there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database.
and if you did at a clinic or 23and me et al, be sure that your dna plus some metadata (if not from you, from your payment or from the lab, anything that goes around hippa is game) is already cataloged there.
couple months ago a newspaper shown how cheap private investigators paid for this data to narrow down location of people they were paid to locate.
Why do people keep giving out their information so freely?
[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2167554-serial-killer-s...
[2]: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/9kpnnz/linda-ann-okee...
[3]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/19/maine-man-accus...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/golden-s...
> Then the researchers built a model that predicted that a database needs to include only 2 percent of a population for 90 percent of the people to have a third-cousin match or closer in it. In other words, a database of just a few million people could be sufficient to track down nearly everyone in the United States....Another pattern jumped out in the MyHeritage data: People of primarily northern European ancestry were more likely to have matches than people of primarily sub-Saharan ancestry. This reflects the predominantly white customer base for MyHeritage and most other direct-to-consumer DNA tests. It also means that genetic-genealogy searches by law enforcement are, for now, more likely to succeed with people of European descent.
These sorts of identifications actually require a lot of manual work by genetic genealogists tracing ancestry after a potential relative is found in a DNA database. For example, Barbara Rae-Venter lead a team of five people to identify the Golden State Killer.
BTW, there's a handy Wikipedia page for a list of suspects identified using the GEDMatch database
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suspected_perpetrators...
If it is actually used to make human trafficing more difficult, it is a good thing.
(Don't ask me whether I trust this administration to do anything good, for the right reasons, within reasonable bounds, with proper controls, or merely act with sanity and respect -- that is a whole other conversation likely unsuitable for this forum)
It's fallacious to frame handing more power to centralizing entities solely in terms of the good they may (possibly) do. There are always downsides, even in addition to direct misuse - eg 1000 lifetimes lost every year to the TSA alone.
It's always a trade off, and politics (aka willful ignorance) practically guarantees it won't be made for the right reasons.
Which is why I put the disclaimers in the last two paragraphs ("If it is actually used" and "Don't ... trust this administration...")
The restricting scope, application purpose, and effective oversight are the anchor points and crampons that enable us to not slide down the slippery slope, but get to the top.
Now, whether or not this is true...
I'm picturing the president hosting a daytime talk show "who's the father" episode.
At the border there are instances of individuals using children to get special preference. The proposed idea will mitigate this issue.
This just seems like a policy that can be used to discriminate against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family".
That's... still discriminating against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family"
They’re trying to filter against bogus claims.
Also, I’m sure they have rates of these things and if it starts getting higher than the norm it could prompt more scrutiny.
Also, in many of those countries there isn’t a tradition of adoption, so that would be pretty rare.
> Many of the migrants are asylum seekers fleeing political violence in their countries of origin, especially Congo and Cameroon. Many of the Congolese lived for years in Angola, where they learned enough Portuguese to get by in Spanish. Angola last year expelled more than 300,000 Congolese refugees.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/hundreds-o...
> About 300,000 Congolese have fled Angola in the last few weeks, many of them in response to the violence in Lucapa at the beginning of October.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-angola-drc-violence-insig...
The US was the up-and-coming nation of the Western hemisphere for a long time while engaging in systematic persecution of blacks, Native Americans, and, at various times and places, other groups. Aggregate economic development and systematic persecution of selected groups which justifies flight in reasonable fear aren't mutually incompatible.
By definition, it's 100% of the cases that would be legitimate before validating the family relationship.
Of course, this tradition is being undermined left and right for the sake of the convenience, prejudices, and the power to control, of the ruling classes. And we go along with it, because there are some defensible reasons for doing so.
It's why I prefer online services that allow users to pick their own names. Here, I'm logfromblammo, and that's all anybody needs to know about me. In contrast, on Facebook, the terms of service require me to link my account to the identity I use for official interactions with the government, which is in turn linked to the name my parents gave me at birth.
Without descending into the identity derpfest propagated by some right-leaning libertarians, controlling my own identity means that it is more difficult to hurt me by hacking documents linked to my government identity. The more private businesses use the government identity exclusively, the more identity fraud and identity theft can become a problem.
This type of DNA-collecting dragnet reinforces the paradigm "you are who the government/company/computer says you are" over "you are who you claim to be". Getting sent to the vice principal's office to be disciplined for something that another person, enrolled at my high school with the same name as mine, had done is as close as I ever want to get to that. I got yelled at, for their mistake in identification. I am the only person who can really be sure that I am me, and I don't trust others not to screw that up--because they keep on screwing it up.
Asking for someone's "papers" to prove anything is never going to be something I could support unconditionally. Whenever you do that, you're taking away someone's agency to be in control of their own life.
Way to mitigate the issue. Damn the consequences.
so if a parent dies any rando in the caravan can claim the child and get all the attached benefits? gee, wonder if that kind of reward would have side effects on the safety of migrants with children.
(Disclaimer: I have no real opinions on this, but I'd like to get the facts.)
hint: it won't be effective at that.
On the other hand, we are talking about desperate people frequently traveling under the guidance of notoriously callous border traffickers so what do I know...
This is going to cause harm, it will not accomplish its purpose, and the charlatans will be laughing all the way to the bank.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We're trying to avoid flamewars on Hacker News, because they're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Plus they bring out meanness and dumbness in people and get worse as they go along.