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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like some of the philosophies expressed in this article. The whole "put family members in jail" bit feels like a worthless appeal to emotion.

If your family member is a mass murderer, I really don't care if investigators use information related to you to catch them. Even if that data is your DNA, and it was shared contrary to your expectations.

Nobody wants to see their loved ones go to prison, but the Golden State Killer was an absolute monster, and it's an demonstrably good thing he was caught and faced justice.

I understand that people feel that using DNA information from genealogy services to investigate crimes might feel like a slippery slope towards egregious abuse (and maybe that's true), but the Golden State Killer is definitely not an example of such abuse.

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I don't buy this justification. It's like the people talking about mass surveillance saying,

"I understand that people feel like unchecked government mass surveillance might feel like a slipper slope towards egregious abuse, but it's worth it to catch all the evil terrorists and pedophiles"

Sure the Golden State Killer was a terrible person, but I'm not willing to just blindly trust and accept that the government should be able to access and use whatever data they want to keep me "safe."

Personally, I fall into the "Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither" camp

An aside, but that sentiment "Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither" makes no sense.

Every person in every civilization has made the trade off between liberty and security to some degree. All but the staunchest anarchists are for some laws.

Discussion over where the grey areas end are valid; and I'd argue more useful then assuming what ever is currently acceptable to any given person must be the optimal tradeoff.

Exactly this. Police in most countries can search your home if they have proper legal justification. That is extremely invasive, but it is allowed by many societies because they recognize that invasive searches with proper oversight can bring around greater liberty, if such searches catch individuals who are harming others.

As I see it, the issue is not that these websites are being used by law enforcement, but that there is not formalized rules for doing so, nor is there transparency in how they are used by law enforcement. An example of a formal rule would be a warrant requirement.

I would gladly move to any country that did not have this police ability in a heartbeat. There is no level of security that can justify to me anyway, even the most mundane aspects of our policing activity.

The problem is that police don't actually make anyone safer, they simply create order for the state after something has occurred. I have never once called the police and had them actually do a single thing to help or solve the problem I was facing. Yet I can recount countless instances of them harassing me for nothing? Why is that? Maybe the fundamental notion of 'secure vs liberty' is flawed if we aren't actually provided with more security.

I've had a fugitive apprehension team surround my home... guns drawn, riot shield, the whole nine yards... looking for the guy who broke into my home, stole a firearm, sexually assaulted a person living there, and had continued threatening the victim via phone calls and texts for months.

After they caught the guy, I found out that those guys showed up due to a DNA match against subsequent violent crimes, for which we were the only victims who knew his identity. Soon after the cops re-victimized us they put out a media alert that quickly resulted in someone turning him in. It was two more months before anyone told us they'd caught him. Two. Friggin. Months. Of continuing to worry that this criminal might make good on their threats of doing further harm.

Seriously, I can't imagine many people reading this have lived for months under that level of stress and fear.

Fuck the police.

It doesn't make sense because it's so often butchered. Here's the real quote from Franklin:

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

So, the liberty must be "essential" and the safety must be "temporary" - and the classification as such would be the essence of the argument. It's not so much a statement of principle as it is invective.

And in context, it's actually about the liberties of a legislative assembly [1] rather than those of the individual, but that's a minor detail.

1. https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said

The good news is - you don't have to! But I don't mind giving my DNA if it means my mass murdering 2nd cousin might be caught.

What if it means your homosexual or blaspheming 2nd cousin might be caught?

I don't live in a society where that is an issue.

This is an example of the "end of history" fallacy, which assumes that civil and cultural freedoms do not regress once they are attained. But in fact, limits on policing are the very reason why homosexuals and blasphemers were able to get enough of a voice to become accepted in the first place.

It's a fallacy to suggest that any possible future is a probable future.

I donated blood earlier today. Maybe I shouldn't have because there is a possible future where a newly evolved disease is discovered that is rampant in sterile needles, lays relatively dormant for 10 years in people, and then kills them.

Persecution of minorities is not a possible future, it is a fact of the present. It was even worse in the recent past, and what progress we've made is not the result of predestined change in sentiment but of prioritizing civil liberties instead of the boogeyman of crime and moral degeneracy. You don't punch holes in the levee after the flooding stops.

As a gay blasphemer, I'm going to take my chances on this one. I appreciate the concern though.

I don't think they reuse needles for that any more.

How will you feel when your 2nd cousin is convicted of being a murderer based on nothing more than shed skin cells, and your whole family believes their alibi of being with their mother, but the jury doesn't because mothers lie for their children and DNA transference sounds far-fetched?

That's the nightmare scenario of familial matching and government access to / creation of DNA databases.

How many people have been falsely convicted(or even justly convicted) because their skin cells were found at the scene, with no other evidence?

How would we know?

Here's a story of someone who came close and probably would have been convicted had their attorney not credibly identified a source of the transference.

https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/

Sorry to tell you but a droplet of your DNA ended up in the vial of a serial rapist. So sorry that we tore your life apart when you were so obviously guilty. Mistakes happen, eh?

> Nobody wants to see their loved ones go to prison, but the Golden State Killer was an absolute monster ...

As was pointed out by another commenter, the (accused) Golden State Killer was a police officer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Killer#Joseph_Jam...

So the people you're saying you'd want to trust with this info in order to do the right thing, are sometimes literally the "Bad Guys" you shouldn't. :(

If a family member is charged for a crime, unless it is your spouse, isn't it true that the State can compel you to provide evidence that might incriminate the family member?

It's complicated:

http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2282

Agree with your point of view and I think the challenge is the latter half of your statement. It is akin to the darknet and illicit behavior. They can (and have) stopped bad people doing seriously bad things on the net so should we allow an authority to moderate that.

At a point in time everything may work as intended but the track record is that the system will be abused.

> The whole "put family members in jail" bit feels like a worthless appeal to emotion.

Using "but wouldn't you want to lock up those darn killers" is itself an emotional appeal.

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