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- Hacker News
- 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 demolished, fights on front lawn, statues covered in gold while people can't get healthcare or even food
people arrested and prosecuted at great expense then quietly dismissed
all normalized somehow without mass outrage
by ck2 - I mean, are YOU going to try to stop them?
- Unless ICE was also collecting young children, it should say: "... including that of young children".
- I mean, they have been collecting young children.by thrance
- This behavior will continue until an actual consequence is introduced.by lenerdenator
- America voted for this.by gdilla
- 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.
by pavlov - 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.
by scarecrowbob - Framing things as protecting children from predators, corporations, governments, etc... seems to always be the justification given for and against any measure directed at them. Child trafficking is real. Governments are already moving toward age verification online. Most people seem to legitimately only care about privacy or children's protection when it serves as a bludgeoning tool for "their team." Consider me sufficiently jaded on this issue.by andrewclunn
- > 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.
by aliasxneo - 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 "we were able to identify this john doe because their DNA was on record"). However, given that companies and governments are awful, I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/by voidUpdate
- 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).
by mindslight - Totally agree; we can't leverage good stuff because we are mess.
There are some sorts of protocols and conventions that might help with this.
For example, not-for profit medical systems can hold certain records , then problems are regionally isolated and have extra layers of protection.
Biosignatures, similarly, we may want to only enabling 'matching, and with a warrant' - so that gov may not procure individuals biometrics, but only require a 3rd party lab to do matching, with oversight, process etc.
That would radically limit concentration of of actual power, likelhihood of problems.
If biometric matching companies were liable for failure to implement protocol (aka delete after test) etc - then that's powerful.
Regulations are never perfect, but they work.
Companies can skirt the law - but 99% of the time it's just normal compliance.
The trick is to make regs that don't encourage breaking compliance, and when it happens, the blast radius is limited.
by bluegatty - How close does a DNA "match" have to be to get somebody tossed in jail? Do they actually require 100%, or is a "match" something less? What's the false-positive rate? Would a non-twin sibling's DNA "match"?
Yes, I'm aware that, in theory, DNA is unique. As is the theory for finger-prints. But, I'm also aware that theory is rarely reality.
by alistairSH - Perfect enforcement of crimes is a bad thing. If criminal law was perfectly enforced we'd still be in Prohibition and PGP would also be illegal.by inigyou
- 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.
by RajT88 - 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.by mft_
- > IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information
How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?
by tremon - I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/
Exactly. I can think of so many bad outcomes. Just the medical point:
both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia")
You know how this will end in the modern tech dystopia. In countries where health care insurance is not mandatory or there is a large gap between collectivized and private insurance, DNA would be used to reject or raise the prices for people with 'unlucky DNA'.
A government that could be trusted now is not necessarily trustable in the future. I am pretty sure the orange guy clan would love to lone their pockets by selling such information.
Also, apart from these issues, a lot of people simply do not want to know these things. Suppose that the outcome is "you have a 30% risk of dementia by 60". For most people such kind of information is hard to act on, while it increases worry significantly. I do think it can help for some treatable illnesses, enabling early monitoring.
by microtonal