CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA | Hacker News Reader

CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

theintercept.com

169 pointsetiam57 comments

As someone who likes their database tables correctly named, without duplication and containing all the data, I can understand the urge to deploy this as a handsoap to all public restrooms with sinks that can collect water samples.

It's just too neat and clean of a trap to not use it.

This is a small example of what might or might not be done, but its also a great example of the corrosive effects of lack of trust in institutions of society, and one of the largest reasons why the NSA et all are so incredibly dangerous.

Our society works because of trust, take that away and stuff breaks down, badly.

Its not clear to me how this would be useful for nefarious purposes. Surely, to apply this detergent and collect the resulting biomarkers in a controlled fashion, they would require fairly complete access to the target individual? As in, the target would have to be sitting there letting an agent rub their arm with some swabs. And there have to be easier ways to do the same thing- file a sharp edge into the back of a door handle could likely get enough skin cells to extract DNA, without being too obtrusive. Am I missing something?

Nope, article is garbage

Ironically they're targeting the wrong end of the person. The sewers would be a great place to collect DNA and narrow down a manhunt in a large metropolitan area.

Wow, mind = blown. You could perform binary search on the sewers to find a criminal. Hah, that would be ridiculous if that was possible.

There were some indications that we attempted a focused attempt in Pakistan during the hunt for Bin Laden.. From an interview with the Bureau Chief of Time who wrote the full detail story about how it went down:

> CROWLEY: Right. Unfortunately, Allison's language had to be a little bit cryptic. They couldn't confirm exactly what they had done, but he writes that in some of the option they consider were testing. It's not pleasant testing the sewage in the town for genetic markers, and then, another was this UAV. Actually, it wasn't an eagle size UAV. It's much smaller.

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1204/26/sp.02.html

Well, the Monterey Bay Aquarium does species counts using water sampling and searching DNA[1] so something similar might be possible to search for s specific individual signature.

[1]http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/01/15/dna-detectives-abl...

History is going to be so monumentally unkind to this period of American history. :/

As opposed to any other period of American history?

No, in addition to.

Eh, not necessarily. This could be the last period when things were still really really good.

Barring disruption of the government, the future will be fairer and more just than today, just as today is fairer and more just yesterday.

Can you provide any examples of things that are less fair and less just now than they have been any time in the past 100 years?

Exactly, I just finished listening to an NPR interview on a book about the underground railway and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Out of your 100 year window range, but a nice example of just how malleable the institutions of government are to the forces of oppression.

I'm pretty sure there must have been a few times in the past 100 years where the US's crimes against humanity as broadly detailed in the CIA torture report wouldn't have been as widely & flat-out ignored ... (as the forces behind your collectively turning a blind eye aren't very fair or just either)

The problem is, the next time we have a genuinely bad government, that government will own us all.

Can you imagine a Stasi or a KGB with the power the FBI is demanding, or the power combined with the legal carte blanche that the NSA already has?

That's really not as far away as you seem to imply.

Just look at the difference between current politics and forty years ago. If politics changes as much to the extremes in the next 40 years, you get your genuinely bad government in far less than 40 years.

Add in the known tendency of humans globally to take refuge in extremism and racism in a recession, well, one more deep recession could do it.

The US 40 years ago was a relatively backward, sexist, racist, and homophobic. Politics has gotten an order of magnitude better since then, and the people are greatly more virtuous. If we get a similar change in the next 40 years we'll be living in an amazing society.

I largely agree with you, but what do you think changed? Biologically we haven't changed since much darker ages. That leaves culture, and culture is inherently consensus-driven.

What happens when the consensus breaks down?

We've changed massively - that was the point. Who's to say the next 40 years is the same direction?

Also many things have improved, but certainly not everything.

Look up "regression to the mean" ... :)

And to believe a strong statement like "an order of magnitude better" I'm going to need some stronger evidence. For a hand-wave I'll be willing to agree with "not much worse, if you look from the right angle of perspective". In case you hadn't noticed, but you got a misogynist hateful clown running for president that's currently blocking my view of this supposed order of magnitude betterment. And there's crowds cheering him on. It's an order of magnitude improvement like dada was to classicism--entirely orthogonal.

This assumes today actually is fairer and more just. It isn't necessarily so in all ways, and change is not necessarily permanent, as history will show you.

I think the degree to which people were aware of the impact they had on the world, in contrast with our blithe willingness to ignore that, is going to be looked upon unfavorably. Previous generations were generally ignorant, misinformed, and lacked the resources even if they wanted to change that.

What's our excuse now, other than habit and our own worst natures?

Can others confirm/deny this:

Google this, no quotes: snopes Skincential Sciences CIA

Then duckduckgo the same, no quotes.

Did anyone else get disturbingly little response from google, but very detailed and recent results from duckduckgo?

I searched this precisely because I was skeptical, but that search result was just weird.

EDIT: For me it happens both in regular, tracked search and in an incognito tab.

EDIT2: Dropping snopes gives a regular result from google and searching just snopes does too. I think google's ML initiative may not be working out as well as they hoped.

The DDG results are about snopes, or Skincential Sciences CIA, but not both. If you remove snopes, the Google results look fine to me.

Thanks for the confirm. Maybe someone at google listened to people complaining (or their algos learned) that when people search many specific words they are looking for a specific thing and not to randomly drop it.

Also, as a side note (not directly to you but so I don't clutter the feed). The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm". The company in question is a private company, who's purpose is to develop intel tech and sell it to the CIA. They are not associated with the CIA in any official capacity, but they do seem to have a cozy relationship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

Edit: Also, on duckduckgo the first two results I get are specific to both this story about skincential and the cia.

> The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm".

Plot twist... YCombinator is the venture capital arm of the CIA /s

Or perhaps, you know, something to do with Google being funded by branch of CIA?

You might want to catch the 1997 scifi flick Gattaca on Amazon Prime before it becomes anachronistic.

I thought one of the reasons why everything had to be done by the free market was that government is bad at picking winners. But what do you know?

Why are we letting this go on?

Because the time to stop it was 30+ years ago. It's their country now, not ours.

Right. And maybe HN readers just happen to read a lot of non-US press but it seems to me many of these "American Governments/Companys are doing bad things" are coming from non-USA press outlets.

And by giving up you are furthering their power without accountability or oversight.

No, I'm not achieving any more by "giving up" than I am by not "giving up". I'm not in a position to change the nature of US policy, and as long as American voters use their power to vote in venal assholes, that won't change.

I'll bite, why is this something we shouldn't "let go on?" The CIA invests in companies doing research that support it's mission. You can disagree with the mission and work to change it, but what is wrong here? Why is it a crime to let a company develop this technology?

I agree, we can all sit and bitch about this all day but if you want to make a change in their policy why not go work for them?

-------------- Just to note, the later part of this isn't directed at you @noobermin, just my own rant (sorry) --------------

Also, there are plenty of companies that are in their portfolio that we are happily using without complaint.

What this company is doing isn't wrong and assuming that the CIA is going to abuse it is wrong as well. Do people realize the hoops and hurdles these folks have to go through before they are even allowed to even be in the room with some of this stuff?

The people working there are everyday folks that feel the same about the abuse of technology and work very hard for little pay to ensure that they aren't infringing anyone's rights. Sure it isn't perfect all the time, but for the most part they do their job well considering we almost never hear about their successes till several decades later.

because it's our money.

Well, you see, the common view on HN is very against anything related to government intelligence and military efforts. Usually, they want all the governments to topple and be replaced by, usually the proposed solutions on HN, anarchy, anarchocapitalism, or some kind of Marxist utopia.

Because the CIA fights terrorists, anarchists, and radicals, and those are the biggest perceived threats to the comfortable and secure lives people desire. The CIA exists to protect the status quo internationally, and that's a status quo that has been pretty damn good to your average American.

Why in God's name does the CIA have a VC fund?

If you step back from the conspiracy theory stuff, why shouldn't the CIA have a VC fund? They have a vested interested in fostering technology that could serve their purposes, so why not ensure that technology finds the funding it needs to mature?

Consider also that research grants from the Department of Defence are effectively the same thing, the government sponsoring technology that it might find a military application for, and those grants brought us the internet so it's not all bad.

Why covertly collect when they summon anybody?

I wouldn't be surprised if they already collecting DNA samples in bulk from the sewage systems of America

When I was a child there was a government program to take bio samples (blood and finger prints) from children in case of abduction. This was in the early 80s. So I would wager that this has been going on for a great long while.

"CIA's Venture Capital Arm"

Stahp

I am not too worried. CIA isn't what they show in TV dramas. It is just another incompetent organization that will go after weak. These are the same jerks who have not really achieved any strategic objectives of importance. The are one major public scandal away from serious trouble.

Hi, you don't seem to be aware of the awful crimes against humanity the CIA has committed without "serious trouble".

For example, consider the scandal where they stage a coup in a foreign government, kidnap American citizens to experiment in brainwashing or assassinate a political leader to protect economic interests.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html / Google for any of these headlines

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