Orange County Prosecutors Operate “Vast, Secretive” Genetic Surveillance Program | Hacker News Reader

Orange County Prosecutors Operate “Vast, Secretive” Genetic Surveillance Program

theintercept.com

58 pointsnewman8r12 comments

One thing that always makes me curious about this kind of thing is how people that enact these programs justify them to themselves and the people around themselves. This is evil villain level stuff to strong-arm people into submitting genetic samples for your private database by abusing your position of power to invent felonies for them and I don't think these people are dumb, they know that what they are doing is awful.

Just weird to me how I feel like everyone is infuriated all the time by everything, things order if magnitude less messed up than this, but then these people exist in this magic bubble where no one is bothered by this. Doesn't make sense to me.

Maybe because the underlying assumption is that the dark/little/poor people are the only ones this will be used on? The ivory towers care about virtue signalling and property values.

But if you notice, there is a big crime wave in SF... which threatens property values. Genetics database? Double plus good!

No, they think they're saving the world, or at least their part of it, from crime. People use that as justification for all sorts of abuse. After all, who would prosecute a prosecutor?

The Maryland (?) Supreme Court case made me think that some involve just misunderstand DNA...they think of it as something like a very long random string that makes for a good, unique identifier. That is, of course, completely wrong. I can know all sorts of things about you that are, or should be, private...like who your real parents / kids are, whether you're likely to get cancer or not, whether you are intersex, etc.

Few years ago, the Kuwaiti govt started collecting DNA from every person in the country.

There was also a news article about British schools collecting DNA of their students and passing it to the cops (don’t know if this is fake news or not).

We are not far from the scenario where some every human’s DNA is in some massive database, Wikipedia style.

They already have full body scans from the people who consent to that at the airports. Totally voluntary and people believe that submitting keeps them safe.

This may evidence may ignorance on the topic of genetics, but it seems to me that the natural response to increasingly prevalent/abused genetic profiling would be for both the criminal and noncriminal sector to begin pursuing crispr-like technologies to attempt to re-anonymize themselves? For the criminal sector, to reduce true positives, and for the non-criminal sector, to reduce false positives.

Would it even be possible to alter a person's dna enough to provide sufficient information entropy so as to make them 'unidentifiable' ala hashing without simultaneously introducing significant diseases/disorders? One could also hypothesize having such a process be performed continuously, such that a person might be constantly genetically unrecognizable from the organism they were the day before.

In other news, does anyone want to inject some venture capital into my new cryptographic genetic manipulation start-up? It's like a VPN, but for your dna.

Let's take a look at your data room and talk

Don't U.S. states all already do this immediately after birth?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18945-do-you-care-wha...

https://www.healthnutnews.com/cbs-dna-from-newborn-blood-sam...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23136040/

In my state even when you home-birth you are required to submit samples. You have a right to "request" they destroy the samples after 90 days, but in the fine print it says they will process your request but they won't guarantee that all samples/digitizations will actually get destroyed.

OC law enforcement is famously corrupt. Lived there for years. I can't tell how many times I got pulled over for BS reasons for a fishing expedition. I was once given a ticket for "incorrect instrumentation" for a completely unmodified (and unremarkable) 350Z.

Some people think driving a 350Z is already a probable cause.

My point exactly.

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