Presumption of innocence still applies. This a school of hundreds. If this fails who then should be considered suspects? Every male in the town? Every male in general?
This is not the first police have push for 'voluntary' DNA samples on mass. It's not without precedent. But having the prosecutor handling the case saying anyone refusing to submit a sample would be considered a potential suspect fucking is.
I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone surrendering personal details of any sort police without consideration and legal consultation and certainly not whenever you haven't be accused of a crime. That information is personal and I care should be taking to keep it that way.
Of course that's hardly cause for celebration considering how routinely they take DNA the first place. They commonly forcefully take DNA of arrested suspects and hold onto it without indefinitely without a conviction or formally laying charges. Something that is not practice or allowed by the majority of western countries[1]
They may of turned around in the last few years but I'm to that I'm sceptical :(
edited 16th Apr '14 7:45:11 AM by joeyjojo
hashtagsarestupidI'm afraid that I don't share your paranoia about misuse of personal information. There seems to be a nasty undertone to privacy arguments implying that people have a right to get away with anything they can manage to so long as they can avoid getting caught. Also, that it's the proper role of law enforcement to conduct every investigation from scratch with zero prior knowledge or assumptions.
In my mind, increasing the information available to law enforcement prior to crimes actually happening is a good thing, because it allows the ruling out of enormous numbers of potential false leads and makes accurate arrests and prosecutions happen much faster.
For example, if they have DNA from a rape scene and can match it to the DNA of everyone in the pool of potential suspects, they can identify the culprit — or at least rule out a vast number of innocents — before interviewing even a single person.
Going away from the DNA thing for a bit, I saw an article the other day about a new aerial surveillance platform that can offer police a live (or recorded) overhead view of a large area sufficient to track suspects and vehicles for a crime already committed. The example shown was a purse-snatcher and their getaway vehicle. There's nothing about this inconsistent with established privacy law. You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy while in public, and if the police can use surveillance information to track the exact location and destination of a suspect, they can arrest that person without bothering innocent people.
After all, isn't the greatest fear about law enforcement that of a false conviction? Anything that reduces that rate should be welcomed as long as it isn't harmful in other ways.
In other words, I don't recognize a fundamental right to privacy from law enforcement when it comes to things like DNA, fingerprints, and the like. What you do may be your private business, but what you are is not.
edited 16th Apr '14 8:21:08 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'm drawing a distinction between what I am and what I do. My behavior in my home, my personal preferences, and so forth, are my business to share with whom I please. My name, my physical appearance, my identifying information like DNA and fingerprints, however, are or should be a matter of public record.
Heinlein was of the opinion that a human being's DNA is not even their own; it's a shared resource of the entire species and the species has a collective interest in it.
The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were designed to protect people against official abuse of power, not to prevent law enforcement from efficiently prosecuting crimes.
edited 16th Apr '14 8:01:24 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yes but Heinlein contradicts himself more than God does in the old Testament
You may not consider your fingerprints, dental records, DNA ect personal but I do. The information is a part of you and long as you inhabit your body the distinction between 'what are you' are 'what you do' is any arbitrate one.
Your DNA belong to you and you alone. It is not something that should be discarded in the name of public good and efficient justice.
edited 17th Apr '14 4:48:17 PM by joeyjojo
hashtagsarestupidFighteer, I don't think your conclusions follow from your arguments. I can agree that the police should have the ability to conduct surveillance in pursuit of a suspected criminal, for example, without agreeing that what I am is not privileged information. What's so difficult about needed some sort of probably cause? And there is no reason they shouldn't destroy that video once the trial is over. What do they need it for?
The collection of DNA during a rape investigation might be justified, depending on the specific circumstances, but again, once the trial is over, they should destroy the about everyone except the guilty party. Putting everyone else in a database for future use is unjustified by any sort of probable cause.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.We have a national fingerprint database, don't we? That information isn't destroyed once a prosecution is completed. So clearly some information about you as a person is judged suitable for permanent retention. DNA is like a fingerprint, but orders of magnitude more reliable. Where's the difference?
edited 16th Apr '14 8:27:15 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Anything can be manipulated or modified. That's not an argument for or against. "More personal" is a subjective argument.
edited 16th Apr '14 9:06:50 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Conversely, they can take one hour to interview people, get a general picture of what groups were where, and rule out large swaths of the student body for a fraction of the cost, no lab time, and no privacy concern.
Pretty much the only circumstance where this many DNA tests will ever produce useful and expedient results for an immediate crime is if they get lucky and find the culprit on one of the first handful. And it'll still be more expensive than if they just conducted an in-person investigation.
Yes. For people who are actually arrested. And in many cases, there are avenues that are supposed to remove the biometrics of those who aren't convicted — even if we've been finding lately that they often don't because lol who actually follows their own regulations.
edited 16th Apr '14 6:52:13 PM by Pykrete
You know, it'd be nice if you could actually back up your doomsaying. How do you know they haven't been doing conventional investigation as well as trying the DNA thing? The relentless cynicism is really kind of blowing things out of proportion. A girl was raped, they have no leads, a bunch of people volunteered to give their DNA to help the investigation. There's no privacy violation in this story. If people were being compelled to give up their DNA without any actual evidence that they'd done anything wrong (and no, saying "if you don't volunteer your DNA we'll probably consider you a suspect" does not constitute compulsion) then you'd have a reason to be up in arms. If you had any solid reason to believe that this was being done for nefarious purposes rather than for the stated aim of aiding the rape investigation, you'd have a good case for being upset. As it is, though, there's pretty much nothing wrong with the situation except that you don't like the fact that a couple hundred people have decided that they're willing to give their DNA up despite not being accused of any wrongdoing.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Try telling a child that if they don't comply you'll specifically target them for a rape investigation that currently has no other suspects. See how totally not compelled they are.
Hell, studies of typical police interrogation methods and bluffs have seen false confession rates around 1/4, sometimes up to well over half. It's very possible the first person to refuse giving their DNA will be convicted, whether or not they actually did it.
Like it or not, the threat of being specifically targeted is, for very good reason, compulsion. People are measurably risk-averse, even when by all logic they aren't at risk.
edited 16th Apr '14 9:07:33 PM by Pykrete
Again, how does that apply to collecting DNA but not to asking people where they were when the crime happened? People don't have to talk to the police if they don't want to, and they don't have to give police a DNA sample if they don't want to. But someone who refuses to tell the police their whereabouts when the crime happened is going to seem suspicious, just like someone who refuses to give them some DNA.
You seem to be getting hung up on the word "suspect", but anyone who could have possibly committed the crime is technically a suspect, and anything that rules out one suspect will inevitably make the remaining suspects seem that much more likely. If the police are pretty sure that one of these 500 people is the culprit, and half of those people provide DNA evidence that exonerates them, then anyone who didn't provide a DNA sample is going to seem twice as suspicious as they did before, since the odds of them being guilty have gone from 1/500 to 1/250. The police aren't choosing to make people suspects if they don't cooperate; it's that not cooperating naturally makes them more suspicious.
I think the point of this all is:
A single remote rape case does -not- warrant the massive collection of innocent DNA for 'later use' or worse, false conviction. What if the rapist isn't -even- a part of the school to begin with? Just pick a sucker and convict?
Around in Malaysia, there's this infamous case of Anwar being charged with homo rape, despite all the logical reasons, alibi and evidences suggesting otherwise. The prosecutor claimed victimship and some out of the blue, publically unverifiable sperm traces come up, and somehow, the sperm traces matched up to 3 other different people as suspects. This proves that if anything, DNA evidence is both mistakable and falsifiable.
The massive collection of DNA of male students is not holding up good water, to say the least.
Same as usual.... Wing it.Because they have done no investigating. The lack of leads is because they appear to have not even bothered to ask for if anyone has an alibi before deciding to try and DNA test 500 people. Unless they've somehow investigated and nobody in the entire school can have their movements verified (if this is the case I'd love a source) than they're using their own incompetence to justify this.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThis is starting to drift off-topic. Certainly the collection of DNA evidence is an important aspect of the issue of privacy, but one incident in France shouldn't be blown out of proportion. Let's re-focus on government and privacy in general.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.

Well the NI stuff sounds good to be honest, towards the end we actually got our heads out our ass' in Northern Ireland and worked out how to deal with a situation like that properly, instead of trying to just blow stuff up. I'd actually prefer someone like that for an MI 6 post, Northern Ireland can teach us a lot for the war on terror.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran