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ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

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Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#91

IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information, then I feel like people having a DNA test at birth or on becoming a citizen could be useful, both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") and from a policing standpoint ("we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" or "w…

New Jersey "government-ize-ed" this quite a while with a database that's quite abused. But every US hospital does genetics testing for allergies (a few for milk and similar that are nearly a death sentence for the new born).

NJ is just ahead of giving law enforcement access whenever it wants for searches, and renting the data to whoever pays.

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#92

IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information, then I feel like people having a DNA test at birth or on becoming a citizen could be useful, both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") and from a policing standpoint ("we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" or "w…

You've unwittingly demonstrated why it's impossible to have a "trusted government", and why governments are inherently awful even without nefarious motives!

> "we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before"

You've casually thrown out a use that sounds like it would be valuable, and thus has political appeal - but it actually fails hard to false positives. If you're merely confirming a DNA match, then the small chance of a false positive remains small - you're only comparing against one candidate. But if you do a population-wide search, then that chance of finding false positive multiplies [0] across the whole population! So even with good intentions, you've invented a process that picks random people out of society and harasses them (at best, with the way justice systems actually work this would lead to false convictions).

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#93
post #83

There’s a reason why Germany has extremely strict laws about how personally identifying information can be collected and stored. America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.

[flagged]

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#94
post #83

There’s a reason why Germany has extremely strict laws about how personally identifying information can be collected and stored. America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.

[flagged]

> foreign CRIMINALS

Subheadline of the article:

> Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.

7th paragraph of the article:

> The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, and residing in the US undocumented is typically a civil, not criminal, offense.

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#95
post #83

There’s a reason why Germany has extremely strict laws about how personally identifying information can be collected and stored. America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.

[flagged]

Thank you for demonstrating what was meant by “America has yet to learn the same lesson.”

The poem “First They Came” was written by a German pastor who enthusiastically supported Nazis at first, because after all they were fighting against communists and all the other foreign agents undermining the homeland.

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apartheid was bad. Immigration enforcement isn't bad... it's what alot of people want. These people feel as if they are (in part, collective) owners of the country, and owning it they want to exclude people who do not own it. The same way, I might add, that you or I want to exclude squatters from our homes, and the same way (I assume) most of us don't invite hobos in to sleep in our beds. If you say that's bad too an…

> These people feel as if they are (in part, collective) owners of the country But they don't in absolutely any sense (legal, moral, philosophical) own the country. And especially they do not "own" the culture (because that's actually impossible). So all you have is jingoism propping up this entire notion.

Citizens most certainly do own the country. It comes directly from the fact that all government power is granted to it by the people.

>That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

To the extent that the land claimed as part of the United States belongs to and is controlled by the United States, it belongs to the people.

People certainly own an interest in the culture and have a right to keep it from changing too much too quickly and to fight and refuse the changing of certain aspects of that culture.

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#97
post #83

There’s a reason why Germany has extremely strict laws about how personally identifying information can be collected and stored. America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.

I live next to a reservation and feel that there is a lot in common between the US indian reservation system and concentration camps.

My position is that the US has been on this road for about 250 years. Blood quantum and similar policy choices forced on people, individually and in groups, have been very damaging.

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#98
> Agency spreadsheets Georgetown obtained and analyzed show it sent the FBI the DNA of at least 1.36 million people between October 2020 and the end of 2024, more than a dozen times ICE's rate during the same time period.

So at the same time we saw a mass increase in border crossings we were also collecting their DNA? That's a huge number.

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#99
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, I recall police coming to our classrooms to fingerprint us. The whole school got fingerprinted. The idea was to help police if kids went missing. Whether or not you believe that justification ("Stranger Danger" was a scare at the time), I can promise you those fingerprints were used to put people in jail later.

I think that's a bit safer, because you could deduce very private information from a DNA sample, but you can't really tell anything about a person from their fingerprints, except maybe the size of their fingers. It's a one way match

Identical prints do exist. As with lab contamination of DNA, there is a potential for false accusation when you submit to dragnet biometric databases.

Re: ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a bit safer, because you could deduce very private information from a DNA sample, but you can't really tell anything about a person from their fingerprints, except maybe the size of their fingers. It's a one way match

Identical prints do exist. As with lab contamination of DNA, there is a potential for false accusation when you submit to dragnet biometric databases.

> Identical prints do exist.

Evidence?

It's theoretically possible, but as far as I'm aware, no one has found a matching set.

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