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.
Not so fast. Often DNA can identify that you are likely related to someone who committed a crime. This can lead to interesting results in cases where the relationship is not known.
For example consider the case where a couple with fertility problems used a sperm donor. The child is never told that this happened. Then police identify that the crime was likely committed by someone who shares 1/4 of their DNA with the child. In other words that child's grandchild, grandparent, half-sibling, aunt or uncle. You can imagine the sudden disruption when the police show up?
It gets even worse if the child was the result of an affair. Or if the person who committed the crime was. Or if the child was in some other way the result of a family secret.
Oh right, and it gets more problematic. The traced DNA is not necessarily the criminal's. You find hair at the crime scene, but maybe it was present before the crime. The hair is a lead, it is not proof.
These cases are common enough that schools long ago learned not to use people's families for demonstration of how genes work in biology classes. Heck, they are common enough that I personally know people that I know are in these kinds of situations. And you have to get to know someone pretty well before you find out about stuff like this.
And now we're going to have law enforcement randomly exposing private situations like this. Maybe we as a society consider this worthwhile. But there is no question that privacy will be invaded here.
Clearly there is some potential effect, so yea you are right. But this is pretty tenuous, rare, and this sort of risk comes with any police investigation.
If the police see a red BMW leave a scene, it might accidentally cause a person with a red BMW to be falsely investigated.
Human eyewitness evidence is even worse.
So yea, while there is some effect, it is no more than what we already accept.
Please explain why these are poor arguments to rebut the claim, The only way this has any effect on anyone's lives is if it is used to catch you for a crime you committed.
I think you're describing questions that, before DNA analysis, were explored through traditional police investigations all the same. It would be just as disruptive if a detective figured out that the suspect is the result of an affair through tracing birth certificates and interviewing doctors and nurses as by matching DNA samples.
Additionally, your hypothetical also assumes that the person(s) related to the supposed subject have their DNA on file or are somehow compelled to provide it as evidence - precluding some kind of existing database, or a kind of chicken|egg situation. That is out of scope of this argument.
Additionally, your hypothetical also assumes that the person(s) related to the supposed subject have their DNA on file or are somehow compelled to provide it as evidence - precluding some kind of existing database, or a kind of chicken|egg situation. That is out of scope of this argument.
That is actually a very safe assumption.
As articles like http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/dna-databases/ make clear, police already ARE creating DNA databases. And since there is little regulation around this right now, they are free to be creative in assembling them. For example you can get a good DNA sample from the straw used to blow into a breathalyzer. So get stopped at a routine traffic stop, your name, license plate, and DNA can go into a database. And voila, police can now match you and your relatives against crime scenes!
As technology improves and costs come down, incentives to match everyone to DNA tests will go up, not down. Heck, I remember as a child in Canada over 30 years ago having police come to my elementary school and taking everyone's fingerprints. I believe that the cause was so that if anyone went missing, they could identify us. But once that data is collected and goes into databases, it doesn't come out.
Heck, how many parents would give consent today for their 2nd graders to get a DNA test for that purpose?
Won't let me reply next-in-thread. I never said that what you describe wasn't possible, and I'm indeed aware of those instances you bring up. What I'm saying is that that is out of scope of this argument. EFF is talking about collection capabilities. Immediately jumping to the 1984 senarios hurt the overall grounding of the argument.
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 needs of law enforcement against people's right to privacy.
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.)
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.