[burneraccount12]

This will be an unpopular opinion but we should index the DNA of every citizen.

The two objections are 1) exposing genetic health info 2) foreign countries can identify our spies.

For #1, I have news for you: insurance companies already build risk profiles of you, DNA profiles are not going to tip the balance of your premiums against what they already know. This ship has sailed. (and TBH if they didn't insurance would likely be even more unaffordable and out-of-reach than it already is)

For #2, I can't say.

But think of the benefits: how many more crimes would be solved? How many LESS innocent people would go to prison for crimes they didn't commit?

Plastic straws, browsing history and DNA indexing are white people problems, IMHO. Look at what it's like to be black in America in 2019: Botham Jean was sitting in his own apartment, eating ice cream, watching a ball game when a white off-duty Dallas police officer broke in and murdered him for no reason.

She'll be out of prison in 5 years.

The rise of body cams has the last 10 years has shown these types of incidents happen more frequently than we ever wanted to admit.

How many people are hurt in real life by things like DNA indexing? Please. It must be nice to be so rich to worry about frivolous non-problems like these. A national DNA index could keep a lot of innocent (mostly minority) people out of prison but oh no god forbid a white person be revealed to have a genetic marker for Alzheimers and their insurance premiums go up. The horror.

[ggggtez]

I think the idea of this post is contradictory.

Who suffers from government lists of potential terrorists, criminals, and their relatives? It's not a "white people" problem. That would be a problem faced primarily by dark-skinned people.

And really, what else would the government do with a database of the DNA of every person in the country, other than use it to track and profile people of color? Could you imagine being "stop-and-frisked" for your DNA to see if you were related to any known criminal, and then questioned under suspicion that you might know where they are hiding?

It seems simply crazy to say in one breath that government and police abuse their power, and then in the next say you want to give them authority to keep files on every single person with impunity.

[burneraccount12]

Right, because the lack of DNA indexing stops cops from racial profiling now.

Cops already check your ID to see if you're related to any known criminal! Literally, this "nightmare scenario" you're envisioning happens every day in America. E.g.: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/28/nypd-gang-database-addit...

It's comical that you think this is some 1984 thing that will happen if we enable DNA indexing...the fact you don't know it already does happen shows just how far removed your experience is with police from those of black and Hispanic people in America.

If you're Arab flying into the country? Even worse.

If anything DNA indexing would allow innocent, unaffiliated people to not have to endure the indignity of what they currently go through.

[ggggtez]

So... you are saying: "We can't trust police, let's give them more powers"?

I think your expectations on how many crimes a DNA database would solve is vastly over-estimating. For example, even if a rape case collected DNA evidence, most of them never actually process those kits. You can't solve a crime if you never look at the evidence to begin with.

I think a DNA database is a solution in search of a problem.

[burneraccount12]

What is this implicit assumption that DNA index = power?

Power to do what? Identify you? They already (try to) do that! A DNA index is just a superior authentication mechanism, one that would involve a lot less suffering for those being identified.

The not processing of rape kits has been shameful and many nonprofits are working to rectify that problem: https://www.rainn.org/articles/addressing-rape-kit-backlog

You don't experience the problem because you're likely wealthy and probably white. The fact that rich whites can so easily dismiss even the idea of police authentication as a problem just shows that rich white America isn't even aware what poor black people go through in this country every single day.

[opwieurposiu]

DNA can be synthesized for $2 a gene. DNA tests as used in crime labs only check dozens/hundreds of genes to make a match. With a database of everyone's DNA, anyone can be framed for anything.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/synthetic-gene-cost-slas...

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

Sorry, but this fundamentally misunderstands how sequencing technology works.

The kind of DNA sequencing you do on the population/genome scale is of relatively low quality and depends on a reference genome. It is not a de novo sequencing. Particularly challenging are repetitive sequence areas; high-throughput sequencing utilizes short reads that cannot be unambiguously assembled or mapped in these areas. If you have two sequences that have AGAGAGAGA... on their ends, you cannot determine to what degree they overlap. Only reads that span the repetitive sequence with sufficient margins can be unambiguously assembled or mapped.

DNA fingerprinting, however, relies precisely on robust characterization of these repetitive sequences. These sequences experience many errors during replication that produce high diversity in a population. Your unique suite of sequence lengths is used to identify you. This is assessed with restriction digest fragment length polymorphism analysis (RFLP analysis), an entirely different technology from high-throughput sequencing.

These repetitive sequences are also difficult to synthesize, for the same reasons it fails in real organisms. RFLP analysis is, therefore, about the most robust way you generate a DNA 'fingerprint'.

This situation changes if the sequencing technique used generates longer reads. Thus-far, the economical option always uses short reads, and this technique is perfectly suitable for the kinds of analysis done. It would take a breakthrough in sequencing technology for this to change, which is certainly plausible, but is not the current reality. A future concern, perhaps, but science fiction for now.

[krick]

This is interesting. But can I know ahead which genes will be tested? Is it always the same set?

Basically, I'm asking: is this really true? Given a drop of your blood I can frame you today for anything plausible for under a $1000? It's kind of difficult to believe.

[bradknowles]

Yup, it's always the same SNPs.

They can only test a relatively small group of SNPs, and they chose the ones that (at the time) believed differed the most from one person to the next, so as to maximize the probability of being able to distinguish between individuals.

But if you've got everyone's DNA, then you can calculate those SNPs for everyone, and then easily create kits that would allow you to frame anyone you want just by leaving behind samples of "their" DNA at the crime scene of choice.

[krick]

I feel like I'm asking something you already answered, but just to make sure: this implies, that to frame specifically you I don't need everyone's DNA, I just need a sample of yours, right? And if I understand correctly, DNA evidence is treated with quite a respect in court?

So, if I really can make a sample of "fake DNA" (that will be indistinguishable from the "real" for forensics purposes) for a couple hundreds dollars, I really can frame anyone I know for anything (right now!), because getting a sample of their DNA isn't really that difficult.

It doesn't quite add up in my head, because if it's so simple, why the courts would even consider it hard evidence?

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

DNA fingerprinting does not utilize SNPs; it uses RFLPs.

[DoctorOetker]

if you have the drop of blood, you don't even need to synthesize anything, you just use PCR to amplify the DNA

[NotSammyHagar]

it's true, there have already been demonstrations of this.

[mmmrtl]

Not that $2 a gene isn't in our near future, but the method you're citing is highly error prone (on the order of 80% misassembled) and (hopefully) wouldn't look like a natural sample to a forensic lab. Commercial prices for gene assemblies are still ~$200 per, so not super accessible yet.

[exolymph]

You should look up the no-due-process list of "terrorists" (some real, I grant) who have problems at airports. Then think about what governments like to do with lists of people in general.

[burneraccount12]

Exactly! If we had a DNA database we could quickly clear people as innocent.

Instead we rely in inaccurate authentication measures like birthdays and names and photos...hence endless suffering.

DNA would positively or negatively identify people.

Besides, people are already voluntarily doing this at airports as part of the CLEAR program. So your horrible awful terrible nightmare scenario...literally goes on every day at major American airports.

[dragonwriter]

> If we had a DNA database we could quickly clear people as innocent.

Only when you have a sample to compare it to that definitively came from the perpetrator (not just “was found at the scene and can indicate that whoever it came from was present”.)

That's actually not all that common.

[burneraccount12]

Is the TSA the FBI? They're not looking for perpetrators, they're looking for terrorists. I promise you the US government has a vast database of biometric information of suspected terrorists.

The fact we all have to suffer thru terrible, imperfect authentication techniques like looking at your birthday shows we should have a database to save us all the grief.

Honestly all your arguments are actually GREAT reasons to have a national DNA index.

[AmericanChopper]

> Plastic straws, browsing history and DNA indexing are white people problems, IMHO.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to dismiss problems based on the ethnic demographics you believe they impact.

[burneraccount12]

Sort of the way white people dismiss the problems of black people. Easily.

For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.h...

[AmericanChopper]

Somebody having their own position on an issue that you believe impacts one ethnic group more than another is not racist. Having a position on an issue that is motivated by which ethnic group you believe it impacts is outright racist. I guess these days I probably shouldn’t be, but I am shocked to see openly racist rhetoric on HN.

[ttobbaybbob]

Such a database would certainly have been valuable to anyone who ever wanted to commit genocide.

It's easy to see the short-term, first-order positive results. However the power to abuse such information is basically unlimited.

[burneraccount12]

Wait, WHAT?

How are people going to use a DNA database to commit genocide?

How are these people going to be killed en masse? What would stop someone from using the same method without a DNA database?

This argument makes no sense...the thing stopping genocide now is not the inability to identify people based on their genetic characteristics.