Did you know that the State of California has a DNA sample from every person born in the state since 1983? It's required by law for the hospital to collect it and give it to the state.
What is collected and stored is a small blood-spot sample from a heel prick on a newborn. This is used to test for various kinds of conditions that affect newborns.
This isn't a full DNA genome sequence or even any data at all, just the blood-spot specimen.
Law enforcement does not have automatic access to this sample, but individual samples have been given to law enforcement through court orders or warrants. There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information or how often it's given to law enforcement, but there's been proposed legislation to make this more transparent.
Was it inaccurate?
It's not a "DNA sample" in the way that most people would consider it these days, no more than a used cup would also be called a "DNA sample". But to your point, it can still be used for surveillance and tracking.
Also, your phrasing is designed to make it seem like a huge overreach, when this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities. I have personally experienced this.
So yes, I do think your framing here is inaccurate through omission of key facts.
Why does the state have to collect and keep the sample for that to happen? Why can't it be the private property of the parents, provided to whatever private testing labs are used to do the tests?
There is a process for people to have the sample destroyed, I also have no idea how easy or how often that is used.
the blood "spot" is about general morphology, and antigenic specificity.
OP made it sound like Cali was genome sequencing everyone born in the state and then storing that.
What's really going on is they're doing routine blood tests.
So yeah, pretty inaccurate.
as blood contains white blood cells, and these cells tend to contain DNA, yes a collection of identified blood samples is also a collection of DNA (molecules).
A DNA collection doesn't need to have been sequenced to qualify as a DNA collection.
So yes a collection of blood sample is technically also a collection of DNA sequences, but it has an expiry date (a short one compared to the lifespan of an individual!) contrary to a DNA sequence that's pure data.
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[1] Often mostly factually accurate, but I doubt you'd find much common ground with the particular spin they'd put on describing your daily life.
It would be like scanning your drivers license and putting it in a sealed envelope and claiming "I don't have your home address!", when I'm known to get the home address from other peoples envelopes when asked for it.
The government has granted themselves an option on your personal data that can’t be revoked.
The government has my biometrics. Most people should assume, by default, that the government has theirs as well.
However, the likelihood of being able to "sequence" the biomatter on a blood spot is quite low, and the probability of getting good signal out of it continues to go down over time. It'll still remain useful for various kinds of spot testing and genetic disease testing, but it's not going to produce a fully validated genomic sequence or even be that useful for forensic purposes.
This isn't some sort of sealed blood vial, it's literally just blood on paper.
Also your statement directly conflicts with the purported confirmed utility of law enforcement getting warrants to use said samples.
Yes, our ability to manipulate and read DNA has increased significantly in the past 40 years. But you can't create data from something that isn't there or has been corrupted beyond recovery.
And as far as the efficacy of police goes, I don't think that a warrant is sufficient to prove that there's confirmed utility in getting these samples.
Then no, it wasn't an incendiary claim.
Then why do they keep the samples?
They keep the samples for the same reason US tech startups keep deleted data and track seemingly useless behavior. Because they might find a use for it someday and there's literally no law preventing them from doing it.
Then I can easily guarantee you that individual samples have been given to law enforcement _without_ orders or warrants.
> There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information
Which means there is zero oversight, logging, or auditing.
Reading this thread, I was curious about what the size of California's sample collection looks like. I made an estimate using a little 1ul vial and an estimated 40 million people born in California since 1930. 100 samples in each box means 400,000 boxes. It's something like a 60 foot by 60 foot room with shelving.
If you extended it to a bank of 100 billion (about all humans ever born), that gets you to a pretty low tech solution that stores samples in the footprint of five Costcos.
People in the Netherlands trust their government because noone in the 500 years of history has ever gotten close to getting dictatorial power unless you count Napoleon and Hitler.
It's easy to fret at how dysfunctional and insane politics are. But after you talk to some actual voters (and look at opinion polls), instead you marvel at how comparatively sane policies manage to be---despite voters.