[HN Gopher] The FBI Has Collected DNA Profiles for 21M People
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The FBI Has Collected DNA Profiles for 21M People
Author : mikece
Score : 77 points
Date : 2023-08-29 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theintercept.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theintercept.com)
| mypgovroom wrote:
| [flagged]
| twiddling wrote:
| That few?
| julienreszka wrote:
| [flagged]
| advisedwang wrote:
| Does that include, like, the EPA? NPS? What about the DoD?
| Agencies are just how the government does stuff, does "all
| alphabet agencies must be abolished" just mean the government
| should stop doing anything?
| mypgovroom wrote:
| All means all
| pc86 wrote:
| Most people who feel like entire federal agencies are somehow
| trampling on their freedoms and should be abolished _start_
| with the EPA (though conveniently leave out the DoD most of
| the time).
|
| There's probably a decent joke buried in the fact the first
| two they always talk about are the EPA and Education.
| NotACop182 wrote:
| Also let's abolish osha. See how workers feel after they
| are gone.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| it wasn't asked, but the idea is to abolish all
| hierarchical relations of authority and rule. that
| includes business owner authority over workers which osha
| exists to counterbalance.
| eesmith wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_agencies
|
| There are three main meanings:
|
| 1) "New Deal agencies"
|
| 2) "Since the 1990s, the term "alphabet agencies" has been
| commonly used to describe the agencies of the U.S. national
| security state."
|
| 3) Any government agency or cabinet department known by its
| initialism.
|
| From context, #2 seems the most likely.
|
| If #3, no more NASA. No more FAA. No more NOAA.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Yes
| soligern wrote:
| [flagged]
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| the congo has plenty of hierarchy and belief in strongman
| leaders.
| soligern wrote:
| Nothing you would have to abide by if you're not part of
| the local community.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Ok and
| soligern wrote:
| You get what you want.
| smitty1110 wrote:
| Come on, that's just absurd. No more IRS? No SSA? Good luck
| with all the angry seniors asking for their SSA checks beating
| down your door.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| I see little difference between collecting fingerprints and DNA
| samples.
|
| Very few reasonable people object to suspects being
| fingerprinted, so far as I can tell.
|
| Maybe people don't actually know what's being stored? A couple
| dozen non-protein-encoding loci cannot be used to frame you, tell
| what gender or race you are, or derive any other information
| about you.
|
| You can't look at a CODIS entry and say "this is a red-headed
| female with green eyes and a higher-than-average risk of breast
| cancer" you can't tell anything-- except if the samples being
| compared match.
|
| Same as fingerprints.
| tw04 wrote:
| As far as I know, fingerprints can't be used against my great-
| great grandchildren 200 years from now if some insane dictator
| decides he wants to eliminate every person that shares my
| bloodline for some reason.
|
| History has shown the horrible things mankind is capable of,
| and DNA can be utilized to facilitate it. Fingerprints cannot.
| manquer wrote:
| Given what CRISPR can already do today, it is not
| inconceivable that DNA editing and obfuscation becomes a
| thing 200 years from now , modifying the genetics and DNA of
| the zygote and sperm aka designer babies already is a serious
| non sci-fi area now .
|
| I doubt our progeny 200 years from now will have that strong
| a DNA connection to direct forefathers as we do now.
|
| DNA has been used to free thousands of wrongly convicted men
| from long prison sentences, probably from this kind of FBI
| databases too.
|
| I would rather take the benefit of better accuracy in
| criminal justice system now rather than vague problem far in
| the future.
|
| Tools are just tools , ethnic cleansing and eugenics existed
| far before DNA was even discovered , lack of tooling did not
| stop them
| jasonjayr wrote:
| This sounds like it could be a plotline in some futuristic
| cyberpunk story: encrypted/obfuscated DNA to protect
| against some antagonist!
| Arrath wrote:
| I could swear I've read a book (Consider Phlebas, maybe?)
| where along with shapeshifting to allow for easier
| approaches to their target, an assassin character can
| modify their dna such to leave behind evidence (hair,
| skin cells, etc) that point towards other parties.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Making the argument that DNA is private is a hard sell. Which
| parts? Your unique genome? Or the segments you share with
| everyone else. Instead of putting the genie back in the
| bottle (we can't), we should have more governance around the
| use and storage of the data, because it's only going to get
| faster, cheaper, and easier to sequence DNA, store it, and
| move it around digitally. Can probably already store global
| database of everyone's genome in a few racks of storage, if
| not a single rack.
|
| Very similar to the challenges we face around PII/SPI and
| other personal data.
| type0 wrote:
| > Making the argument that DNA is private is a hard sell.
| Which parts?
|
| It is in a way, it just doesn't work as many people think
| it does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_encryption
| tw04 wrote:
| >Making the argument that DNA is private is a hard sell.
|
| How is that a hard sell at all? I'm not suggesting a
| motivated actor would have trouble getting it, but I am
| suggesting that nobody should be allowed to have a copy
| without my express consent. AKA: it's private.
|
| In the same way that if a significant other were to send
| you a nude photo it's OK, but if you were to take pictures
| up a woman's skirt on the subway, it's very much not.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > but I am suggesting that nobody should be allowed to
| have a copy without my express consent
|
| I think that is a fair position to take and would support
| legislation codifying that in statute. That's not
| necessarily private, but strongly governed (but perhaps
| we're talking past each other). How do you feel about
| relatives who share segments with you, where them sharing
| their DNA would trivially lead to you? As always, the
| discussion is "where does one's rights end and the
| other's begin."
| [deleted]
| typingonmyphone wrote:
| [dead]
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Fingerprints on a gun means you atleast touched that gun.
|
| Some dandruff on a gun with your dna in it could mean that you
| rubbed against the murderers neighbor in the subway two weeks
| ago.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| One big difference is that DNA can identify siblings, uncles,
| aunts, grandparents etc. So even if I willfully allow the FBI
| to store my DNA, it could identify one of my relatives. It
| makes the decision much more complicated for society and people
| who want to preserve some privacy.
| pushedx wrote:
| I don't like this
| ftxbro wrote:
| That's enough to fill in the rest.
| soligern wrote:
| That hits hard. Atleast they can't reasonably base insurance
| premiums on the gene set of your third cousin, not for most
| health conditions anyway.
| theptip wrote:
| > The rapid growth of the FBI's sample load is in large part
| thanks to a Trump-era rule change that mandated the collection of
| DNA from migrants who were arrested or detained by immigration
| authorities.
|
| This detail makes a difference, IMO. It's one thing to be doing
| DNA surveillance on citizens, quite different to use it to
| identify/correlate migrants, particularly undocumented ones.
|
| I don't love the overall accumulation of Orwellian machinery that
| sooner or later can be turned on the citizenry, but I did leave
| the article with less concern than I entered with based on the
| title.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > quite different to use it to identify/correlate migrants,
| particularly undocumented ones.
|
| A persons status can change in their lifetime. Further, was
| there any problem with photographs and fingerprints? These have
| been successfully used for identification for a long time, what
| is DNA identification providing that we weren't able to achieve
| before?
|
| I understand the need to identify people. I do NOT understand
| the need to do it by recording my genetic code. There's a lot
| of private and exploitable information contained in my DNA..
| much less so in my fingerprints.
| ketralnis wrote:
| Pretty much every invasive thing starts out as a more
| acceptable less invasive and is stepped up one thing at a time.
|
| "Oh okay it's just non-citizens" "oh okay it's just criminals"
| "oh okay it's just people that have been arrested" "oh okay
| it's just people about to go through the TSA but they don't
| store it" "oh okay they do store it but they take real good
| care of it" ...
| [deleted]
| black_13 wrote:
| [dead]
| skellington wrote:
| I don't want this level of surveillance either, but if the
| rapid growth is in 'large part' due to collecting illegal
| immigrant DNA, doesn't that go against the narrative that
| illegal immigration is a small problem? Have we caught and
| released 20 (?) million people since Trump was in office?
| cout wrote:
| The 20M DNA samples is more than just migrants. Still, 100K
| encounters per month can add up fast:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2023/01/13/monthly-e...
| dpifke wrote:
| According to CBP, there were about 100,000 "encounters" on
| the southern border this past June, which is a 42% decline
| from the month before and the lowest since February, 2021:
|
| https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-
| rele...
|
| (It's not immediately clear to me whether an intercepted
| group counts as one "encounter," or if each individual in the
| group gets logged as a separate "encounter." My hunch is that
| it's the latter.)
|
| 100-150k/month * 36 months = between 3.6 and 5.4 million
| individuals since Trump left office, which would make up a
| significant chunk--but not the majority--of the 21 million
| DNA profiles.
|
| (For context, this is about the population of Dallas, TX or
| San Diego, CA entering the country illegally per year: https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...)
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| This is why I never felt comfortable doing 23andMe, or any of the
| spin-offs. It seems there's no way to protect that data.
| leotravis10 wrote:
| Even if you don't use it, there's a good chance your relatives
| or your loved ones might have. Connecting the dots that way.
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(page generated 2023-08-29 23:01 UTC)