ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children
wired.com
wired.com
And whether people are breaking the rules or not, the more someone knows about you the easier it is for them to influence and manipulate you. (This is the basis of the online advertising industry.)
I think people who don't value privacy must not know what it is.
(You, personally, in 2026 feel the need to close the door for 'privacy' because of some combination of societal programming, learned experience, personal psychology, choice, whatever.)
The gist is that this was always done when people were arrested for criminal offences. They're now doing it for civil offences and, like with all the ICE stuff, it seems to be do first, ask questions later. So you can be a citizen but your data might end up in their systems anyway as it's submitted before they find out you are a citizen...
10 years ago we found out, from a budget proposal that was in dispute, that the police had sent every mental health database in the Netherlands to Palantir. Regular health databases too, but if you're Dutch, Peter Thiel knows exactly what you told the "the law guarantees you can trust me" social worker 20 years ago. Or what you told any Dutch police officer at the border, on the street, ... Everything. That's what the Dutch state used their authority for.
Also, the DNA test is not done by the IND, but by the NFI (Dutch Forensic Institute), who destroy the material after six months.
sidewndr46 had a pretty grandiose claim (I don't think there are any European countries that do a DNA test at birth and store the data) and you only come with a lot of handwaving that is not even about DNA.
The Dutch government must have done that because it comes with a really cool badge ... that's the only explanation possible here.
There were multiple governments operating pervasive surveillance states and using them to punish dissidents on the western part of European continent well within a human lifetime from today. What makes you think that won't happen again, this time in a completely iron-clad way?
You can just say "at this very moment".
Generally, we've seen that that was bad and I would hope that we wouldn't do it again. I did also say that I don't think it would actually work out because governments, in my original comment
(France actually ban paternity testing without a court order!)
Because the GDPR is only concerned with data collection not explicitly required by law. If a government passes a law to set up a genetic database, then that it totally fine with the GDPR.
Yes, I'm aware that, in theory, DNA is unique. As is the theory for finger-prints. But, I'm also aware that theory is rarely reality.
In reality, juries often hold evidence like this (and also-very-unreliable eye witness testimony) in high regard, based on how it's positioned into the narrative.
Your response is very uninformed at best.
I'd argue that while a DNA match could be a very good starting point for a conviction, other evidence should also be presented, for the reasons you suggest. For example, there is the case of the Phantom of Heillbron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn), where European police found DNA evidence of a woman being at many diverse crime scenes, but it turned out the cotton swabs used for testing were contaminated by at worker at the factory (The swabs weren't certified for police work)
The problem is that we're proposing a DNA database, so you're now comparing 1 sample found at a crime scene with 300ish million people. That's a 300M in 100B chance, or 1 in 333, of some person having a false positive match.
Now combine that with thousands of samples being tested every day (because let's be honest, why wouldn't you use such a database for literally every single crime?) and you're looking at dozens of false-positives per day. It is only a matter of time before it isn't someone with an airtight alibi at the other side of the country, but someone reasonably-close who was just sitting alone on their couch at home all weekend. How are they going to prove they weren't involved in the crime?
This is why large-scale DNA matching is a horrible starting point for a conviction. It gives you a false sense of security, and it makes the investigators lazy. In most cases it is far better if DNA is used as the final nail in the coffin when you've already got a solid case against a suspect.
https://womenherald.com/health/the-chimerism-case-how-lydia-...
I don’t remember the exact details, because I have watched it long time ago, but they don’t need an exact match. Actually it’s more scary - if your distant cousin has DNA “in the system” - you are in it too.
This 1M DNAs may “help” match an order of magnitude more people.
How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?
"We're sorry your job application was rejected because we found you were 4% less maximally conscientious than the median applicant"
I've had job applications (albeit in secured projects) rejected for similarly vague bullshit ("Insufficiently candid")
(Entertainingly, if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we wouldn't need this database... or police or militaries for that matter.)
At any rate, even if I could ensure, in perpetuity, that my DNA would not be used inappropriately (where I get to decide what that means), I would still not want it collected and database'd. People deserve to have privacy in their bodies.
Whether or not you believe that justification ("Stranger Danger" was a scare at the time), I can promise you those fingerprints were used to put people in jail later.
Evidence?
It's theoretically possible, but as far as I'm aware, no one has found a matching set.
( > Evidence? )
A detective in a ~150K pop. municipality told me that while they might dust for prints, they rarely use them in court because computer matches are very noisy and actually entering prints as evidence in court requires an expensive expert witness to evaluate and attest to a supposed match. The prosecutor can't afford the fees for every case, so a lot of fingerprint evidence goes unused.
Exactly. I can think of so many bad outcomes. Just the medical point:
both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia")
You know how this will end in the modern tech dystopia. In countries where health care insurance is not mandatory or there is a large gap between collectivized and private insurance, DNA would be used to reject or raise the prices for people with 'unlucky DNA'.
A government that could be trusted now is not necessarily trustable in the future. I am pretty sure the orange guy clan would love to lone their pockets by selling such information.
Also, apart from these issues, a lot of people simply do not want to know these things. Suppose that the outcome is "you have a 30% risk of dementia by 60". For most people such kind of information is hard to act on, while it increases worry significantly. I do think it can help for some treatable illnesses, enabling early monitoring.
The law however is only as good as it is being enforced. And if recent events is anything to go by, not having this data is generally the strongest protection.
The problem is a law can be repealed any time. Might take some heavy lobbying to get there but nothing is impossible.
On the upside, think how good that Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA article will be.
You never know who will be in power tomorrow. The convenience of a centralized system today does not outweigh the catastrophic danger of that system in the wrong hands in the future. Specially nowadays.
Remaining is to upgrade old phones of every body.
There are some sorts of protocols and conventions that might help with this.
For example, not-for profit medical systems can hold certain records , then problems are regionally isolated and have extra layers of protection.
Biosignatures, similarly, we may want to only enabling 'matching, and with a warrant' - so that gov may not procure individuals biometrics, but only require a 3rd party lab to do matching, with oversight, process etc.
That would radically limit concentration of of actual power, likelhihood of problems.
If biometric matching companies were liable for failure to implement protocol (aka delete after test) etc - then that's powerful.
Regulations are never perfect, but they work.
Companies can skirt the law - but 99% of the time it's just normal compliance.
The trick is to make regs that don't encourage breaking compliance, and when it happens, the blast radius is limited.
NJ is just ahead of giving law enforcement access whenever it wants for searches, and renting the data to whoever pays.
> "we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before"
You've casually thrown out a use that sounds like it would be valuable, and thus has political appeal - but it actually fails hard to false positives. If you're merely confirming a DNA match, then the small chance of a false positive remains small - you're only comparing against one candidate. But if you do a population-wide search, then that chance of finding false positive multiplies [0] across the whole population! So even with good intentions, you've invented a process that picks random people out of society and harasses them (at best, with the way justice systems actually work this would lead to false convictions).
From a technology perspective, it is really not that hard to keep all this on an air-gapped network and just run comparisons against it "offline" and get a result back with all the info you need when there is a match.
So it all really just comes back to implementing governance that has the correct leverage on power. America is definitely not that, and this will be abused in all manners if america continues down fascism.
Of course there's always things we just shouldn't store, like logs of password hashes or whatever, but most of reality hinged on "trusted government"
So at the same time we saw a mass increase in border crossings we were also collecting their DNA? That's a huge number.
America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.
My position is that the US has been on this road for about 250 years. Blood quantum and similar policy choices forced on people, individually and in groups, have been very damaging.
next up, armed ICE around voting locations despite federal law
because "just try to stop us"
then refusal to seat voted delegates
because "just try to stop us"
the idea is to normalize the obscenity of it all, like the billions in wildly illegal grifting
king's image on buildings, airports, passports, park passes, coins and $250 bill
whitehouse demolished, fights on front lawn, statues covered in gold while people can't get healthcare or even food
people arrested and prosecuted at great expense then quietly dismissed
all normalized somehow without mass outrage
Kidding, sort of, if brownshirts and other government-sanctioned thugs show up in November, I'm really not sure what I'll do. They're already making noise about doing extra "Watching" of elections in my area (Fairfax County) and as far as I can tell, the only criteria for that is "they vote blue, so it must be fraud!"
Then get all righteous and start talking about democracy and then no-true-scotsman all the actual things folks do to curtail the actions of the state.
It's wild, but the flip side is that since I am on that side of things I have a much better picture of what it might actually be possible when folks understand that the ethical choices aren't available via a ballot line.
I wish I believed voting worked even a little.
A lot of folks might take that sentiment to believe that since the only 'real and adult' politics comes about from voting we simply abstain out of apathy. For me, the sentiment is a lot closer to "I wish I thought I could just vote instead of all the other weird political things that I end up doing".
Anything at all helps.
This is, I suspect, a good thing. The article never states any downsides, other then nebulous claims. Yes, DNA is like finger printing someone, which is routinely done for arrests, but has the benefit of assisting in claims of family relations, which is at the heart of many ICE concerns.
The same way, I might add, that you or I want to exclude squatters from our homes, and the same way (I assume) most of us don't invite hobos in to sleep in our beds.
If you say that's bad too and that it's much like Apartheid, then all I can conclude is that maybe I need to learn more about Apartheid. Maybe it's not so bad as I have been told.
But they don't in absolutely any sense (legal, moral, philosophical) own the country. And especially they do not "own" the culture (because that's actually impossible). So all you have is jingoism propping up this entire notion.
>That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
To the extent that the land claimed as part of the United States belongs to and is controlled by the United States, it belongs to the people.
People certainly own an interest in the culture and have a right to keep it from changing too much too quickly and to fight and refuse the changing of certain aspects of that culture.
Citizens are the beneficiaries of a trust. The land is held in a trust. That is not the same thing as ownership. Think about it: in some other countries you can't even outright own land. That should indicate to you that your notion is overly facile.
The underwriters of that trust are all of the current citizens and more importantly all those that came before. In the USA that includes indigeneous peoples, slaves, naturalized immigrants, etc.
> People certainly own an interest in the culture and have a right to keep it from changing too much too quickly and to fight and refuse the changing of certain aspects of that culture.
Lol what does it mean to "own an interest"? I own an interest in blue spotted blue spotted stingrays - what rights does that bestow upon me with respect to the stingrays? None.
Citizenship is the most absolute (though diluted) ownership possible. I own a car, but if I commit a crime heinous enough I can have that confiscated as a penalty. On the other hand, in the United States there is no crime for which my citizenship can be revoked. What about the other elements of ownership? Participating in the decision-making process of the disposition of the property for instance... that's called voting or representative democracy or whatever you want to call it. At times, the government, acting on behalf and with the consent of people, has bought more territory, or traded it away to other nations. We employ a policy of absolute defense against any belligerent encroachers.
Looks like ownership to me. Calling it a "trust" is just the weasel words.
I don't care what you think - this isn't a creative writing exercise. Trust is the technical term describing the legal framework for much of the land in the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Trust_Lands
I'm not gonna respond to the rest because you're clearly just going off vibes and feelings.
Lol my man have you looked at the polls lately
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
Haha
Citizens do own their countries. In any meaningful sense of the word "own", they do own them. Legally, morally, and philosophically.
> And especially they do not "own" the culture
This is a strange non sequitur. Sure. No one owns culture. The immigrants can take their culture with them back home.