Police and DNA Data
So, I was getting my hair cut yesterday, and overheard the next person over chatting with her hairstylist or whatever you call them. She had apparently had the “priviledge” of going on a tour of forensics lab, and was talking about DNA testing, and how the police manage to get samples — even against someone’s consent.
This is somewhat of a hot topic, especially considering the recent murder of a small child here. Which is precisely why now’s the time to be most worried about it. Wether it’s Sept. 11th attacks, or this Holly case, emotional times can weaken public opposition to granting increased government/police powers.
Anyway, so basically police are insisting they have numerous clues and are closing in on the killer (or killers?). Translation: we don’t have any good ideas, which is why we’re desperate for public clues. And asking anyone remotely linked to the girl for DNA samples.
And several (thee, to be exact) people refused consent for a DNA sample to be taken. The woman at the hair place was saying that police need a court order to get a DNA sample from someone without their consent. Makes sense to me, but her tone was as if that was a bad thing…
Anyway, she then proceeded to say that the police had informed her on the tour she attended that while this may seem a problem, there is a legal loophole where police will go undercover and follow a suspect around. If they throw out a Tim Horton’s cup, for example, the police will dig into the garbage and try and get a saliva sample.
This is indeed quite a loophole – IANAL but as far as I know, it is indeed legal for police (or random people, in fact) to dig through garbage, and anything they find is fair game. Unless you’ve shredded documents, don’t consider it private or destroyed if you toss it in the garbage. I guess the same applies to DNA, based on that precedent – but should it? Do we have to take Gattaca-like precautions to avoid shedding bits of ourselves all over the place?
This kind of tactic brings up major privacy issues. Everybody has things they’ve done, places they’ve been to that are embarassing, or perhaps marginally illegal. Most of the time, no-one really cares. But when police/government has the ability to get your DNA fingerprint and build up a database (who really believes it when they say “it’ll only be for use during this investigation”, anyway?), suddenly any investigation or random check in a place you may have left DNA lying around becomes an excuse to pry into your life.
Take the aforementioned Gattaca example – in that movie, Ethan Hawke’s character works his way inside an exclusive agency, but he has to use someone else’s genetic identity due to the ingrained genetic discrimination present in society. While this was illegal, it is certainly understandable. During the course of a murder investigation, the police happen to find his (real) genes near the crime scene. Suddenly the investigation is focused on him, and his whole life, his dreams, are in jeopardy when he had nothing to do with the serious crime, the murder.
Our society (or maybe US, it’s all the same anyway) that it is better to let ten criminals go free than have 1 innocent in jail. One must always weigh the onus on the general population, the innocent, from any “security” measure, be it anti-terrorist legislation, DNA banks, etc, against any gains such measures may provide. One also needs to constantly check wether those advantages are real, or merely imagined, i.e. would more liberal DNA fingerprint legislation actually help police catch criminals?
This sort of stance may appear odd, coming from me. After all, I do post all this information about me on the Internet, freely available to anyone. But the difference is that I still have my privacy – the right to be free from intrusion or disturbance in my personal life or affairs, my identity. And I selectively choose which parts of that right to give up, consciously deciding that it’s more fun for me to share that I went Swing Dancing two weeks ago with the world than to keep it private. But there are other things, like what exactly I downloaded off the internet last night, that I might not put up here.
Heck, maybe we’re going about this all wrong, maybe we don’t need privacy. In the interests of catching criminals, let the government (and anyone else who can hack into their system or ask the right questions) know everything. If there’s something embarassing or minor in our history, it doesn’t matter, does it? We’re still the same person. I mean, who really would care, if, for example, a noted politician was having an extra-marital affair? Oh….
Never mind. It seems human nature just doesn’t quite work that way.
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