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Comment by mLuby | Hacker News Reader

Let's say you're arrested (so fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed, mug-shotted, etc) but then not charged or convicted.

Is there a way to get those records expunged?

(IMO the innocent—and maybe those who've served their sentence—ought to be able to do this.)

A lot of good it does, when more and more states are requiring fingerprints to get a driver's license. The various governments want the data, and are simply taking it from a progressively-larger set of people. It's obviously not equal in severity, but the "First they came..." poem certainly applies here. They are simply rolling this out in stages: first in the most "sensitive" spots, such as airports. Then it will be most federal buildings, or other "high-security" locations. Then it will be routine.

Giving your fingerprints is already pretty mandatory for all the French citizens, and now the government is pushing for face recognition to be used as the default identification system... (meanwhile, centralized databases on all the citizens were illegal just a couple decades ago !)

It's amazing how governments exempt themselves from laws. GDPR for the rest of Europe, but for the governments, privacy does not matter. I'm not saying it makes sense to apply the same rules letter-for-letter (gov't has to have _something_), but even the same spirit would do.

> Is there a way to get those records expunged?

Really?

"Yes sir, we have entirely expunged your data and you have the US government's solemn promise that we didn't make a copy of the files we're not telling you about."

Effectively, there is no such thing as expunging digital data. There's always probably some extra copy somewhere.

Sure, don't trust them but still make it legally clear what's allowed and isn't instead of this grey area we have today. Then they'd have to do parallel construction because they can't admit there's a still secret biometrics database out there. And secrets love to be whistle-blown about so that'll happen eventually and reset their progress.

There's no silver bullet, just a long battle of attrition.

How would that reset their progress? The leaks have revealed that our secret organizations are pretty open (at least among themselves) about parallel construction. For instance this article [1] reveals some slides of the more harmless surveillance data on a target. Nonetheless, in a giant disclaimer at the top the NSA reminds their agents "This information is provided for intelligence purposes in an effort to develop potential leads. It cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings, or subpoenas, or for other legal or judicial purposes."

And as the leaks have fallen off the news cycle, along with an interesting rise of misinformation in social media, you gradually see people beginning to understate what was revealed and to show ever less concern over it. It's actually a phenomenal demonstration for how a secret agency should handle a leak to avoid any meaningful consequences of what is ostensibly ground-breaking information on programs that are, at best, in legally grey areas, all being released to the public en masse. Snowden no doubt felt that his leaks would change our approach to intelligence if not our entire nation. In reality, next to nothing changed.

[1] - https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveilla...

you are spreading misinformation here -- there is legal precedent, and courts do matter

Sure they do, because the US government obeys the law and upholds the constitution! Yes sir!

So is there no point in any privacy laws then, since your assumption is the US government will violate it? Laws give you a way to win a lawsuit, at the very least you have that.

A law that someone must do something that cannot be verified is more of a guideline. If the law is audited and compliance measured then that is meaningful, but the US government (particularly post-Snowden) is probably not capable of monitoring itself for compliance.

If the government is not allowed to gather certain biometric data then that is relatively easy for the public to monitor. If the government collects and then promises it is going to delete the data there is a real chance that it won't get done.

Money is what wins a lawsuit. Otherwise you must have huge public backlash and that doesn't happen often.

>So is there no point in any privacy laws then, since your assumption is the US government will violate it?

Its not an assumption, its a fact that has been proven time after time in every case for the last 15 years.

>Laws give you a way to win a lawsuit, at the very least you have that.

That's just not true. Not only can the government spy on you with impunity, the court has ruled that the government can kill you, without any due process whatsoever, and you are entirely powerless to challenge or even discover if you are on their "kill list" as long as they invoke the "state secret privilege".

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190924/20182043065/dc-co...

The unfortunate fact is that our legal system has failed. Instead of enforcing the law and upholding The Constitution - its most core and precious mandates - our legal system has consistently deferred to government claims about the need for absolutely secrecy and legal impunity to do whatever they deem necessary.

you are arguing that the system is not perfect, therefore it is failed. I argue this is false, because protections are applied in many cases not one, and time moves forward.

No, I'm arguing the system has failed completely based on the abundance of evidence. Of all the hundreds of thousands of illegal, unconstitutional searches (that we know about) by agents of the government, never once has any government agent ever been criminally prosecuted for their willful violation of the law and the Constitution for their crimes. Further, the courts have ruled, on the rare occasions when challenges have been allowed to have been heard, that government claims of "state secrets" and "national security" supersede due process, legal and Constitutional rights. Our courts and our legal system have failed completely and absolutely in every conceivable way. This total failure has only worsened over time, and there is absolutely no indication that this trend is reversing.

I always wonder with these types of "your personal data has been deleted", especially wrt to nightly and weekly backups. If you've been "in the system" for a while and your "record" is expunged...can it really be so? Does the expunge process actually go back through backups and remove them from there too? I kind of doubt it, because backups are always "hands off" unless you're restoring. I ask this also for the purposes of GDPR and the big tech companies (FAANG).

In my own stuff, I'd feel obliged to make a disclaimer: "Yes, I've deleted your stuff, and the backups of the data (which I still have), will rotate out of existence in nnn days." I would also need to keep the deletion request handy for nnn days, just in case I needed to restore data (& so that I could re-delete their data).

This doesn't answer your question, but it is important to keep in mind that being arrested is not a crime.

It's treated as such for a wide variety of things. Condo associations use arrest records as red flags for potential residents. Any arrest record removes your status with the global entry programs with CBP. I'm sure there's many more I'm not even familiar with. Even when you're completely exonerated, the arrest record haunts you until you can expunge it.

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