The beauty of DNA samples is that they are recheckable. How would a corrupt official frame someone? He presumably has access to the database to which you object - if he declares a flase positive, matching a crime scene sample to a database entry where there is truly no match, the decepetion will be uncovered in short order: the accused simply supplies another sample, which will not match the crime scene sample.
Your DNA is the most private and personal thing you have, aside from your soul, if you believe in that. It’s way more precious and personal than someone’s tangible property. How is it not invasion of one’s person to force someone to give it up?
Bricker
Does Prop 69 mandate independent rechecking of a sample when a match is ostensibly found? I know that asset forfeiture had good intentions as well, but people cleared of crimes have fought hell getting their property back. Also, what is to prevent the database from falling into the wrong hands? Suppose I wanted to know whether you had been in my wife’s car last night, and I have a spare $10,000 to offer a clerk in the office. Could I get access to your sample?
But isn’t this already an answered question? We already require all persons charged with felonies to give fingerprints. Based on that I’d say the DNA thing is legit, constitutionally.
Hell, MY fingerprints are on file with the feds. I once held a Top Secret clearance through USAID and Department of State. And I think that’s perfectly legitimate.
As for the run of the mill citizen with no crime charged and no other need I would heartily oppose constructing a database of such and requiring a registration. People should be able to stay off the grid as much as possible.
How do you figure that? Your DNA is the result of your parents’ DNA. It is uniquely YOU, but it is not private or personal any more than your fingerprints are.
Sure you could.
Or you could save $8,000, hire someone for $2,000 to follow me around at a distance until I spit on the sidewalk, discarded an empty soda can, or did any one of a zillion other things that left my DNA somewhere.
What if the official is a real dirtbag, and would accept $1,000? Besides, wouldn’t processing your saliva cost money, whereas the database sample is already done?
Have you looked around the web?
This siteoffers three tests for $280. That’s for any private citizen who wants to send samples in. There are dozens of other sites. Why anyone would risk bribery of a state official to save $93 is beyond me.
Well, I would say your fingerprints are personal too, but even that’s a little different. Fingerprints can be gathered without technology; they’re more along the lines of someone’s appearance since they’re right out in the open. I’m sure that a skilled detective, looking at someone’s hands and a crime scene side by side, would be able to determine whether the fingerprints match up, and it wouldn’t require inking. DNA collection is invasive (it can’t be accurately taken from hair or skin flakes; a full sample can only be taken from living tissue), and the similarity of DNA samples is non-obvious to a non-scientist or CSI technician. It’s private because you can’t access it easily; it can only be done with invasive technology and it can’t be seen in the way appearances or fingerprints (they straddle the line) can be seen.
My fingerprints are on file; I have a job at the local passport agency and they took them of everyone that works there. I do feel very paranoid about it and I wouldn’t have taken the job if they had asked for DNA. It sincerely creeps me out that someone has my fingerprints on file and that they will be on file until the day I die. Hopefully the building where they are stored will blow up after I leave the job, along with all the computers they’re stored on.
(Oh yeah, and I don’t see much that’s wrong with collecting DNA or fingerprints from the convicted… what I have problems with are collecting them from common citizens or the accused. People who have committed crimes and are not found to be innocent later relinquish all rights to the privacy of their DNA, IMO.)
By “invasive” you mean that a cotton swab is run along the inside of the cheek, a procedure that lasts about two seconds… yes?
Doesn’t matter, it’s still physically invasive, unlike taking a photograph.
I’m afraid that I feel like you’re evading the point. So far, you’ve not provided a compelling argument that the data are safe from prying interests. Assigning risk to me, for example, is not compelling, since it may well be the case that it is the clerk himself who is corrupt and who is offering the data for sale. (Or for exchange of sexual favor, or because he is an enemy of yours in private life, or a bazillion other reasons.) If for some reason you believe that official corruption is a concept too incredibly hypothetical, then I would like to hear that argument.
If your concern is that the data are safe from prying interests, it’s relevant for me to show how easily the data may be obtained by other means. If were were discussing a database of hair color, I think you’ll agree I can rebut your inference of invasion of privacy, or your concern about prying external interests, by pointing out that all someone has to do is look at you to get the same information that’s in the database.
It’s true that there is some risk associated with storing your DNA in a database. But that risk does not exist in a vacuum. We must balance it against both the utility it serves an ordered society, and the delta of the harm it creates to you – measured not against “zero,” but against the harm that would exist anyway, absent the database.
But you’ve shown only that a datum is (somewhat) as easy to obtain. Surely, you will agree that obtaining information on, say, a thousand people is easier through corruption of bureaucrats than through ordinary means.
Unfortunately, you and I use a different ethical measure. I do not weigh the right to give or withhold consent against something else. Rather, it stands as the premise from which all else follows. In fact, I would assert that you cannot measure the risk versus the utility because the variables are too many, the unforseen consequences unknown, and the post hoc cum hoc relations unknowable. I see no ethical difference in the argument that collection of identities by the government is useful to society and the argument that collection of wealth by the government is useful to society, other than that the former is more onerous, more insidious, and more possibly destructive to the lives of individuals than the latter.
Maybe, but it is a wicked funny Monty Python reference.
and
I have yet to see someone carefully scoop up their sluffed skin, shedded hair, snot, tears, earwax, saliva, urine, stools, pus, blood, fingernail and toenail clippings in public (or in private), and thoroughly burn their precious property. To get someone’s DNA, you don’t have to be invasive, you just have to be patient. Everyone’s body is a DNA litterbug.
I don’t see why you are ethically entitled to keep a ten dollar bill that you saw fall out of a man’s pocket. Moreover, if you are entitled to the spray from my sneezes, then why am I not entitled to sneeze in your face?
If your sluffed skin, hairs, (etc.) were actually worth $10, then yes, I would feel ethically obligated to give it back to you, but since I don’t see anyone who knowingly or unknowingly discards their DNA and then searches or retrieves it, nor do I see anyone chasing someone down to return such items, then it would be safe to say that the person had no further interest in said property (no value attached to it), nor the person who found it feels compelled to return it. I never said I was entitled to your DNA, but if I want to get it without being invasive, I can.
Not that I would, but I could if I really wanted to.
Value is aesthical, not ethical. People have never valued their DNA samples because they’ve never had to. When I first began losing my hair, the only possible consequence was that someone might cast a poppet spell.
Am I the only one who gets the feeling that if someone could show that a crime was prevented by having the government track everyone’s whereabouts with GPS locators implanted our ass, Bricker would be the first to sign up?