You no longer have to be convicted of a federal crime in order for the U.S. government to take your DNA. Under the provisions of a little-known law passed a year ago, the Department of Justice will take DNA from anyone who is even arrested on federal charges.
The act also provides for taking DNA from illegal immigrants detained in the U.S., whether charged with a crime or not.
Being convicted of a crime is, therefore, no longer required to get you into the FBI’s national DNA database.
President Bush signed H.R. 3402, the so-called Violence Against Women Act, on January 5, 2006.
“Obviously, the bigger the DNA database, the better,” said Lynn Parrish, the spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, based in Washington. “If this had been implemented years ago, it could have prevented many crimes. Rapists are generalists. They don’t just rape, they also murder.”
Peter Neufeld, a lawyer who is a co-director of the Innocence Project, which has exonerated dozens of prison inmates using DNA evidence, said the government was overreaching by seeking to apply DNA sampling as universally as fingerprinting.
“Whereas fingerprints merely identify the person who left them,” Mr. Neufeld said, “DNA profiles have the potential to reveal our physical diseases and mental disorders. It becomes intrusive when the government begins to mine our most intimate matters.” — New York Times
If you were arrested but found not guilty, had the charges dropped, or were never charged with a crime in the first place, the only way to get your DNA back out of the database is by court order.
But, hey, you can trust the government, right? After all, the government has never abused its power, and never has anyone in the government built up giant dossiers of information on people in order to advance his own personal agenda. It’s because everyone in the government is so trustworthy, pure of heart, and good of intention that we don’t need to protect ourselves from the government. They would never harm innocent people.
Right?
Oh, snap…
(To help prevent this sort of backdoor legislation in the future, join Downsize DC’s effort to pass the Read the Bills Act.)
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Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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Michael
Feb 05, 2007
Not to mention that the Feds have been taking DNA samples from everyone who joins the millitary. I know they were doing this in 1995 when I joined.
V
Feb 05, 2007
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I had a friend whose car was broken into, but the guy cut himself breaking the window. If the blood could be matched up with an identity, we could potentially catch a lot of criminals this way.
What we really need is a strong-worded law that prevents DNA taken this way from being use for ANYTHING other than criminal investigation, and can not be given to a 3rd party. The penalty being a giant lawsuit by everyone in the database.
Michael Hampton
Feb 05, 2007
There are two problems with such a law: First, the government ignores laws whenever it thinks it can get away with it; and second, laws can always be changed, in this case to remove the protection later, once everyone is in the database.
After all, they’re just words on a piece of paper. They are not chains which bind the government. Indeed, asking for the government to restrain itself is absurd.
Q
Feb 05, 2007
true it’s not necessarily these intrusive laws, but how people abuse them, laws are a lot like drugs in that respect, most recreational drugs in and of themselves; are not harmful, until they are abused. that can be by the way they are taken, or by process of manufacture, like when liquor was illegal, there were a lot of pirate distilleries that didn’t have the safety protocols in place to ensure the quality of the product.
the laws wouldn’t be so bad, if the true intention wasn’t to give more room for secret abuse of the law, such as the abuse we’ve been seeing of the patriot act, claiming a suspect may be a terrorist just so they can have justification for arrest and violation of privacy, as long as we do nothing this will only get worse until either a bloody painful revolution takes place, or the economy implodes, and our government just collapses under the weight of it’s own stupidity and greed.
Brock
Feb 05, 2007
I’m going to regret asking this. How, exactly, do they propose taking DNA from someone who does not want to give? Wouldn’t it be similar to fingerprinting, where failure to submit is a crime, but forcing you to submit would be assault?
Gölök
Feb 06, 2007
So will they take it from the constitution violating politicians
and the illegal Feds or Nats like the FBI, ATF, NSA, CIA, DEA, and all but border guards, Marshal liason and customs/treasury have to give up their blood and DNA?
What happens when your time is up? Do they drop it, keep it, or give it to the Raelian master race programs?
Where does it end. Does this fall in the line of self incrimination? A search and seisure?