Journal severoon's Journal: DNA Dragnets and Identification 8
Has anyone out there heard about this new practice police are using to catch criminals? It's called the DNA dragnet.
Here's the short form. Over the last few years, there have been several cases where police request that large numbers of people, sometimes approaching a thousand, give their DNA to rule themselves out as suspects in a case. Those who refuse to submit to the procedure are treated as suspects.
Now, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this--I only found out about it last night while watching 60 Minutes. I am sure, though, how I feel about police using this to solve crimes without having to get permission from a court or a specifically scoped law controlling the practice. Last time I checked, to become a suspect in a criminal case police had to have probable cause--anything short of that is harrassment. You can't even be pulled over for a traffic violation unless the cop has met this burden; how can you become a suspect in a rape or murder investigation simply because you were anonymously caught in a DNA dragnet and refused to cooperate?
Apparently, England has no such qualms. They have taken to routinely using this technique when they run out of other leads to follow. Germany has run DNA dragnets including thousands of people. We in America need to address this to express how we feel about this practice to our representatives and authority figures before it becomes standard practice.
I am not saying that I think it should never be used...though this is very possibly the conclusion I will come to on the matter after careful thought. I've long been conflicted about privacy issues involving identification of individuals. For instance, my state, California, now requires you to give a thumbprint in order to get a driver's license. Is this a problem? I'm not sure...privacy advocates argue that requiring such a thing is the action of a police state that considers its citizens as criminals before they do anything wrong. Somehow, though, this argument has never resonated with me.
To understand my viewpoint, ask yourself: what is the purpose of issuing IDs in the first place? The point, dear reader, is to identify you. I imagine the driver's license originally existed merely to identify you as a licensed driver, but I think that we all know that this is no longer the case; driver's licenses are now used for that purpose and as a state ID, same as the one you're entitled to if you're not a licensed driver but want a form of legal identification. So it seems to me that in order for a privacy advocate's argument against fingerprinting to be self-consistent, they ought to be advocating the abolition of IDs altogether. I've yet to meet anyone that can propose a reasonable means of doing away with IDs altogether. So the same argument privacy advocates make about fingerprints could be applied equally well to the head shot present on every photo ID, the address...the concept of the ID itself.
All this means that even most privacy advocates accept that some form of identification is necessary. So we find ourselves on a sliding scale from no IDs at all at one extreme to a global ID that uses every bit of technology available to disambiguate you from the entire global population (fingerprints of all ten fingers, DNA information, 3D model of your face and body, etc). If we agree that the need exists for the state to identify citizens, what degree of identification is necessary and reasonable?
One of the more nuanced arguments I've heard intelligently draws the line at DNA evidence. This argument is based on the notion that citizens should be willing to give enough information that authorities can reasonably identify them while limiting the exposure for abuse as much as possible. Some undoubtedly feel that a photo and an address are already too much, but I think most reasonable people would recognize that the true jump in exposure to such abuse doesn't occur on this sliding scale until we get to DNA. The potential to abuse DNA is much more serious than, say, fingerprints. Your DNA could be given to a health insurance company that discovers you are predisposed to a certain illness and cancels your insurance as a result. (Is it only a matter of time regardless before insurance companies require a DNA sample before they'll insure anyone? I think that once DNA becomes cheap to process, this will probably come to pass at some point anyway. Perhaps this issue of the DNA dragnet is simply prompting a conversation that we need to have anyway.)
Another factor in this discussion of identification is the level of granularity. Should we move to a national ID card, or leave it at the state level? Personally, I'm not against the national ID card because I think the benefits outweigh the risks. Besides, consistency requires that, if you are against a national ID card, you are also against interstate cooperation. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket out of state only to have it show up on your driving record in your home state? Of course no one likes to get nailed with a ticket, but I think you'll agree it would be unreasonable to expect that each state will operate completely independently in this regard. I mean, what if a loved one of yours gets kidnapped and taken out of state? Would you advocate that the state authorities follow the trail to the state border, and then simply throw up their hands and head back to the office? Of course not...in that case, you'd be all for interstate cooperation and information sharing. States spend millions of dollars every year sharing databases...we might as well save all these tax dollars and just go national. There's something that rings false about a position that in principle agrees with the need for collecting and sharing data, but finds some degree of comfort when states are unable to exploit this capability due to technological difficulties.
National IDs are more in line with our shared consciousness anyway--when travelling abroad, if someone asks me where I'm from, I start by saying "America," not "San Francisco" or "California." (Contrast this to natives of India, who will often specify their home state within the country...in my experience, Indians typically do not share a strong national identity.) Besides being cheaper, a national ID would perhaps allow us to get better control over the illegal immigration situation (which is why national IDs will never happen--both parties lack the political will to deal with the appalling state of our immigration situation).
Anyway, as I intimated at the top of this essay, I'm pretty well undecided on how exactly to approach the issue of DNA dragnets. Do you have any thoughts to contribute that might help me form an opinion on this?
What would the founding fathers say? (Score:1)
Re:What would the founding fathers say? (Score:2)
You bring up a lot of good points in your post...what's missing, though, is the thread that ties together your argument. Instead of a logical progression, you seem to mostly be relying on the "slippery slope," which is a logic fallacy and shouldn't be employed in discussions of policy. (As a matter of judging a particular person's character, it might be relevant, but even then you have to be careful how you use it.)
So, let me address why the slippery slope argument generally isn't useful. Whenever a pers
Re:What would the founding fathers say? (Score:1)
Re:What would the founding fathers say? (Score:2)
That's true, and I'll concede I wasn't thinking in these terms in my reply to your post. However, I do not know of any Constitutional restrictions on
Re:What would the founding fathers say? (Score:1)
Re:What would the founding fathers say? (Score:2)
Well, as my best friend (who's a lawyer) told me once, all statutes, acts, amendments, laws, etc, are "basically" meaningless until they are interpreted by a court. This is not to say that they are useless, but rather, simply lacking meaning. Now we can get into philosophical debates about the three types of definition (prescriptive vs. connotative vs. stipulative), but what all of this boils down to is one simple thing. There are vague or amibiguous terms in nearly every legal statement and it's the job of
A couple of things... (Score:2)
Probable cause is what they need for a warrant. Reasonable suspicion is what they need to persue probable cause.
Second, kidnapping is a federal crime. So if your loved one is kidnapped and taken out of state, the FBI gets involved.
But to deal with the mass requests for DNA, say no. I would. The only way that people are going to remember that they are innocent until proven guilty is if someone reminds them. W
Re:A couple of things... (Score:2)
I'm not a lawyer, so I may not have used the correct terminology...but still, do we want to get into a purely semantic argument? I don't. You know what I meant, let's go from there. :-)
I knew someone would take this bait. Extending my example just a bit, it should be easy to see tha