What is the impact of this?
I have the same aversion to government power built into my bones but I can’t think of a concrete way the government would be able to abuse this capability to assert power over me.
I have the same aversion to government power built into my bones but I can’t think of a concrete way the government would be able to abuse this capability to assert power over me.
DNA could be tested for traits that are "more likely to cause criminality". People with those traits can be more heavily scrutinized and surveiled. Or have their employment opportunities limited.
DNA could be multiplied and planted as evidence.
DNA could be cloned, or used in scientific testing without consent.
DNA could be used for targeted biological warfare.
People leave traces of DNA everywhere they go. Who knows what type of detection mechanisms will exist in the future?
There's also the very likely scenario that a central database like this becomes a prime target and leaks. It's borderline guaranteed.
While racism is definitely a thing today, it seem to be dying. Slowly, but the trend is certain: modern society is way less racist than it was, say, a century ago (or worse, a few centuries ago). People stop caring about ethnic origins. The care about cultures and nationalities those days (notice how even the meaning of "racism" had shifted to account for this), and those are rapidly becoming less and less correlated with genetics.
While people won't stop being xenophobic (unless, idk, some miracle or catastrophe happens), in the modern world, when it comes to identity, genes are rapidly losing battle to memes.
It's also much cheaper to just fabricate evidence (cf. XKCD #538 aka $5 wrench vs security). Worked well since time immemorial, and doesn't leave a clone.
I don't think you need to consider other possibilities, this is a good enough example. And unfortunately it is not insane in the sense of paranoid, because this is what Nazis would be doing with it. Or NK jailing entire families for one member's crimes but basing it on DNA matches.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
TL;DR - Pasco County in Florida was using "predictive policing", where based on various statistics, they would predict who would commit crimes and harass the ever-loving shit out of them until they moved out of the county.
Leaks/bugs already blamed, in the article:
>GEDmatch tools that provided access to DNA profiles that were opted out of law enforcement searches, which she described as “a bug in the software.”
I'm no biologist, but I've heard that ethnic bioweapons (in a way portrayed in science fiction or conspiracy theories) are basically a myth and/or convenient propaganda fuel.
Could there be some genes already circulating in certain ethnicities that would protect from a specially designed virus?
Maybe guilt by association? Imagine going into a business, having some DNA based system identify you, and being denied entry because the majority of your relatives are criminals.
Realistically, I'd say the opposite will happen though. Being related to someone wealthy or influential will automatically get you special treatment and you won't even have to ask "do you know who I am?"
> but I can’t think of a concrete way the government would be able to abuse this capability to assert power over me
I think the war on drugs in the US is a pretty good example. If I say it was used to marginalized and disenfranchise one specific group of people, everyone knows what group I'm talking about, so, IMO, that's a good indication it was intentionally targeted at that group.
Now imagine the same thing, but you're in the targeted group and, instead of having the police roaming your neighbourhood, you're simply locked out of all the "opt-in" systems that are necessary to have a decent life; banking, real-estate, licensing, etc.. Maybe you're even prevented from shopping at stores that have reasonable prices and have to overpay for food because you're a "bad person".
Opting in to beneficial systems, with less beneficial defaults, is the new way of discriminating IMO.
Remember that you shed cells everywhere you go, so soon the tech will be advanced enough where we can do nearly real-time DNA matching. If you sneeze, a sniffer could pick that up and figure out who you are.
Imagine a camera that films not things that are visible, but people who were there, at that protest, in that store, in that hospital, boarding that plane. It's practically irrefutable (or currently legally is, even though it's inherently flawed.)
And you can never change that identifier. Once that data is out, it's out.
The last headline in that article, "Solving Crime Before It Happens" could have easily been entitled "Minority Report" (another great sci-fi movie that's not so fictitious anymore.)
At the same time, when you look at real life justice systems through the same lens we look at Gattaca and Minority Report it looks even more bizarre. We are pretty much running criminal training camps almost designed to make people more criminal, and then after they get out of the camps we structure our society to almost force them back into crime to survive. It's bonkers.
If people are robbing other people for $100, especially in 2023 dollars, that's too stupid to be a failure of society, that has to be because small-time crime is a resource for a lot of justice system-connected industries, and as long as maintaining the level of it doesn't pit those industries against real estate interests, they can lobby for crime.
I think there are really three kinds of crime:
1) Crimes of need, where people need to feed themselves or their loved ones, so resort to crime because they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom,
2) Crimes of stupidity, where people just don't understand how unlikely they are to get away with something, or how bad the punishment could be, so they undervalue the cost of undertaking those crimes for the benefit they stand to gain, and
3) Crimes of compulsion, where people have enough, and mostly understand the costs and the benefits, yet risk their lives and freedom for more for some irrational reason; degenerate gamblers.
We can prevent all crimes of need immediately and easily. It's more difficult to prevent crimes of stupidity, but pouring education into everyone is the answer. It's idiopathic crimes of compulsion that are hard to deal with, because people have wildly different reasons for their compulsions.
As a society, we pour all of our efforts into crimes of compulsion, the only kind of crime that we're virtually guaranteed to be ineffective at stopping, and bad at controlling. Where the discussions between political factions are about whether we should kill them, give them therapy, drug them, corral them far away from people, let you look them up on a website after they're free, refuse them work, let them vote, etc., in the context of assuming that the vast majority of crime has unique causes and solutions. To assume that, we have to ignore that people are still sticking other people up for $100.
That sounds good until you realize that algebra won't help... You're proposing a "scared straight" program, essentially.
Stuff like: Stealing from your employer because you believe they are treating you unfairly, keying someone's car because they cheated on you, trashing an apartment when the landlord evicts you, not paying a fine that you think is unfair, doing drugs because the law is stupid, etc...
Person X has a genetic predisposition that results in anger control issues in 87% of people, so they must subscribe to weekly anger management counselling or they'll be denied access to public areas such as malls and schools. The government certified and licensed suppliers are A, B, C.
Imagine the profits of legally compelling people to buy your stuff. History shows there would be a long lineup of people eager to exploit something like that.
I don't think the government should be imposing anger management counselling on people in the first place. That has nothing to do with concern about DNA, and everything to do with concern about the government being able to tell me what to do when I've not been convicted of a crime.
A lot of it would be based on junk science and the low rate of offenders, because the diagnosis is bullshit, would be touted as evidence of the value the program is providing.
What if it's not based on junk science, but on good science?
Of course if you recently visited the place where a crime took place you might also be falsely accused.
I suppose they could also use it to track your movements if there was some way to massively collect DNA samples from the environment.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2375624-air-pollution-m...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230606-how-air-pollutio...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
these can be deployed at great density in an array providing granularity made to order.
That isn't being falsely accused, it's worse.
A core problem with any surveillance is that it is disproportional and only available to the powerful. If access to surveillance were as universal as possible, powerful interests would suddenly find the will to wind it back.
Now imagine they have the wrong DNA on file for you!
Or go back a few more generations, even here in the USA you might legally have been declared to be 3/5 of a person.
You think people have really changed since then? I don't.
Lack of a detailed census in your country was indisputably protective for Jews during the Holocaust. Plenty of people only discovered themselves that they had matrilineal Jewish descent during the Holocaust, because the Nazis had all those punchcards.
Oh my god can we stop this absurd meme. Nobody was ever 'declared to be 3/5 of a person'. The point of the 3/5 compromise was to reduce the power of states with slaves. It was purely about counting the population of the state for the purpose of assigning seats in Congress. To suggest that it was racist to multiply the number of slaves by 0.6 before adding them to the non-slave population is truly insane. If it had been 1.0 then it would have given slave-owners more political power.