ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

Posted by BlueBerry2001 1 hour ago

Counter99Comment24OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by voidUpdate 54 minutes ago

IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information, then I feel like people having a DNA test at birth or on becoming a citizen could be useful, both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") and from a policing standpoint ("we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" or "we were able to identify this john doe because their DNA was on record"). However, given that companies and governments are awful, I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/

Comment by mft_ 49 minutes ago

Indeed. It’s essentially the age-old conundrum: I don’t need to worry about my privacy because I’m not breaking the rules… until someone changes the rules.

Comment by alistairSH 11 minutes ago

How close does a DNA "match" have to be to get somebody tossed in jail? Do they actually require 100%, or is a "match" something less? What's the false-positive rate? Would a non-twin sibling's DNA "match"?

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.

Comment by voidUpdate 1 minute ago

According to wikipedia, "the theoretical risk of a coincidental match is 1 in 100 billion (100,000,000,000) although the practical risk is actually 1 in 1,000 because monozygotic twins are 0.2% of the human population", so it looks like some twins will cause an issue for DNA-based convictions, but I think a non-twin sibling is probably diverse enough? I have different eye colour, ears, food intolerances to my brothers, so I feel like our DNA is pretty different ("pretty" on a scale of human to human comparisons, since 99.9% of DNA is identical between humans or something like that).

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)

Comment by assimpleaspossi 2 minutes ago

Remember that one still needs proof. My DNA on a victim's clothes does not mean I committed the crime.

Comment by inigyou 25 minutes ago

Perfect enforcement of crimes is a bad thing. If criminal law was perfectly enforced we'd still be in Prohibition and PGP would also be illegal.

Comment by voidUpdate 22 minutes ago

It's generally quite hard to get a DNA sample from someone's PGP signature

Comment by usrnm 49 minutes ago

Life in general would be a lot simpler and nicer in a perfect world with perfect (whatever it means) people in it

Comment by sidewndr46 45 minutes ago

There are several European countries that do this from what I understand

Comment by hvb2 40 minutes ago

Do what, fingerprinting or collecting DNA? Not sure what you're trying to say, if Europe does it, it's fine?

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...

Comment by spwa4 9 minutes ago

A few things we can know for sure. The Dutch immigration enforcement authority, IND, has a blanket exception for to the GPDR collecting any kind of information on anybody "for the purposes of immigration enforcement".

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. Everything.

Comment by voidUpdate 36 minutes ago

Slightly biased because I'm a european, but I think a european country is more likely to be trust-able with a country-wide DNA database. Only slightly more though, I still wouldn't trust them to actually do it right

Comment by ljf 26 minutes ago

Interested in this as I haven't heard of this from an all population point of view, do you know which European countries this is? I know many have a national DNA database but that is limited to those charged with crimes (or suspected of in some cases, in some countries these are removed later).

Comment by b3ing 35 minutes ago

Maybe they can use it later to match the ICE rapists with the women and kids that are being sexually assaulted, something no one wants to talk about

Comment by kardianos 38 minutes ago

They don't mention this, but one major reason for this is to validate claims of family units and prevent trafficking.

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.

Comment by jackmott42 29 minutes ago

Look at this guy making excuses for the Nazis

Comment by 14 minutes ago

Comment by 13 minutes ago

Comment by lorreyfum 12 minutes ago

Good. Make it easier to track and identify them when they break more laws.

Comment by alistairSH 10 minutes ago

When who breaks more laws?

Comment by tremon 3 minutes ago

The babies, obviously.

Comment by 51 minutes ago

Comment by ck2 18 minutes ago

we're officially in the "just try to stop us" phase of authoritarianism

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

Comment by functionmouse 15 minutes ago

I mean, are YOU going to try to stop them?

Comment by alistairSH 7 minutes ago

Like Susan Collins, I shall furrow my brow to indicate my unease with the situation.

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!"

Comment by effnorwood 25 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by CurbStomper 48 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by 56 minutes ago

Comment by throwaway2027 1 hour ago

Just in time to train an AI model on it and discriminate based on heuristics. /s

Comment by zombot 40 minutes ago

Maybe they'll discover the illegal-immigrant gene or the unwanted-wrongthinker gene.

Comment by sieabahlpark 1 hour ago

[dead]