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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Its an interesting (if controversial) theory, that your DNA is no more private to you than your fingerprints, and they already fingerprint you when you are arrested and put those fingerprints into a national database.

The sticky thing for me though is that DNA not only identifies an individual, it also identifies their parents and possibly their siblings. So now we've got more than just our poor arrestee's id we've got some 'known acquaintences' and it gets worse if people start getting arrested for misdemeanors just so that the cops can take a swab to check.

No doubt there will be more to this debate before the dust settles.

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DNA also contains confidential medical information, fingerprints do not. Even if we accept that it is okay to collect DNA, it certainly cannot be treated like fingerprints are, it has much more stringent privacy and data security requirements. Simply as a practical matter, I don't think I am comfortable with their ability to handle this data.

(I imagine the collected DNA is currently not digitized, but in the future I would not expect that to remain true.)

The fact that they take fingerprints and put them in a national database, without even a conviction (you can be arrested for anything, and never convicted), should worry some folks, but I suppose we gave that battle up long ago.

> you can be arrested for anything

My favorite is being arrested for resisting arrest...for that arrest.

You can't be arrested for resisting arrest alone. You can be charged with resisting arrest and nothing else. This is an important distinction.

Imagine someone is suspected of murder. There is probable cause that this person has committed a crime so a judge issues an arrest warrant. A police officer finds this murder suspect and arrests him. The suspect resists but is ultimately taken into custody. Under interrogation, the suspect gives an alibi that ultimately checks out. This person isn't charged with murder because it's apparent he didn't commit the murder. However, the arrest was legal and resisting it was a crime. So the suspect is charged with resisting arrest with no other charges.

It's all a matter of perspective. If you come to arrest me for a crime I know I didn't commit, then no, the arrest is not "legal" per my definition of "legal". The government might, indeed, be following it's own rules (and getting to that on a consistent basis would be a slight improvement over where we are now) but my rights have still been violated.

There is only one definition of "legal": allowable under the law.

The constitution and the laws of your state outline your rights (if you live in the US). Part of the deal is that sometimes you can be arrested for crimes you didn't commit. But that's why we make sure that people who are arrested are guaranteed a speedy trial from a jury of their peers, etc.

> The constitution and the laws of your state outline your rights (if you live in the US).

It seems fairly uncontroversial that the constitution and laws are merely imperfect encodings of your rights. The encoding is necessary, since our legal system runs on it, but due to its imperfect nature it cannot be considered the master copy. Pre-1960s, many of our laws did not reflect what we expect of them and as a consequence of this the rights of countless were 'legally' trampled.

Lectures about the law are rarely of comfort to those that are a victim of it.

There is only one definition of "legal": allowable under the law.

But there is more than one definition of "the law".

The constitution and the laws of your state outline your rights

Not really. The constitution is more properly thought of as a list of the restrictions on what the government can and can't do. My rights exist quite outside of that framework. Whether I can defend them or not is a separate issue, of course.

Part of the deal is that sometimes you can be arrested for crimes you didn't commit. But that's why we make sure that people who are arrested are guaranteed a speedy trial from a jury of their peers, etc.

Sounds good on paper. Probably works as intended most of the time. May be about as good a compromise as we can come up with. But by no means is this system totally just, especially if you're someone who is convicted of a crime you didn't commit, or a "crime" that is nothing of the sort (smoking marijuana, homosexual sex, etc.)

> It's all a matter of perspective. If you come to arrest me for a crime I know I didn't commit, then no, the arrest is not "legal" per my definition of "legal".

How does that work? The police can only arrest people after they are convicted? They have to arrest them first and then charge them.

How does that work? The police can only arrest people after they are convicted? They have to arrest them first and then charge them.

Yeah, that's the rub, innit? I don't see any way to avoid a certain measure of injustice in this system. But it does argue that if the police arrest somebody, they better be pretty damn sure they are actually guilty of a crime. IOW, if we're going to accept this system of police, laws, arrests, courts, juries, etc., I think the bar for arresting someone needs to be pretty high.

But, I adhere to the basic premise that it's better for a guilty man to go free, than for an innocent man to be imprisoned.

For which you have separate remedy. It's an unpleasant irony, but resisting an unlawful arrest is, itself, not lawful.

For which you have separate remedy.

None of which will get me my time back.

It's an unpleasant irony, but resisting an unlawful arrest is, itself, not lawful.

Speaking only within the context of what passes for "the law" today (that is, the byzantine maze of statutes, regulations, codes, etc. pushed out by the US federal government, states, counties, cities, etc)... it may actually be, at least in some very specific cases. See: http://www.apbweb.com/cops-speak-out/1405-resisting-arrest-n... for example. Or: http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/resisting-an-u...

And that is all, of course, totally side-stepping the bigger issues of whether or not our entire system of "law" as we know it today is really valid.

Sure, and it may also be legal to use deadly force to defend yourself when the cops execute a warrant against the wrong address, which happens to be yours. People have been acquitted of murder charges for killing police officers executing their lawful duties in exactly those circumstances.

That won't make you any less dead should they respond in kind.

> You can't be arrested for resisting arrest alone.

There have been plenty of examples cropping up on YouTube recently showing videos of people being arrested for resisting arrest for their arrest and nothing more.

Of course, they don't get charged. But they do get arrested.

Indeed. One of the fascinating things if you read the dissent (which I highly recommend, it's very approachable) is that the national electronic fingerprint databases have not actually ever been constitutionally tested on 4th amendment grounds.

In my mind this falls into the same category as "searching" someone's smartphone if you arrest them. There's no analog for that. It's so fundamentally different, that you have to treat it differently than just looking through a backpack or something.

> In my mind this falls into the same category as "searching" someone's smartphone if you arrest them. There's no analog for that.

Strangely, this is a case where "cloud" stuff could actually help. You can't search somebodies rented apartment just because you found his access device for said apartment in his pockets when you arrested him. Similarly, why should you be permitted to search his rented "cloud" just because you found his access device?

This is imperfect since clearly local data should be protected from such searches as well, but it is fairly accessible.

For this matter, I'd love to see someone push for an equivalent of renters rights in all things digital...

I disagree, I think the cloud stuff actually makes this even harder (at least today). The distinction between what's in the cloud and what is local is extremely hard to make, even for those of us that live and breathe this stuff. Oh sure, you can define it, but as a practical matter, if I hand you my phone, can you tell what's on the cloud? Is it left to the vagaries of what the OS has happened to cache locally? If you open my Dropbox app on my phone, how do you know what files are local and what files aren't? What if you see a filename like "drug_customer_list" in the directory listing? Can you go get it now that you have probable cause? It's murky and messy. We can pretend that it's simple, but it's not and we will need to work all of this out.

Pretending as though it is simple is the trick though. The reality is simple: don't search the phone without a fucking warrant. However this is a reality that is rejected by those with no incentive to realize it. What is needed is a fictional simplicity that is easier to feed people.

After we have that we can work on getting the rest done properly.

> it also identifies their parents and possibly their siblings

Also children.

> No doubt there will be more to this debate before the dust settles.

Absolutely. The fact that the court didn't split along political lines tells you that this issue hasn't been through the political process yet. There will be quite a bit more to this story down the road.

This has been standard practise in the UK for many years now. Still controversial with an ongoing debate, but your point about relations is pertinent - a good number of convictions have been arrived at due to others' DNA samples.

> Its an interesting (if controversial) theory, that your DNA is no more private to you than your fingerprints, and they already fingerprint you when you are arrested and put those fingerprints into a national database.

I find that argument entirely disingenuous. The only way they are equivalent is if the DNA information is stored in their DB as a cryptographic one-way hash. This would remove all additional information from the DNA and only use it for unique identification.

Let alone the fact that swabbing your mouth should be a violation of your privacy (and blood tests).

I don't think disingenuous means what you think it means :-) But that aside, if I understand what I think you mean the analogy of fingerprints doesn't work for you (and for me either btw).

Historically the court has held that your right to privacy diminishes as you get closer to being convicted of a crime. And that the state may set aside that right, using a warrant, when they have reason to believe a crime was committed.

There has been little debate about putting the DNA of convicted sex offenders into a national database for example.

I find it disingenuous because the people making that argument don't really care about protecting people's rights -- they only want it to make their own jobs easier.

If they really thought that fingerprinting was the same, they'd be championing having their own children DNA swabbed, just like they get their children fingerprinted in case they need to be IDed. The fact that none of these same people have tried to "save the children" tells me they don't really believe that argument.

> And that the state may set aside that right, using a warrant, when they have reason to believe a crime was committed.

That makes sense though. Having judicial oversight of law enforcement is a compromise that protects people from the police (at least in theory), while granting LE the ability to do their job. DNA swabs used to have the same judicial oversight -- i'm not sure what is wrong with having to get a warrant to swab someone.

> There has been little debate about putting the DNA of convicted sex offenders into a national database for example.

I have no problem taking away some rights of convicted felons, since we already take away their liberty by locking them up.

The interesting thing is this national DNA database would be freely and easily accessed by corporate entities, assuming CISPA (or CISPA-like) acts pass.

CISPA is for sharing information about cyber threats, clearly DNA samples would not fall into that category. So no that isn't an "interesting thing", because it isn't a true thing its just you spreading FUD about something that isn't related to this topic.

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