On Mon, 03 May 2010 15:54:06 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> There is a difference between "we have a specific crime that we are
>> looking for suspects for" and "we are doing random checking to see if
>> someone might have committed a crime".
> 
>   There is a difference, but I don't see the random checkings as being
>   all
> that abhorrent in all cases (as I have mentioned, here the police does
> random checkings on drivers even without any reason to suspect them of
> being drunk, and I think that's completely ok).
> 
>   Of course if the police abuse their rights to perform random checking
> in order to harass people they don't like, that's going over the line.

Here in the US, we're very strongly opposed to putting the government in 
a position where it can abuse its power.  There was actually a war over 
this in our history because the government that governed us was seen to 
be abusing its power.  The framers of our government decided that the 
government should not have this power because they'd seen it abused.

>> To use your rape example, suppose instead of "we're looking for a white
>> male because of this specific case we're looking into" the police
>> started by collecting DNA samples from all white males just *in case* a
>> crime were committed.
> 
>   As a side note: Why are people so afraid of DNA databanks? Why is it
> such an abhorrent idea? What kind of "invasion of privacy" is having
> your DNA in a databank? Exactly how does that invade one's privacy?

In 15 years' time, DNA is found to be unreliable for some reason.  A 
whole bunch of innocent people are convicted based on DNA evidence 
because it was irrefutable and infallible back in 2011.

So then what happens?

Again, it comes down to not trusting the government to not abuse its 
power.  It's a means of keeping government power in check.

>   Imagine that if every single citizen had to have their DNA registered,
> and thanks to that the apprehension rate of rapists grows near 100%,
> wouldn't that be a good thing? Not only would the rapists be all caught,
> but it would also act as an effective deterrent.
> 
>   How could DNA information be misused by authorities?

There are lots of ways it could be (and is) misused by authorities.  
Cross-contamination, improper labeling of the dataset - DNA data is 
supposed to be 100% accurate (or better than 99% accurate), but that's 
only as good as we know today based on today's science.  If it's 
mislabeled or miscategorized, how exactly does one challenge that if it's 
supposed to be infallible?

>> That's the difference.  What the Arizona law does is not tie the act of
>> "being an illegal immigrant" to a specific instance of a crime.
> 
>> Does that make sense?
> 
>   I suppose that that kind of law could perhaps have good intentions
> behind it, but in practice it's too radical to have any chance of
> actually working, even if the intentions were good. (Of course I have no
> way of knowing what the actual intentions were behind that law proposal.
> Maybe it *was* made by purely racist reasons.)

Nobody here (as far as I know) has said it doesn't have good intentions 
behind it, but that doesn't make it a good law.  I've actually read the 
law, and while it doesn't specifically say "those of Hispanic descent are 
subject to being stopped", it does IMHO cross the line by making it a 
"specific crime" to "be" in Arizona illegally.  First, that's already 
covered by Federal immigration laws, but the law sets the police up so as 
to be required to engage in racial profiling.  Even the governor of AZ 
(who signed the bill into law) has said she doesn't know how the law 
should be enforced without using racial profiling - but she signed it 
into law anyways.

Jim

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