111–120 of 136 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
> those fingerprints were used A detective in a ~150K pop. municipality told me that while they might dust for prints, they rarely use them in court because computer matches are very noisy and actually entering prints as evidence in court requires an expensive expert witness to evaluate and attest to a supposed match. The prosecutor can't afford the fees for every case, so a lot of fingerprint evidence goes unused.
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…
Indeed. It’s essentially the age-old conundrum: I don’t need to worry about my privacy because I’m not breaking the rules… until someone changes the rules.
And whether people are breaking the rules or not, the more someone knows about you the easier it is for them to influence and manipulate you. (This is the basis of the online advertising industry.)
I think people who don't value privacy must not know what it is.
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.
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 do own their countries. In any meaningful sense of the word "own", they do own them. Legally, morally, and philosophically.
> And especially they do not "own" the culture
This is a strange non sequitur. Sure. No one owns culture. The immigrants can take their culture with them back home.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't mention this, but one major reason for apartheid's Bantustan policy was to recognize distinct homelands and preserve cultural communities. This is, I suspect, a good thing. The article never states any downsides, other than nebulous claims. Yes, assigning people to ethnic homelands is like any other government record-keeping, which is routinely done, but has the benefit of assisting in claims of separate n…
Dude. Trafficking minors is bad. DNA literally can help establish family relationships.
we're officially in the "just try to stop us" phase of authoritarianism next up, armed ICE around voting locations despite federal law because "just try to stop us" then refusal to seat voted delegates because "just try to stop us" the idea is to normalize the obscenity of it all, like the billions in wildly illegal grifting king's image on buildings, airports, passports, park passes, coins and $250 bill whitehouse d…
I mean, are YOU going to try to stop them?
Then get all righteous and start talking about democracy and then no-true-scotsman all the actual things folks do to curtail the actions of the state.
It's wild, but the flip side is that since I am on that side of things I have a much better picture of what it might actually be possible when folks understand that the ethical choices aren't available via a ballot line.
I wish I believed voting worked even a little.
A lot of folks might take that sentiment to believe that since the only 'real and adult' politics comes about from voting we simply abstain out of apathy. For me, the sentiment is a lot closer to "I wish I thought I could just vote instead of all the other weird political things that I end up doing".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The first real example it opens with, is a criminal. For the rest of ICE detainees, don’t care. Again, we have 10s of millions of backlog of illegal entries, overstays, visa violations etc. No one knows how many 10s of millions, but it is eight figures worth. Most of the illegal entries we have essentially no way of getting or knowing who they are. Collecting their biometrics to include DNA that might be found at fut…
If I had to guess, you consume a lot of entertainment media.