The FBI Has Collected DNA Profiles for 21M People | Hacker News Reader

The FBI Has Collected DNA Profiles for 21M People

theintercept.com

128 pointsmikece68 comments

That's enough to fill in the rest.

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.

1% is the number I seem to remember from watching an interview of a CEO of a DNA company.

I don’t like this

Alas, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. The government will always have these, it will never go away, and it's highly unlikely we will ever get them to stop collecting this data.

Why not just tell them to delete the data or they are fired?

Revolution. Burn these institutions to the ground.

Any revolution that involves burning any institutions to the ground in this country is very likely to be a fascist one (and will be quite happy to keep all those DNA profiles).

"Burn it down" is the same short sighted reactionary thinking as "surveil it all". A blanket judgement.

This is utterly nonsensical. The surveillance state is an unacceptable infringement on our natural human rights, and it should be dismantled. A hyperbolic statement like "burn it down" is, at least, grounded in an understanding that our current relationship to the state is hugely problematic and should be remedied. It is in no way morally equivalent to "let's have a surveillance state", which is an outright endorsement of an authoritarian measures.

You take "burn it down" as hyperbolic statement and "surveil it all" as face value.

You understand the reasonable ground of "burning it down" others dont. Id prefer better goal formulation with less demagogy.

I prefer constructive solutions over worn out hyperbole that, coming from the mouths of some on the far-left and far-right, are anything but. A politics of envy is the norm today, and this envy has some raging have-nots wishing to deprive the haves even to the point of harm to themselves. "Burn it all down" are not the words of a doctor says who wants to reset badly formed bones or heal open wounds. It is the motto of the murderer.

But there is a certain race to the bottom with no exit. Consider the ease with which DNA may be collected. What prevents China from the mass collection of DNA of Americans? Would that knowledge asymmetry place the US at a disadvantage if, say, the US were to become the target of some kind of biological warfare? A disadvantage in the sense of lacking the knowledge needed to protect the populace. Could a repository of anonymized genetic data be constructed, or would it be too easy to infer whose DNA is whose? Are the threats too remote to justify such collection, even if legally endorsed?

I don't think the word "fascist" is meaningful here. The most significant and violent revolutions in recent history resulted in success for communist parties (Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, People's Liberation Army for Chinese Communist Party).

Just don't leave any DNA at the scene.

This would be illegal in Germany, especially for the government.

“If you look back at when CODIS was established, it was originally for violent or sexual offenders,” Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who specializes in the ethical implications of genetics research, told The Intercept. “The ACLU warned that this was going to be a slippery slope, and that’s indeed what we’ve seen.”

Just like the CSAM scanning people are still promoting...

I'd really like to use 23andMe to see my genetic heritage/background, but at this time it seems there's no safe or secure way to do this, it's just not worth it.

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.

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.

I regret doing it.

It is worse. My cousin did it. So parts of me are there already and I have zero say here. It is kinda like current surveillance. You can take all the precautions you want, but, if your so does not, it partially defeats the purpose. Those are the moments I lean towarda heavy regulation.

Presumably a good number of them are dead?

Their descendants are still alive

That few?

> 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.

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?

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...

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...)

My guess is that it's responsible for a significant bump in the rate of growth over the last half-decade, but only for a tiny percentage of the 21M. The reason they mention it is to make conservatives more comfortable with mass DNA collection.

The excuse that was used to start mass DNA collection was a serial rapist and murderer cop who himself was excused from having his DNA collected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo

> 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.

Photographs and fingerprints don't tell you who's kids are whose.

You don't need to capture every persons DNA for that. I'm not sure what the numbers are, but I presume there's quite a few without children at all. You also have no need to store the DNA after you've determined lineage. Who your parents are don't change later. So, a third party could perform individual verification in cases where required, and the DNA sequence itself could be destroyed afterwards by that same third party. No FBI database need exist for any of this.

All good points. All I was saying was why there is a need for DNA over photos and fingerprints.

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" ...

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.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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."

> 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

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

This sounds like it could be a plotline in some futuristic cyberpunk story: encrypted/obfuscated DNA to protect against some antagonist!

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.

Many of Peter F Hamilton's books come to mind, DNA resequencing/rejuvenation playing a big role in the ability of certain characters to avoid detection from authorities

>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.

The type of DNA information contained within CODIS cannot be used to do this.

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.

>One big difference is that DNA can identify siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents etc.

The type of DNA information contained within CODIS cannot be used to do this.

Fingerprints on a gun means you atleast touched that gun at some point.

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.

Let's say that Judaism is made illegal, and the police bust an underground synagogue, or homosexuality is made illegal, and the police arrest the host of a gay book club that meets at his home, or, to strain credulity, a group of lesbians meet in secret in Tasmania to avoid having to include translesbians.

Could DNA vacuumed up in the room be used to find all of the people that attended, and imprison them?

They could probably use the dna to make a precise targeted bioweapon aimed at those people.

>They could probably use the dna to make a precise targeted bioweapon aimed at those people.

The type of DNA information contained within CODIS cannot be used to do this.

> I see little difference between collecting fingerprints and DNA samples.

There's a huge difference... Its like alphabet VS encyclopedia

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