich account for ~2% of the US population. (I don't have the exact percentage at my fingertips, but the cutoff for the top 1% is ~$300K.) I cut out the dollar definition because it did not jive with the top 5% definition, which was the definition I wanted to reply to. I then introduced the average income so that I could compare the top 5% to the bottom 20%. (These figures drawn from 2005 data, as published in Dec. 2007 by the CBO.)
Two points: Your "not a bailout" arguments seem to center around the fact that the Fed did nothing to avoid the destruction of Bear Stearns as an entity and the fact that a lot of their employees lost their jobs in the transition... that doesn't change the fact that the government stepped in and provided a huge pile of cash to finance a private deal, which pretty much sounds like a bailout to me.
Also, perhaps things would have been touch and go for a while if the government let Bear Stearns collapse ungracefully instead of gracefully, if the government wasn't pumping huge sums of cash into the industry that it may never see again. So? All the government is teaching the financial industry is "feel free to take risky positions, we'll come bail you out by taking on your riskiest investments and lending you money at killer rates". In the long run, it is far more important that banks learn to only take positions that they have properly evaluated and that they can survive. If a dumb bank has to collapse every now and then, so be it.
The bottom 48% of wage earners pay no federal income tax (SS and medicare is another argument, but if you want to argue for their demise you won't hear any complaints from me). In fact, many of those receive "Earned Income Tax Credit." In other words, even if they didn't pay into the system, they still get rebates. Yes, it's income redistribution, for good or ill, that's what it is.
Since I'm no the subject, after the Bush tax cuts, more people on the low end of the scale were paying no taxes at all, the tax burden shifted UP, not down.
Since 2000, the tax burden of the bottom 40% of income earners dropped from 0% to NEGATIVE 4%. Conversely, the burden on the top 20% went UP to 85% from 81%.
I'm sick and tired of people claiming the tax cuts were for the rich; if the rich benefited the most it's because they were paying the most, but everyone got a piece of the pie. Moreover, our tax system is still highly progressive... the tax cuts actually made it MORE progressive (accounting for increasing the percentage of the tax burden for the wealthy and lowering it for the poor). If you still think it's not "fair," then I'd like to see some alternative that you think wouldn't destroy the economy beyond it's already dead in the water behavior.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Followed by...
You both came close. A considerable amount of Exxon's income (doesn't matter if it's moved to the CEO's pocket or part of a new drill bit or tanker) comes from what? -- selling gasoline, of course. And who is it that pays for that gasoline? The private citizen.
Corporations pay taxes, sure, but everything they pay is built into the price of the items they sell, and you should keep in mind who pays that: The consumer. Who also pays their own taxes.
When someone says "corporations pay XXX and the consumer doesn't have it so bad because they only pay X", they're blowing smoke. Those corporations got a good proportion of that money from the consumer.
For every item you buy, you're paying built-in costs for income tax (and other taxes in some cases) that went into the materials, manufacture, transport, marketing, retailing, etc... of that item. This is with the money you have left over after paying for your own income taxes.
The bottom line is that the tax load on the average consumer is much higher than you think it is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The actual tax burden on the lowest income group will never drop to 0%, much less to a negative number, because the income taxes (and other taxes) of all the people involved in producing everything they consume are 100% built into the prices of those things they consume. From natural gas to a loaf of bread, everything carries a built-in tax burden.
Furthermore -- for instance in the case of natural gas or electricity -- where the utility company has a health care plan in place for its employees, anyone paying for natural gas is forced to pay for that health care plan before they can address their own health care needs, unless they're willing to live in the cold. This is true for all benefits that accrue to workers supplying low income people with services or goods for money.
Painting low-income people as a tax-free or contribution-free group is either naive, or disingenuous. It just isn't so. Less than the middle class? Sure. The middle class carries a huge load.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not yet...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?