Hacker News Reader

That is what the Kuwaiti government did, years ago. This might work for authoritarian governments, should not work in democracies

View on HN

It is a bad idea, but technically speaking it has nothing to do with democracy, they are orthogonal.

Why shouldn't it work for democracies? In what sense is maintaining a DNA database incompatible with democracy?

Because using DNA collected from a victim of crime to prosecute them for a later crime is probably a violation of 5th amendment rights.

The next logical step if you don’t think the 5th was violated is collecting DNA from everyone (eg: repurposing COVID swabs) so you can identify all the potential suspects from your sampled population while completely ignoring that someone from outside the sampled population could be the person you are looking for.

The direct proposal was not to collect data from victims, but all innocent parties . no need for extrapolation.

I don't see how this is unreasonable, when already we collect photographs (with ID cards). Or, more aptly, we already collect footprints of newborns, for purposes of identification. Collecting DNA for purposes of identification is almost the same thing.

Being able to positively identify people is a reasonable function of a government, including democratic governments.

DNA testing is not positive identification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com