Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not • Hacker News Board

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#231

Post by amanaplanacanal » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #226

ModernMech wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. They're not hard to spot; people warned about the current guy for a decade before he took over. What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up. What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a…

It still amazes me that there was no penalty for storing classified paperwork in his bathroom. I always thought that governments treated security very seriously, but apparently not.

He got lucky that the sitting attorney general was loathe to appear that he was politically motivated, so was very slow to appoint a special prosecutor. He then got extremely lucky that his hand picked judge was assigned to the case, and slow walked it until he got reelected and took control of the very department that was investigating him.

This on top of the fact that the "law and order" party apparently is only for law and order if it's being used against people they don't like. Evidently most people aren't self aware enough to question their own beliefs, who knew?

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#232

Post by amanaplanacanal » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #163

postingawayonhn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the assumptions should always be that one day someone like that could take power and gain access to that data.

I mean I think, while that possibly always _should_ have been the assumption, 20 years ago the assumption would have been very much that someone like that could _not_ take power, and that the worst the US had to fear was the likes of Dick Cheney (admittedly still pretty bad). The idea that the US might just transform into a weird batshit autocracy is really _pretty new_; it wasn't taken all _that_ seriously even in T…

I don't think most people realize just how slow the court system is. It's horribly underfunded. They generally come to good decisions, but it takes a really long time, and a lot of damage can happen in the mean time.

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#233

Post by tern » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

tern wrote: post #89

yosame wrote: post #42

Hilariously, this is the second Sam that wants to collect everyones iris's for nefarious purposes

Big difference between a hash for use as an attestation (proof of humanity) and a digital ID associated with your name

This is the most maddening topic I've experienced in recent times. My guess is it's the ghost of ww2. Anything that looks or smells like a definitive reduction of a human being to numbers is to be opposed, regardless of utility.

What you are choosing, instead, is the management of the phenomenon you're trying to avoid by corporations—more or less emergent feudalism.

Consider the options: a corporation knows everything about you vs. no entity knows any information about you except for whether you're eligible for the service being provided, and that you exist. The former is the current state of affairs. The latter, I think, is a better state of affairs.

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#234

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #222

I remember nostalgically when this kind of thing would have been so unpopular in the USA, including (especially?) among the "populist right", that it would not have happened. The escalation of the surveillance security state has been quick and vast.

It's still unpopular. The difference today is that the public is so thoroughly disempowered, that there is nothing you can do to change/resist it. Point me to the major political party, or even individual candidate, where "dismantling surveillance" is even a minor part of their platform. There are probably a single digit number of politicians in the entire country, from federal all the way down to local, who are against surveillance.

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#235

Post by tern » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

I'm quite disappointed by the discourse in this thread.

We can build privacy-preserving identity. It's a huge opportunity. Go work on it!

If you're in the Bay, there's a conference on it every year where the people building the tech and setting the standards are hashing out the ideas!

When the government comes knocking, they're not coming up with stuff from scratch—they're picking up the tools we left around ready to use.

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#236

Post by arandr0x » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

I think it's worth mentioning that while biometrics for identification have flaws (as mentioned in this thread, they're not 100% collision free, are not necessarily secret, and are non-trivial to collect), DNA has a different risk profile if it leaks than fingerprints and iris scans if you consider technology advances. DNA could let people (moving beyond government, since you should probably assume anything in a government database will be leaked at this point) target your family and not just you, it includes information that could let adversaries find out ways you're uniquely exploitable (for instance allergies, sensitivities, diseases) and in general its potential for harm goes far beyond impersonation or being used in court.

(On the plus side, I suppose, I think the story on storing DNA at the scale we're talking about is not fully complete. DNA does denature and it takes a reasonably good sample to get a full genome sequence, and fully sequencing and storing data for every person has other practical issues. The article itself only references using DNA results to "prove or disprove biological sex", which is much more trivial and while it's likely to come with its own problems and edge cases, is also much less information.)

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#237

Post by q1bz2p » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

anilakar wrote: post #152

rzerowan wrote: post #67

One thing that i would prefer in biometrics would be that the iris/fingerprints get treated as what they are publicly available and easily obtainable data. At worst using it a a secret key is similar to using your name as a hidden variable for authorisation, whent it sshould strictly be a identification token.And once leaked you cant revoke it . Back on topic , a Gattaca type system is unbelievably bleak and when(not…

DNA too. Until 2018 it was used here as waterproof evidence until the police managed to lock up an innocent person based on DNA and blurry surveillance camera photos only. He was only exonerated because the real perpetrator was caught by chance and confessed a week later. The transmission chain that was later identified on CCTV was hand to escalator rail to hand, a 2+ km walk, and finally hand to latex glove.

That transmission chain is fascinating. I haven't been able to find which case this is describing - can you provide any more details?

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#238

Post by joomla199 » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #145

joomla199 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that we don’t know why electromagnetism exists, this is basically true for many technologies.

What do you mean? We know quite well how electromagnetism arises from U(1) symmetry in gauge theory. What else is there to know?

[flagged]

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#239

Post by verdverm » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

rzerowan wrote: post #67

One thing that i would prefer in biometrics would be that the iris/fingerprints get treated as what they are publicly available and easily obtainable data. At worst using it a a secret key is similar to using your name as a hidden variable for authorisation, whent it sshould strictly be a identification token.And once leaked you cant revoke it . Back on topic , a Gattaca type system is unbelievably bleak and when(not…

A coworker from Chile has described their equivalent to a SSN as being used as a public ID rather than a password. Every IT company and government service has the same primary key in their database for each citizen. Wouldn't that be great!

My question would be how do we get there?

Re: Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

#240

Post by HeinzStuckeIt » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #222

I remember nostalgically when this kind of thing would have been so unpopular in the USA, including (especially?) among the "populist right", that it would not have happened. The escalation of the surveillance security state has been quick and vast.

How much of that, at least among elites, is due to looking at China's dizzying development, bound straight for the singularity, while the old appeals to liberty and rights seem to have only got the USA bogged down in gridlock and squabbling?

Revolutions happen, inter alia, to break gridlock, whether consciously or unconsciously. The rise of the surveillance state might be seen as the coup by elites that is one of the known forms of revolution.