The worrying part of this story is that it might lead to victims being afraid of seeking help.
Deliberately using someone’s rape to collect DNA so they can be later prosecuted for minor crimes is absolutely unconscionable in my opinion.
DNA should be scrubbed from govt records if it doesn't belong to someone with a felony. Even misdemeanors I'd say shouldn't qualify people for a permanent DNA record on file.
It is (almost) never correct to violate someone's privacy.
Privacy is paramount.
there are exceptions to (almost*) every rule...
How far do you go? I'd argue that matching DNA from a rape victim to charge that person with a crime is a violation of due process. The expectation with a rape kit is to find the DNA of the rapist. That expectation and trust was violated.
Collect the rapist's DNA and throw the rest in the trash.
One would expect that in such a situation only the DNA of the criminal who committed the rape would have been recorded. My issue with the situation here is that a rape kit should not have been a source of data.
That the DNA of a victim should not have been saved and added to a database. It should not been made available to the investigators.
Suppose that you have a horrific knife slasher, let's call her Sally. She runs around town and kills people with a knife.
However, let's suppose that she gets raped. Will it not be beneficial to society that she is willing to go to the police over the rape case?
It's like perfidy. As a general principle you don't use the fact that people want to do something good against them, even if they're bad. There may be deeper situations where this analysis doesn't hold, for example, if your enemies are providing people schooling or food, that may be an even stronger reason why it's important to attack them, but aside from things like that, this generally holds.
That‘s a very simple rule.
What I am saying is that one should not treat information given for a socially useful purpose so as to discourage anyone from offering the information for that purpose.
If someone volunteers his DNA for research, you do not look for crimes using that information. If someone volunteers his DNA for a rape inquiry, you do no search for burglaries. If someone volunteers his DNA for a burglary, you do not use it in rape inquiries.
The goal is to treat information in a limited way in order to ensure that as much useful information as possible can be volunteered.
I got the hierarchy idea from your example that catching a rapist is better than catching a knife slasher and extrapolated from there.
So if your enemy has medics who he lets tend the wounded, even if they're your wounded, then you stay away from them. You want surrender and truces to be respected, so you don't make use of false surrender or truces as ruses.
But even though you respect such things, your enemy is still your enemy. Similarly, in this case Sally is still a criminal, but you want her to report crimes if she happens to be willing to do so for some reasons, so you don't exploit people's reports of crimes in order to go after those people themselves, unless the report itself is malicious or deceptive and is therefore not a report at all.
I think the issue is the person that goes to the police and submits the report has essentially shielded themselves from all criminal liability. But of course the people the people who's DNA is being tested get no such protection.
It'd be one thing if, as a general rule, only people that explicitly consent can have their DNA used in a search. But in reality the police have this huge database of DNA nobody consented to be used to arrest them, and then Sally comes in, bloody hands washed, and gets to use this giant database of un-consenting victims for her own ends, but none of her own victims can benefit from her DNA, even though she was perhaps the only one of the bunch who willingly gave DNA to the police.
In other words, if it really is a privacy rights violation to test someone's DNA without their permission, and maybe that's the case, they wouldn't need to collect it because they wouldn't have anyone to test it on.
Whether she is reliable only matters for the investigation of the crime.
I don't see it as a matter of a privacy violation. I see it as a socially contra-productive act, a kind of perfidy-- like pretending to surrender and then attacking somebody in war or pretending to be a medic in order to attack somebody.
> like pretending to surrender and then attacking somebody in war or pretending to be a medic in order to attack somebody
There's international courts with the lofty goal of prosecuting "war crimes" and if you submit evidence that some country or group is committing war crimes, like killing medics, you don't get some special protection from the evidence you submit. If you submit a video where you and your opponent are both killing medics, everyone involved can be tried for war crimes. If you submit a video where you're killing A's medics and B is killing your medics, everyone involved can be prosecuted. In the US if the prosecution, has evidence that's both inculpatory and exculpatory they don't get to just tell the jury to ignore the exculpatory elements. I don't see how any court could be fair if this was not the case.
Before you even consider the harm to those victims from not being able to seek justice, there's also a real risk that in doing so you may end up creating more victims by losing the ability to catch a proportion of rapists some of whom may reoffend.
Yes, but there's a conflict here, and it's penny-wise, pound-foolish to prioritize justice for the people who were burgled, when that would very obviously deter people from reporting far more serious crimes.
They are also victims, because their DNA was placed into the same system for the crime of having their house burglarized, which is almost as serious as the crime of having been raped.
You do not need to be a criminal, you only need to be afraid that DNA will be misused in the future.
Political dissident, activists and whistle-blowers come to mind.
Misused how exactly? It is extremely trivial to collect someone’s DNA if you are trying to actively target them… but even then… what would the gov do with it wrt activists dissidents etc? maybe I need to read more sci-fi
> French diplomatic sources told Reuters that Mr Macron had been told to choose between accepting a Russian PCR test to get closer to Putin or abide by strict social distancing rules.
> "We knew very well that meant no handshake and that long table. But we could not accept that they get their hands on the president's DNA," one of the sources told Reuters.
> The source did not elaborate on how the Russian intelligence services could exploit Mr Macron's DNA.
Doesn't provide insight into why one should be concerned, but it's useful information to know that nation states are wary of each other in this regard for some reason even if we don't know what that reason is.
Or just be a little thoughtful. If I want to persecute homosexuals, I can go ta a gay bar and collect DNA. If I want to persecute crypto-Jews, whenever we bust a place where some of them have gathered to worship, we can catch the others in the area by collecting DNA.
In the general case: we can designate a place to be an enemy place, and arrest the people who we can prove have been in that place.
It seems to me like DNA is just new and techie so people are inherently thinking it is more useful and scary than it really is.