US Supreme Court: Cops can take a routine DNA swab at time of arrest

You don't have to love his politics to admit that Scalia's reasoning is, usually,[1] a beacon of clarity: "I cannot imagine what principle could possibly justify this limitation, and the Court does not attempt to suggest any. If one believes that DNA will 'identify' someone arrested for assault, he must believe that it will 'identify' someone arrested for a traffic offense. This Court does not base its judgments on senseless distinctions. At the end of the day, logic will [win] out. When there comes before us the taking of DNA from an arrestee for a traffic violation, the Court will predictably (and quite rightly) say, 'We can find no significant difference between this case and King.' Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason."<p>Even in Lawrence v. Texas, when he was wrong (in the macro sense), he was right in pointing out that, despite the Court's maneuvering, its opinion left no room in the future to find gay marriage bans anything other than unconstitutional.<p>That being said, I'll go ahead and be a little contrarian. Kennedy isn't really wrong: if you accept that routine fingerprinting is okay, there is precious little you can invoke to say that routine DNA swabbing is not okay, other than the fact that DNA swabbing is far more effective.<p>The precision and effectiveness of DNA makes it scary to people, but look at the flip side. We might actually want a world where DNA is the go-to tool for convictions, because everything else is so much worse: <a href="http://lst.law.asu.edu/FS09/pdfs/Koehler4_3.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://lst.law.asu.edu/FS09/pdfs/Koehler4_3.pdf</a>. If routine DNA swabs lead to the use of DNA evidence being routine, then juries might come to demand DNA evidence to deliver guilty verdicts, which would marginalize the other, highly unreliable, forensics techniques.<p>There is also an important fairness aspect: unlike eyewitnesses, DNA evidence is not subject to cross-race identification bias: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_identification_bias#Cross-Race_Identification_Bias" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_identification_bias...</a>.<p>[1] As long as the topic isn't drugs or homosexuals.

Its an interesting (if controversial) theory, that your DNA is no more private to you than your fingerprints, and they already fingerprint you when you are arrested and put those fingerprints into a national database.<p>The sticky thing for me though is that DNA not only identifies an individual, it also identifies their parents and possibly their siblings. So now we've got more than just our poor arrestee's id we've got some 'known acquaintences' and it gets worse if people start getting arrested for misdemeanors just so that the cops can take a swab to check.<p>No doubt there will be more to this debate before the dust settles.

there should be a requirement to destroy the DNA if no conviction is attained. the fact that the gov't can store your fingerprints forever simply because someone accused you of something is insane to begin with. using this as further justification for DNA storage is misguided.<p>your DNA is more private than your medical records, because much of the latter and a whole lot more can be decoded from your DNA, maybe not now, but it will most certainly be done in the future.<p>"just give us the keys to your house, we'll only use them when we (or our associates) deem necessary"

I'm a grudging holder of a view I deem the "rag doll" theory of identity &#38; evidence gathering: if they can get it from your limp body without coercion or harm (needles &#38; "intimate" contact included), they can have it. Facial photos, fingerprints, DNA ... things which can on the whole be obtained by just following you around (touched surfaces, fallen detritus), and which circumstances may dictate a more manipulated form of acquisition (hold face up for frontal photo, manipulate fingers for prints, mouth swab for DNA). Anything involving jabbing, yanking, or threats - no. This view does presume the existence of enough evidence for warrantable arrest in the first place, which should entail a high legal barrier: a judicially signed warrant should be required prior to arrest if possible, and acquired promptly thereafter if impractical; failure to obtain one (before or after, independent of information acquired during holding) should require immediate disposal of anything gathered including arrest record.

As I say in a comment elsewhere in this thread, I find the dissent on this extremely illuminating and tend to agree with it. One thing the court can't consider right now (since it's a hypothetical future and that's rightly not their business) is that some day, DNA sequencing is going to be dirt cheap and super fast. It is only a matter of time. When that happens, what will the court think about the police driving around hoovering up all the hair and cells you shed every day? You know, just to solve those cold cases to see if anyone turns up?<p>People get all worked up over automated license plate readers but the thought of the above happening makes GATTACA (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1</a>) look like Disneyland.

Did anyone else here get fingerprinted in elementary school, when the cops stopped by to say hi and talk about safety? We all were. This was in the mid 80's in Maine. I thought it was cool at the time, but I feel violated now. And I'm pretty sure my parents weren't asked.<p>More to the point: how would this generation feel about the police coming to school and taking DNA samples?

I think it should be pointed out that the information the police get back from a DNA sample is NOT a fully sequenced genome. It contains enough information to find high confidence matches, but they can't go through the information and start looking for pepole that have rare genetic diseases or anything like that. I still view it as a privacy issue by taking DNA from people who are never convicted (they should delete the info of innocent people). However, DNA samples from the police do not contain much 'confidential' beyond a fingerprint other than determining parents/siblings/cousings.<p>Source: <a href="http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/forensics.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/fore...</a>

Gattaca!

And all politicians and senators must have their DNA samples taken and posted online, with photo and name, as a show of good faith that it's not a big deal to let some cancerous arm of the government keep your specific blueprint for bootstrapping a human.