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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."
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".