Live data from Hacker News

CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

theintercept.com

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

#31
post #30
post #28

Can others confirm/deny this: Google this, no quotes: snopes Skincential Sciences CIA Then duckduckgo the same, no quotes. Did anyone else get disturbingly little response from google, but very detailed and recent results from duckduckgo? I searched this precisely because I was skeptical, but that search result was just weird. EDIT: For me it happens both in regular, tracked search and in an incognito tab. EDIT2: Dro…

The DDG results are about snopes, or Skincential Sciences CIA, but not both. If you remove snopes, the Google results look fine to me.

Thanks for the confirm. Maybe someone at google listened to people complaining (or their algos learned) that when people search many specific words they are looking for a specific thing and not to randomly drop it.

Also, as a side note (not directly to you but so I don't clutter the feed). The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm". The company in question is a private company, who's purpose is to develop intel tech and sell it to the CIA. They are not associated with the CIA in any official capacity, but they do seem to have a cozy relationship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

Edit: Also, on duckduckgo the first two results I get are specific to both this story about skincential and the cia.

Re: CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

#32
post #31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DDG results are about snopes, or Skincential Sciences CIA, but not both. If you remove snopes, the Google results look fine to me.

Thanks for the confirm. Maybe someone at google listened to people complaining (or their algos learned) that when people search many specific words they are looking for a specific thing and not to randomly drop it. Also, as a side note (not directly to you but so I don't clutter the feed). The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm". The company in question is a private company, who's purpose is to develop intel te…

[deleted]

Re: CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

#33

As someone who likes their database tables correctly named, without duplication and containing all the data, I can understand the urge to deploy this as a handsoap to all public restrooms with sinks that can collect water samples. It's just too neat and clean of a trap to not use it.

Oh god... as soon as word gets out of this coming to reality there will be a surge of unwashed public restroom hands. Good god! It's bad enough most old guys don't wash their hands after touching their dicks and door handles, now we'll have poop hands everywhere.

Nah, I think you'll have more personal hygiene kits being carried around. Hit the market now and get in before the rush.

Re: CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

#34
Its not clear to me how this would be useful for nefarious purposes. Surely, to apply this detergent and collect the resulting biomarkers in a controlled fashion, they would require fairly complete access to the target individual? As in, the target would have to be sitting there letting an agent rub their arm with some swabs. And there have to be easier ways to do the same thing- file a sharp edge into the back of a door handle could likely get enough skin cells to extract DNA, without being too obtrusive. Am I missing something?

Re: CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

#35
post #19

Ironically they're targeting the wrong end of the person. The sewers would be a great place to collect DNA and narrow down a manhunt in a large metropolitan area.

Wow, mind = blown. You could perform binary search on the sewers to find a criminal. Hah, that would be ridiculous if that was possible.

Well, the Monterey Bay Aquarium does species counts using water sampling and searching DNA[1] so something similar might be possible to search for s specific individual signature.

[1]http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/01/15/dna-detectives-abl...

Re: CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

#38

As someone who likes their database tables correctly named, without duplication and containing all the data, I can understand the urge to deploy this as a handsoap to all public restrooms with sinks that can collect water samples. It's just too neat and clean of a trap to not use it.

Oh god... as soon as word gets out of this coming to reality there will be a surge of unwashed public restroom hands. Good god! It's bad enough most old guys don't wash their hands after touching their dicks and door handles, now we'll have poop hands everywhere.

[deleted]

Re: CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

#40

I wouldn't be surprised if they already collecting DNA samples in bulk from the sewage systems of America

When I was a child there was a government program to take bio samples (blood and finger prints) from children in case of abduction. This was in the early 80s. So I would wager that this has been going on for a great long while.
Post reply on HN