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EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

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Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#61

Post by jackjello »

parineum wrote: post #4
lettergram wrote: post #2

Although I agree with the EFF, I question the legal argument, and whether or not the case will be in their favor. (1) Although DNA should be protected in the sense the government cannot take it from you, without a warrant (or claims your a terrorist). It's difficult to argue that if some hair falls off my head in public, should it not be considered "fair game"? Picking up papers out of the trash has always been fair…

I don't see how this would be different from lifting fingerprints from a discarded cup. Does that happen in real life or is that just a movie/tv thing?

>I don't see how this would be different from lifting fingerprints from a discarded cup.

Your fingerprints don't tell me anything about your mother, you medical history or future, or hers.

When someone takes your DNA, they search your entire family.

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#62

Post by jackjello »

rhino369 wrote: post #3
lettergram wrote: post #2

Although I agree with the EFF, I question the legal argument, and whether or not the case will be in their favor. (1) Although DNA should be protected in the sense the government cannot take it from you, without a warrant (or claims your a terrorist). It's difficult to argue that if some hair falls off my head in public, should it not be considered "fair game"? Picking up papers out of the trash has always been fair…

Yea the EFF doesn't really have a very compelling argument here. I'm not even sure what the downside is in a policy sense. The only way this has any effect on anyone's lives is if it is used to catch you for a crime you committed.

>The only way this has any effect on anyone's lives is if it is used to catch you for a crime you committed.

Or your child. I guess you don't care if you send your kid to the chair though.

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#63

Post by bayesianhorse »

Protection from DNA collection is impossible, for the same reason the EFF wants to forbid it: We shed DNA all the time.

Currently, DNA does not contain "vast amounts of private information", and even the little amount we can get from it requires serious science and hundreds if not thousands of Dollars per sample to retrieve it. Currently it is more effective to prohibit specific abuses, like insurance tests.

In the future, DNA data will be as cheap and obvious as fingerprints, gender or body height. DNA sequencers will pick up human DNA all the time even by accident. Therefore, DNA and its information will be in plain sight, if we like it or not.

Fighting DNA collection will be a lot like fighting copyright piracy. The information is copied and distributed so easily, no way we can keep our DNA private.

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#64

Post by bayesianhorse »

jackjello wrote: post #61
parineum wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this would be different from lifting fingerprints from a discarded cup. Does that happen in real life or is that just a movie/tv thing?

>I don't see how this would be different from lifting fingerprints from a discarded cup. Your fingerprints don't tell me anything about your mother, you medical history or future, or hers. When someone takes your DNA, they search your entire family.

Testing DNA for identification purposes at best establishes identity and a small part of your family tree. Not even the latter so much, because your family would have to be in the system, too. And your family relationships should be something police is entitled to find out.

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#65

Post by bayesianhorse »

remarkEon wrote: post #39
evgen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But law enforcement is not using the encoded information, they are just taking a unique pattern from the information and using it for identification purposes.

I could for sure envision a situation where they use the encoded information. Let's say they find that the sample comes from a person who is predisposed to a heart condition and they already have a description putting him in the 40-50 age range. That's a pretty significant piece of information that can help narrow down a search or canvass, especially if there's any other meta data they can correlate to the crime.

Why would your example be unreasonable? Sounds like good police work.

Just that it is very unlikely that you could infer the clinical manifestation of a heart condition just from DNA alone...

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#66

Post by bayesianhorse »

MarcScott wrote: post #13
aapierce wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the DNA tied him to the crime as opposed to the just the crime scene? The article doesn't really go into that. If they're just comparing the DNA that was left behind at the police station to DNA they found at a crime scene, I don't see any issue.

This was a rape case. Leaving fingerprints or even DNA on a bloody knife can only confirm you picked up the knife, and therefore that you were present at the scene. In this case the DNA identified him as the perpetrator of the crime. IMHO the EFF have chosen the wrong case to fight here.

I agree that this makes the EFF look very bad. Persecuting rape is difficult enough as it is. I can't figure out any hypothetical example where this kind of identification testing could be abused without literally fabricating all sorts of additional evidence.

And if the rapist in this case was questioned as a subject, the police could have gotten a warrant for the DNA anyway.

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#67

Post by remarkEon »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #65
remarkEon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could for sure envision a situation where they use the encoded information. Let's say they find that the sample comes from a person who is predisposed to a heart condition and they already have a description putting him in the 40-50 age range. That's a pretty significant piece of information that can help narrow down a search or canvass, especially if there's any other meta data they can correlate to the crime.

Why would your example be unreasonable? Sounds like good police work. Just that it is very unlikely that you could infer the clinical manifestation of a heart condition just from DNA alone...

No, I would not consider it unreasonable but a lot of people probably would. And I don't know enough about inferring future health conditions from DNA alone, but I meant it as an example for a future possibility. If anyone does know, exactly, what you can infer from DNA alone and how that would be extremely helpful.

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#68

Post by adventured »

arthurcolle wrote: post #42

I'm really not trying to stir the pot and get any vitriol but I'm genuinely curious: do organizations like the ACLU, EFF actually get things done? There has been pretty much no change in the state of affairs with regard to NSA mass surveillance, and the same can be said for RIAA DRM technologies continually pushed forth in the mass market. Everytime I see an EFF related article here or on reddit, I just get the sense…

The serious answer is: very rarely they win important victories. It does happen though. Most of the time they spend their very limited resources fighting uphill battles against a government with nearly unlimited resources (and an ever expanding legal basis for their increasingly vast powers). While the EFF is trying to check the government over here, the government is over there expanding laws in their favor.

The government system of the US is now the size of Japan's entire economy fiscally. I don't see how that is ever going to be contained. There's no way to pass enough controls or restrictions to hold something that massive in place, and there's no way to afford to monitor all the restrictions even if you got them into place.

The other problem I rarely see addressed is culture. No two governments are the same. The US is an aggressive government, that is its culture (at least since WW2 or so), and that will be very, very difficult to change. Some people naively think you can trust a large government like the US Govt., as you might Sweden's government - but that ignores the fact that their cultures are drastically different.

Orgs like the ACLU and the EFF are very valuable institutions, and they're trying to do what few others are. The odds are severely stacked against them, but given the context is so extraordinarily important, it remains worth fighting for. Maybe all they can accomplish is to slow the process of rights erosion down, that too is valuable (some of course argue it'd be better to accelerate the implosion instead, rather than have a long slow erosion).

Re: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection

#70

Post by btilly »

remarkEon wrote: post #36
btilly wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of a warrant is that a judge has decided that the needs of law enforcement override the right to privacy in this case. The point of the lawsuit is to set a precedent saying that the police cannot simply collect and analyze DNA without warrants. Therefore if there is a demonstrable privacy issue to DNA collection and analysis, then requiring warrants is the accepted way in our legal system to balance the nee…

I think this is also a stretch. Fingerprint databases have existed for quite some time, and yet police are not required to get a warrant to check finger prints collected from a recovered weapon against that database, which can reveal quite a lot about the history of the person.

Fingerprints cannot tell you who a person is related to, or about their likely medical conditions. DNA can. (Though the limited set of markers used in police databases can't. But they also misuse those markers and overestimate the odds of a match. However that is a different and more complicated issue.)
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