Yale Law Student Wants Government To Have Everybody's DNA

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Seringhaus, a Yale Law School student, writes in the NY Times, 'To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes.' In order to prevent discrimination when it comes to collecting DNA samples from criminals (and even people who are simply arrested), he proposes that the government collect a DNA profile from everybody, perhaps at birth (yes, you heard that right)." Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy, Seringhaus makes this argument: "Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of 'junk' DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA 'fingerprint.' The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole."

Comments

Fine With Me

[LearnToSpell]

Gimme your /etc/shadow too. What's the problem? It's encrypted.

What about parental rights? Filial rights too?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Can a parent provide a DNA sample to some collection agency for money or for few? Can a child sue his/her parents, when he/she turns 18 if his/her parents have compromised his/her privacy?

Obama likes the idea as well

[night_flyer]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/obama-supports-dna-sampling-upon-arrest

At the moment it is *just* upon arrest... how's that hope and change working out for you?

Re:How does he know it's unique?

[perlchild]

Having it be a DNA instead of a regular fingerprint isn't the problem.

Having digtalised fingerprints(actual strings of bytes) stored about me that can be legally claimed to be me, regardless of how they are gathered, transmitted, handled is.

He's looking for a technical solution to the problem that the government can't be trusted with identifying information about anyone. Bad enough when it's convicted criminals(you can say they earned some of it). But ip theft occurs, with just what amounts to near-public information. Just how bad will it get when people can just copy a string of bytes and say it's you?

He's trying to solve the wrong problem, because the right problem is NP-Hard, if not unsolvable.

How can all those clerks, police officers, etc.. have access to what amounts to identifying information, and how can we secure it, how can we make sure it's not used for police officers "fishing" for someone to convict?

Those are very hard questions, the answers haven't seen much public debate, and his solution addresses none of them, only the "if your identity leaks, you've also lost the privacy lock on your medical file".

Re:Awwwww, hes just so cute and innocent...

[Nefarious Wheel]

Recently and ongoing, there's been work to try to discover some genetic predilection to particular behaviours. Things like a "entrepreneurial gene", a "thief gene", a "rapist gene", and so on. Wouldn't it be awkward if everyone's genetic fingerprint were encoded on the genes which encode for predilection to discover holes in crackpot genetic crime prevention theories?

At the risk of invoking Godwin, I'm going to point out that a certain party during WWII had determined - via phrenology and other pseudoscientific means - that certain classes of people were fundamentally flawed, and proposed an ultimate solution to their quality of life issues were (a) more room to live (lebensraum) and (b) removal of the people classified as defective from society.

The first step was to invade a peaceful neighboring country, the second was by systematic removal of people of certain genetic types, "geno-cide". This removal involved transporting people via rail freight cars and interring them in landfill, after removing any valuables (such as gold teeth) first.

People, classifying people in any way is dangerous. Institutionalising the classification of people is pernicious. And if that pan has a handle, people will carry with it.

If you put people in boxes, pretty soon you'll see a lot of people in boxes.

Stop this insanity now.