Big Brother gets a little bigger

[TheMercenary]

F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases

By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: April 18, 2009

Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.

Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.

The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.

Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people.

But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.

“DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.”

Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights.

DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. “Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted,” the report said.

Minors are required to provide DNA samples in 35 states upon conviction, and in some states upon arrest. Three juvenile suspects in November filed the only current constitutional challenge against taking DNA at the time of arrest. The judge temporarily stopped DNA collection from the three youths, and the case is continuing.

Sixteen states now take DNA from some who have been found guilty of misdemeanors. As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government’s power is becoming too broadly applied. “What we object to — and what the Constitution prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

This year, California began taking DNA upon arrest and expects to nearly double the growth rate of its database, to 390,000 profiles a year from 200,000.

One of those was Brian Roberts, 29, who was awaiting trial for methamphetamine possession. Inside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles last month, Mr. Roberts let a sheriff’s deputy swab the inside of his cheek.

Mr. Roberts’s DNA will be translated into a numerical sequence at the F.B.I.’s DNA database, the largest in the world.

The system will search for matches between Mr. Roberts’s DNA and other profiles every Monday, from now into the indeterminate future — until one day, perhaps decades hence, Mr. Roberts might leave a drop of blood or semen at some crime scene.

Law enforcement officials say that DNA extraction upon arrest is no different than fingerprinting at routine bookings and that states purge profiles after people are cleared of suspicion. In practice, defense lawyers say this is a laborious process that often involves a court order. (The F.B.I. says it has never received a request to purge a profile from its database.)

When DNA is taken in error, expunging a profile can be just as difficult. In Pennsylvania, Ellyn Sapper, a Philadelphia public defender, has spent weeks trying to expunge the profile taken erroneously of a 14-year-old boy guilty of assault and bicycle theft. “I’m going to have to get a judge’s order to make sure that all references to his DNA are gone,” she said.

The police say that the potential hazards of genetic surveillance are worth it because it solves crimes and because DNA is more accurate than other physical evidence. “I’ve watched women go from mug-book to mug-book looking for the man who raped her,” said Mitch Morrissey, the Denver district attorney and an advocate for more expansive DNA sampling. “It saves women’s lives.”

Mr. Morrissey pointed to Britain, which has fewer privacy protections than the United States and has been taking DNA upon arrest for years. It has a population of 61 million — and 4.5 million DNA profiles. “About 8 percent of the people commit about 70 percent of your crimes, so if you can get the majority of that community, you don’t have to do more than that,” he said.

In the United States, 8 percent of the population would be roughly 24 million people.

Britain may provide a window into America’s genetic surveillance future: As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the British database, or about one-fifth, have no current criminal record. In December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain violated international law by collecting DNA profiles from innocent people, including children as young as 10.

Critics are also disturbed by the demographics of DNA databases. Again Britain is instructive. According to a House of Commons report, 27 percent of black people and 42 percent of black males are genetically registered, compared with 6 percent of white people.

As in Britain, expanding genetic sampling in the United States could exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law School professor who studies the intersection of genetics, policing and race. Mr. Greely estimated that African-Americans, who are about 12 percent of the national population, make up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the federal database, reflective of their prison population. He also expects Latinos, who are about 13 percent of the population and committed 40 percent of last year’s federal offenses — nearly half of them immigration crimes — to dominate DNA databases.

Enforcement officials contend that DNA is blind to race. Federal profiles include little more information than the DNA sequence and the referring police agency. Subjects’ names are usually kept by investigators.

Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man’s DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/19DNA.html?hpw

[DanaC]

yep. They get a DNA sample now in this country, even if you are just taken in for questioning. You don't have to be arrested, let alone convicted for your DNA and finger prints to be registered on the national database.

[TheMercenary]

"Sixteen states now take DNA from some who have been found guilty of misdemeanors."

I am pretty sure our state is one of them.

[Aliantha]

I don't have a problem with the government taking my DNA if I ever get arrested. For one thing, if I'm a law abiding citizen, what do I have to worry about? For another, if I somehow become a criminal then the state has every right to try and stop me from offending...and I suppose I have the right to try and avoid capture.

Also, surely it can only help fight crime if the police have more information. So someone gets picked up on a misdemeanor, then they find they've got DNA from the same person or fingerprints from a crimescene that match? Why is it so bad that the police should have access to this type of technology?

I'm all for it. It's about time too imo.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

For one thing, if I'm a law abiding citizen, what do I have to worry about?

My concern is that, when something that you're doing, today, that is legal, is made illegal, tomorrow, they already have the framework in place to track you, and you agreed with implementing it. You don't ever get to tear down that process when it dawns on you, later on, that it wasn't a good idea. The politicians of tomorrow can use the tools that the politicians of today put in place, for whatever purpose they see fit at that time. We can't control that from the present. I think that criminalization of harmless acts is part of the natural tendency to try to control a massive, ever-growing population--not through some nefarious scheme, but as a natural, gradual drift towards replacing chaos and disorder with strict, inflexible systems.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Flint

The politicians of tomorrow can use the tools that the politicians of today put in place, for whatever purpose they see fit at that time. We can't control that from the present. I think that criminalization of harmless acts is part of the natural tendency to try to control a massive, ever-growing population--not through some nefarious scheme, but as a natural, gradual drift towards replacing chaos and disorder with strict, inflexible systems.

Thought that stood repeating.

The DNA database worries me. Far more than CCTV, or people looking into my emails or tracking my mobile phone use (not saying I necessarily approve of all those things, but I don't get a cold chill from them). DNA is about as fundamental and personal as it gets. And I worry at the attitude that seems to be forming within our society that somehow DNA evidence is to be considered absolute and incontrovertable proof. Mainly though, I dont much like the idea of my government owning such deeply personal information about me.

[TheMercenary]

I have mixed feelings about it. They have my DNA from service, anyone who is in the armed forces has been giving them DNA samples since the early 90's. And in the long run it is not so much that they have is as it is what are they really going to do with it. It is like a high tech national ID card. As long as it is used exclusively for criminal investigations I guess it is not a bad thing. But if they were to expand it to other aspects of registration I would have a problem with it. Like I said, they already have mine.

[Beestie]

I subscribe to the idea that information should be taken/given on a need to know basis.

Government is like water. It expands into the space that's not occupied by something else. If we abandon our right against illegal search and seizure then the government will gladly scoop it up.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Beestie

I subscribe to the idea that information should be taken/given on a need to know basis.

Government is like water. It expands into the space that's not occupied by something else. If we abandon our right against illegal search and seizure then the government will gladly scoop it up.

I don't see how this has anything to do with illegal search and seizure.

[TheMercenary]

Agreed.

[Bullitt]

I was thinking hot air, but water works too.

[sugarpop]

I don't have a problem with it as long as it is used by law enforcement. The only problem I would have with it is if insurance cos start using it to keep from having to treat people, or businesses started using it for some other nefarious reasons. If we solve the health care crisis, that really shouldn't be an issue anymore though. As for business, as long as they put in really strict regulations, that shouldn't be a problem either. I think what we need to do, NOW, is decide to regulate new technology and information systems as they are developed, so they don't blow up in our faces, as has happened with the economic crisis and the ways in which people used new ideas and deregultion to rob us blind. We have been brainwashed for sooooo long that any kind of regulation is bad, and stifles business and the markets, that we have forgotten to protect ourselves from the thieves at the door.

[TheMercenary]

What if they said they needed to collect it for every person who uses medical pot? Gun owners? Doctors who perform abortions? Child care workers? Where does it end?

[sugarpop]

If they are going to collect DNA to build a database, everyone should have to donate it. Otherwise it is discrimination. But it should only be able to be used in the pursuit of a serious crime, like murder or rape or burglery or arson, stuff like that.

Smoking pot? No, it should not be used for that. That isn't even a crime in some states anymore. They just give you a ticket, like a parking ticket. If Reagan hadn't come into office and made the laws so much stiffer against pot, it would probably be completely legal now. Carter was on the way to legalizing it, when someone in his cabinet was caught with cocaine, and that was such an embarrassment he kind of abandoned the whole legalization thing about pot.

[classicman]

What if they had your DNA and planted it at the crime scene of a murdered Dweller whom you argued with online?
What recourse would you have?

Originally Posted by sugarpop

Smoking pot? Carter was on the way to legalizing it,

ORLY? I hadn't heard that one.