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House Votes To Expand National DNA Arrest Database
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the US House of Representatives on Tuesday. By a 357 to 32 vote, the House approved legislation that will pay state governments to require DNA samples, which could mean drawing blood with a needle, from adults 'arrested for' certain serious crimes. Not one Democrat voted against the database measure, which would hand out about $75 million to states that agree to make such testing mandatory. ... But civil libertarians say DNA samples should be required only from people who have been convicted of crimes, and argue that if there is probable cause to believe that someone is involved in a crime, a judge can sign a warrant allowing a blood sample or cheek swab to be forcibly extracted."
I dont believe that this is constitutional, or at least its not of the same spirit as the constitution.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
I would like to add a line amendment that anyone running for any government elected position also be required to submit DNA to the database.
What is good for the goose.
You know what to do, guys. Call into the anonymous tipline and accuse all of your Congressmen of burglary.
FTFY
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Whatever happened to "Innocent until proven guilty"?
Sounds about as sensible as registering as a sex offender some 18 year old who had consensual sex with a 17 year old.
We are all God's parents.
Seriously. Where is all this pressure to bypass warrants coming from?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I didn't read through the entire bill, but the part I read talked about people arrested for sexual crimes and murder -- nothing about burglary that I could see. The biggest problem I have with it is that while it has a process for expungement of people who are acquitted or whose guilty verdict is overturned, I didn't see anything in there requiring states to initiate the process when one of these events occurs.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Seriously. Where is all this pressure to bypass warrants coming from?
An apathetic citizentry kills democracy faster than any group's ambitions.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You can vote right wing or you can vote left wing but both wings are on the same bird.
This is just a horrible, horrible idea. And once the government gets a hold of your DNA:
* You will have no idea what it is used for, by whom, nor how often
* You will never really be able to get that data removed
* You will be put in a position to have to prove innocence instead of being assumed innocent
* You are giving up yet more control over your life and privacy to the government
* The data WILL be used to make assumptions about you
* Your DNA data WILL be unreasonably searched, every time a search is done, and without probable cause
* The data WILL be shared with other agencies- state and fed
* The data WILL be leaked in one way or another
* The data WILL be used to also implicate others in your family with "close" DNA profiles
There are lots of other ramifications, these are just the ones that pop into my mind immediately. Perhaps it is time to Email/Fax/Call your Senator and tell them what you think before the House gets its way... http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
The United States Senate thinks sharing photos is risky, but sharing DNA is okay. To become a US Senator, is it a requirement to lose all sense of perspective?
In the UK, we are about to start toning our database down.
You are unfortunate as you don't have any real Liberals in your government as we now do...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The biggest problem I have with it is that while it has a process for expungement of people who are acquitted or whose guilty verdict is overturned, I didn't see anything in there requiring states to initiate the process when one of these events occurs.
In other words, it's like the TSA banned flyers list. Easy as hell to get onto, impossible to get off of. Throw in "poorly maintained" and "prone to errors/misfiles" and we'll have the TSA list all over again, except one that juries believe because they saw something about DNA on CSI.
Would this ever happen here in the US (you know, the home of the free)?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I find it ironic that the US should decide to introduce this measure under a new government when the old one was notorious for abuse of authority.
You live in the UK though, there are major differences between the political parties, the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Plaid, etc. With the US there are no ideological differences, the only difference is who pays them more. For example, "green" businesses have paid a lot of money to the democrats, therefore they support "green" jobs. Etc.
They only have differences when it is politically convenient. For example, stem cell research and abortion.
The largest 3rd party (the Libertarian party) has no representation in congress.
One of the first proposals brought up by our new coalition government, indeed one of the points where both parties agreed on almost everything despite their general political differences, was a "Freedom Bill". That will basically be a mass repeal of all the draconian, intrusive, guilt-assuming laws that the previous lot brought in under a climate of fear that they perpetuated more effectively from the corridors of power than any terrorist group ever could. Introducing safeguards so that innocents' DNA is removed from the database in a timely fashion will be an acid test of that bill: they've talked the talk, now will they really follow through?
Well of course they will have to follow through, because you have a political system that, despite its flaws, gives representation to third parties so everyone's political views can be represented. In the US, if you vote for a "third party" you are throwing your vote away (more or less), in the UK if you vote for a "minor" political party, chances are they will have at least some representation in government.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There must be some cause that motivates them to even propose these bills.
The people want it. They like to feel safe. The appearance of safety makes them feel even safer than real safety. So to get reelected, officials push for things that increase the appearance of safety. Their constituents support that.
Learn to love Alaska
Your DNA reveals a lot about you and so unauthorised access to is a clear invasion of privacy, which could only be justified by any protection against crime it causes.
Furthermore, any national database which can act as a primary index for further information held on you is a genuine totalitarian threat.
The outgoing Labour Government, which has been repeatedly noted on /. for its frightening attacks on UK liberty, insisted that the retention of DNA of innocent people was necessary to stop serious crime. However, after 9 years of retaining the DNA of innocent people, this hadn't even aided in the solving of a single serious crime.
The new coalition Government is committed to only retaining DNA of convicted criminals and temporary retention for those charged with violent and sexual offences, a model already applied in Scotland.
It should be noted that DNA is retained from crime scenes and that DNA of arrestees is checked against that before being destroyed. This is a world apart from the blanket retention that the outgoing Goverment pretended was necessary to solve certain cases.
"I find it ironic that the US should decide to introduce this measure under a new government when the old one was notorious for abuse of authority."
I used to find stuff like that rather ironic, until I came to the conclusion that behind all of the false opposition, behind all of the smoke and mirrors, behind all the playing with peoples gregarious nature in getting them to either vote for the right, or for the left, to watch either cnn, or fox, religiously-- behind all of that bullshit, the truth is that there is an agenda that is being carried out in spite of either side and which will use either side as long as it progresses their purposes.
Some people says it is a wild eyed conspiracy theory. That's fine. I thought so too.
If you really study this one out, you would be shocked to find out that back in the early 2000s 1 major organization that owns several news agencies actually used the argument in court that 'It is not illegal to lie to the public over public airwaves, it is simply a matter of corporate policy as to wither or not we decide to report the truth as we know it'--- so what did the courts do? They asked the other major news owning organizations wither or not they supported their 'oppositions' take on the matter... Guess what? They all signed up on board and agreed. What do news stations always hammer at us? 'We're the guys you can trust!'-- yet, they had right there the perfect opportunity to disagree with their competitors and broadcast the fact that "These guys were trying to lie to you, but we do not agree with them, we are the news outlet you can trust!"-- but they didn't.
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/11-the-media-can-legally-lie/
"they've talked the talk, now will they really follow through?"
No. Having that stuff kept back on file somewhere is worth more than actually destroying it, and then trying to convince people that it actually has truthfully been destroyed.
Three reasons I can think of are based on what I understand from the UK - where we have the dubious honour of being several years ahead of the US in this:
1. Such databases are fantastically expensive to set up and maintain. (Well, it's not the database per se that's expensive, more setting up and managing all the processes that will involve taking DNA samples, getting them into the computer and then matching up DNA data with evidence collected at the scene).
Not ideal when your country is buried in a mountain of debt.
2. Such databases are of dubious benefit. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I do recall that some enterprising journalist submitted an FOIA request and worked out that for every arrest carried out as a result of the DNA database they'd had to take the DNA of hundreds of thousands of people. At such great expense it would probably have been cheaper and more effective (ie. resulted in more arrests) to simply spend the money on hiring more police officers.
Unfortunately the media loves a government taking a "tough stance" on crime, and there's nothing that gets them excited like a computer system that promises the world, even if it almost certainly will not deliver it.
3. Already mentioned elsewhere: with current technology we don't store all the data that comprises the entirety of a person's DNA - just a subset. Most of the theories concerning how likely a false-positive is to occur have never really seen much testing in reality, so we don't know how accurate they are. What we do know is the number of people you're going to put on the database is high enough that false positives are a dead cert. Bit of a shame, therefore, that most lay juries have spent the last 20 years being brainwashed that DNA evidence is utterly foolproof.
Don't need a movement per se. Because human nature is to consider personal rather than societal impact, it's perfectly natural for police and prosecutors to support this kind of BS. (Fortunately, they don't get to make the laws, but IMO their voices carry far more weight than they should.)
Red tape is an unpleasant part of any job, and as an honest cop, of course you're not going to go for a warrant until you're damned sure you're right anyway, so it must feel like a waste of time at best (when you offer evidence to support probable cause, and they issue a warrant), and downright obstructionism at worst
(when, for whatever reason (good or bad -- some judges are corrupt, too), they won't give you the warrant, even though you _know_ you're right). So, yeah, it streamlines your job and lets you catch bad guys quicker; what could be wrong with that?
Same thing, more or less, for the prosecutor's office; he gets appointed/elected to put bad guys behind bars, and (assuming he's honest) he's not even going to prosecute someone unless he knows they did it. But with juries being so reluctant to convict, a little more evidence to lock the case up solid is often beneficial, and never hurts.
(Of course, if you're a crooked cop or prosecutor, then it's even more obvious you won't like warrants... ;))
Then the politicians, of course, have a choice: they can support the law, appearing tough on crime, caring about the children*, and avoid being blamed by police or prosecutors for hindering them in the fight against crime.
Or they can oppose it, saying something about personal freedom, limited government, due process, and innocent-until-proven-guilty -- granted, this will win favor with the far-right gun-toting libertarian kooks, and the far-left pot-smoking libertarian kooks. Then in the next election, their opponent will rip them a new orifice or two by locating a single criminal who would have been caught one crime sooner if the law had passed (or, if the law did pass, one who was caught by it and presumably would still be at large otherwise), and making a series of campaign ads out of it.
Guess which way they go?
* note that sex offenses against a minor are included as well as sex offenses capable of earning more than 1 year sentence.
Are there any 1yr sex offenses against children, and if so, should they be lumped in this class?
Who cares -- "sex offenses against a minor" means you are protecting our children!
The chances of two given people having the same DNA fingerprint are tiny. So if the police already suspect someone of a crime, based on other reasons, then a DNA fingerprint match is good corroborating evidence.
However if you look for everyone that has the same DNA fingerprint as your sample in an entire city/state/country, you will almost certainly find multiple matches. In this case, the DNA match means absolutely nothing, but Jurors will treat it with the same weight as they did in the first case, because they don't understand statistics. Combine that with the fact that the defendant has had prior arrests (that's how he got in the database) and that is often enough to secure a conviction of an innocent man, even more so if he is poor and/or black.
Our justice system already convicts too many innocent people. Giving the government a tool that will result in more is a horrible idea.
TV. I suppose movies have something to do with it too.
Think about it. In just about any TV show or movie, the bad guys are the ones who ask for lawyers. They're the ones who demand warrants. They're the ones who refuse to allow the police to search their car. You can always spot the bad guy on TV: he's the one talking about "civil rights." Any time you see a guy on TV stand up for his civil rights, you know he's the bad guy.
And it goes beyond that. In fiction, warrants only cause harm. Thanks to the delay in getting the warrant, the terrorists manage to kill people. The kidnapper kills their victim. Whatever. The warrant is always a block to the good guys.
People see these TV shows where the police have these magic DNA databases and warrants serve only to allow the guilty to go free. And so you get a push to prevent those pesky warrants that stopped the Valiant Cops from saving the Damsel in Distress because they weren't allowed to just bust into the Bad Guy's Lair without first getting a warrant.
Too many people think CSI is real and that cops never make mistakes. That's why people push to allow cops to bypass warrants: they think every cop is Jack Bauer, struggling against The System to protect Real Americans.
Here's an argument for you: the state has no right to any amount of my flesh.
None. Zero. Nada.
I'll pay taxes with only minor grumbling: "render on to Caesar what is Caesar's", and all. But my flesh is not Caesar's.
And I don't have a problem with people who have shown that the are a threat to the rights of others, being placed under the close supervision of the state, even including losing to some degree the right to make choices about their bodies. But this proposal is not about convicts, it's about presumed-innocent arrestees; and a population-wide database would be that much worse.
The only argument in favor of such a database is that it makes live easier for cops. There's a term for a nation where laws are made on that basis: police state.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"Not one Democrat voted against" seems an odd way to word it. Why not actually give the totals? There are 435 Representatives, but the given 357 yes / 32 no count only adds up to 389. That means the difference of 46 were conveniently absent or didn't vote. And there are currently 253 Democrats and 178 Republicans in the House, so that means even if all the nonvoting ones this time were Republican, fully 100 Republicans voted for it. (And I'd like to hear the excuses of the members who didn't vote, from both parties).
I can't call a bill that more than half of the opposition voted for anything but bipartisan, so why word the results in a partisan way? The blame should correctly fall on *all but the 32 who voted no*.
And third, you can be FRAMED with DNA. It is not difficult, and it is hard to "prove your innocence", which seems to be the necessity now. I can frame someone with DNA far easier than trying to frame them with fingerprints...
I can't call a bill that more than half of the opposition voted for anything but bipartisan, so why word the results in a partisan way? The blame should correctly fall on *all but the 32 who voted no*.
The wording is partisan, but not the way you think. It is expressing disappointment with the democrats for not living up to their public image of being pro civil-liberties. The republicans have an image of being anti civil-liberties, so it's no surprise they would vote for such a thing.
Of course, anyone paying attention for the last few decades knows that the democrats' public image of being pro-civil liberties is mostly false, if for no other reason than in recent years it has been promulgated by the republican party looking to use it as a way to denigrate the democratic party for being 'soft on crime.'
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Camping Tip: Bear bells provide safety for hikers in grizzly country. The tricky part is getting them on the bears.
You're doing it wrong. The bells announce dinnertime.
As for the DNA database, ALL politicians should automatically be sampled (this should be mandatory) just to have the samples on file when the crooks er... I mean politicians get busted for the crimes they obviously perpetrated.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Anyone confused at all why Democrats would not vote against this measure need to read Liberal Facism.
When your body belongs to the state why should it matter if they force you to give blood or not? You live at the pleasure of the state. The state knows best after all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In the US, if you vote for a "third party" you are throwing your vote away
I wish people would stop repeating this as it reinforces the idea in people's minds and keeps them voting for one of the big two. We should instead say (loudly and frequently) that if you vote either Republican or Democrat then you're throwing your vote away.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I agree that bypassing normal warrant procedure is not generally idea, however I think some of the claims about what this bill will cause are getting ridiculous.
First of all, it's not going to drastically change the nature of the FBI's DNA database. The only new group of people who will have their DNA forcibly sampled are people arrested of crimes who are not prosecuted, in states where this is not already the law (such a law was passed in CA in 2004)
Second, it's not like we don't already have a huge DNA database. CODIS is the largest DNA database in the world with over 5 million records. If you think such a database will lead to framing, corruption, or otherwise undermining the right to a fair trial, then all those things should be happening already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_DNA_Index_System
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].