8 ms·
CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA
- andrewgjohnson 11y ago"CIA's Venture Capital Arm" Stahp
- aaronmck 11y agoIronically they're targeting the wrong end of the person. The sewers would be a great place to collect DNA and narrow down a manhunt in a large metropolitan area.
- Kenji 11y agoWow, mind = blown. You could perform binary search on the sewers to find a criminal. Hah, that would be ridiculous if that was possible.
- mikeyouse 11y agoThere were some indications that we attempted a focused attempt in Pakistan during the hunt for Bin Laden.. From an interview with the Bureau Chief of Time who wrote the full detail story about how it went down: > CROWLEY: Right. Unfortunately, Allison's language had to be a little bit cryptic. They couldn't confirm exactly what they had done, but he writes that in some of the option they consider were testing. It's not pleasant testing the sewage in the town for genetic markers, and then, another was this UAV. Actually, it wasn't an eagle size UAV. It's much smaller. http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1204/26/sp.02.html http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1204/26/sp.02.html
- mc32 11y agoWell, the Monterey Bay Aquarium does species counts using water sampling and searching DNA[1] so something similar might be possible to search for s specific individual signature. [1]http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/01/15/dna-detectives-able-to-count-thousands-of-fish-using-as-little-as-a-glass-of-water/ http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/01/15/dna-detectives-abl...
- Roritharr 11y agoAs someone who likes their database tables correctly named, without duplication and containing all the data, I can understand the urge to deploy this as a handsoap to all public restrooms with sinks that can collect water samples. It's just too neat and clean of a trap to not use it.
- nuttinwrong 11y agoOh god... as soon as word gets out of this coming to reality there will be a surge of unwashed public restroom hands. Good god! It's bad enough most old guys don't wash their hands after touching their dicks and door handles, now we'll have poop hands everywhere.
- personjerry 11y agoYeah, with their resources the CIA should really start thinking of CONSEQUENCES of their actions (e.g. this, Iran Contra support, and other shadiness).
- Roritharr 11y agoThat would mark the first time the broad public actually changes behaviour because of a perceived threat to their anonymity and data. I'd be putting my money on the soap people if that were to play out.
- saulrh 11y agoAmerican public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Repercussions_of_raid_on_Osama_bin_Laden_compound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Repe... I do not want that shit going on in any country, but I especially don't want it going on in my country. Fuck that, fuck them, fuck everybody involved in these retarded ideas.
- sitkack 11y agoSo not only were at least 70 health workers murdered, but hundreds of children were paralyzed or died from polio so we could execute Bin Laden. Fuck that. Just fuck it.
- rubyfan 11y agoWhy are we letting this go on?
- Aelinsaar 11y agoBecause the time to stop it was 30+ years ago. It's their country now, not ours.
- hellbanner 11y agoRight. And maybe HN readers just happen to read a lot of non-US press but it seems to me many of these "American Governments/Companys are doing bad things" are coming from non-USA press outlets.
- yarou 11y agoAnd by giving up you are furthering their power without accountability or oversight.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoNo, I'm not achieving any more by "giving up" than I am by not "giving up". I'm not in a position to change the nature of US policy, and as long as American voters use their power to vote in venal assholes, that won't change.
- noobermin 11y agoI'll bite, why is this something we shouldn't "let go on?" The CIA invests in companies doing research that support it's mission. You can disagree with the mission and work to change it, but what is wrong here? Why is it a crime to let a company develop this technology?
- technologia 11y agoI agree, we can all sit and bitch about this all day but if you want to make a change in their policy why not go work for them? -------------- Just to note, the later part of this isn't directed at you @noobermin, just my own rant (sorry) -------------- Also, there are plenty of companies that are in their portfolio that we are happily using without complaint. What this company is doing isn't wrong and assuming that the CIA is going to abuse it is wrong as well. Do people realize the hoops and hurdles these folks have to go through before they are even allowed to even be in the room with some of this stuff? The people working there are everyday folks that feel the same about the abuse of technology and work very hard for little pay to ensure that they aren't infringing anyone's rights. Sure it isn't perfect all the time, but for the most part they do their job well considering we almost never hear about their successes till several decades later.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoHistory is going to be so monumentally unkind to this period of American history. :/
- kiba 11y agoAs opposed to any other period of American history?
- Aelinsaar 11y agoNo, in addition to.
- rhizome 11y agoEh, not necessarily. This could be the last period when things were still really really good.
- rayiner 11y agoBarring disruption of the government, the future will be fairer and more just than today, just as today is fairer and more just yesterday.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y agoCan you provide any examples of things that are less fair and less just now than they have been any time in the past 100 years?
- cmrdporcupine 11y agoExactly, I just finished listening to an NPR interview on a book about the underground railway and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Out of your 100 year window range, but a nice example of just how malleable the institutions of government are to the forces of oppression.
- tripzilch 11y ago
- tn13 11y agoI am not too worried. CIA isn't what they show in TV dramas. It is just another incompetent organization that will go after weak. These are the same jerks who have not really achieved any strategic objectives of importance. The are one major public scandal away from serious trouble.
- hellbanner 11y agoHi, you don't seem to be aware of the awful crimes against humanity the CIA has committed without "serious trouble". For example, consider the scandal where they stage a coup in a foreign government, kidnap American citizens to experiment in brainwashing or assassinate a political leader to protect economic interests. http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html / Google for any of these headlines
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- daveguy 11y agoCan others confirm/deny this: Google this, no quotes: snopes Skincential Sciences CIA Then duckduckgo the same, no quotes. Did anyone else get disturbingly little response from google, but very detailed and recent results from duckduckgo? I searched this precisely because I was skeptical, but that search result was just weird. EDIT: For me it happens both in regular, tracked search and in an incognito tab. EDIT2: Dropping snopes gives a regular result from google and searching just snopes does too. I think google's ML initiative may not be working out as well as they hoped.
- ced 11y agoThe DDG results are about snopes, or Skincential Sciences CIA, but not both. If you remove snopes, the Google results look fine to me.
- daveguy 11y agoThanks for the confirm. Maybe someone at google listened to people complaining (or their algos learned) that when people search many specific words they are looking for a specific thing and not to randomly drop it. Also, as a side note (not directly to you but so I don't clutter the feed). The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm". The company in question is a private company, who's purpose is to develop intel tech and sell it to the CIA. They are not associated with the CIA in any official capacity, but they do seem to have a cozy relationship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel Edit: Also, on duckduckgo the first two results I get are specific to both this story about skincential and the cia.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lucaspiller 11y ago> The CIA does not have a "venture capital arm". Plot twist... YCombinator is the venture capital arm of the CIA /s
- 11y ago
- maxander 11y agoIts not clear to me how this would be useful for nefarious purposes. Surely, to apply this detergent and collect the resulting biomarkers in a controlled fashion, they would require fairly complete access to the target individual? As in, the target would have to be sitting there letting an agent rub their arm with some swabs. And there have to be easier ways to do the same thing- file a sharp edge into the back of a door handle could likely get enough skin cells to extract DNA, without being too obtrusive. Am I missing something?
- Giorgi 11y agoNope, article is garbage
- sehugg 11y agoYou might want to catch the 1997 scifi flick Gattaca on Amazon Prime before it becomes anachronistic.
- aburan28 11y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they already collecting DNA samples in bulk from the sewage systems of America
- sitkack 11y agoWhen I was a child there was a government program to take bio samples (blood and finger prints) from children in case of abduction. This was in the early 80s. So I would wager that this has been going on for a great long while.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- known 11y agoWhy covertly collect when they summon anybody?
- trevmckendrick 11y agoWhy in God's name does the CIA have a VC fund?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- neotek 11y agoIf you step back from the conspiracy theory stuff, why shouldn't the CIA have a VC fund? They have a vested interested in fostering technology that could serve their purposes, so why not ensure that technology finds the funding it needs to mature? Consider also that research grants from the Department of Defence are effectively the same thing, the government sponsoring technology that it might find a military application for, and those grants brought us the internet so it's not all bad.
- nieuweyork 11y agoI thought one of the reasons why everything had to be done by the free market was that government is bad at picking winners. But what do you know?