5 ms·

I don't mean to be dismissive, but engineers tend to simplify these problems, as if the legal system is a perfect justice-dispensing black box. But that's not h

by dvt 6y ago

I don't mean to be dismissive, but engineers tend to simplify these problems, as if the legal system is a perfect justice-dispensing black box. But that's not how it works. This is a question of ethics and moral weights. This is why we have things like habeas corpus, chain of custody, rules about juries and evidence, and all kinds of things. DNA acquisition is rife with privacy concerns. The chance that some criminals might elude capture is one of the implications of why, for example, we don't implant everyone with a tracking chip, or require people to report their whereabouts to the government. If everyone had a tracking chip, no one could commit crimes any more, right? This is a reductio argument, but it shows why what might seem like "sure-shot" strategies (versions of which, in some cases, have been implemented in authoritarian governments) were definitely not "net wins" for society.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
I urge you to spend time reading the Wikipedia page of the golden state killer. Put yourself in the victims’ shoes. Imagine someone waking you in the middle of the night with a floodlight, shoving a gun in your face, screaming at you to lay on the floor while they put dishes on your back, saying “If I hear these fall, I’ll kill everyone.” Then he takes your loved one to the livingroom and mercilessly rapes her for hours. The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA. How, then, is it ethical to look someone in the eye and say “Your lover was murdered, and we could find who did it, but we won’t”?
- dvt 6y ago
  > The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA. The atrocities committed by authoritarian governments by far exceed the emotional force of your argument. From the Holocaust, to the Great Leap Forward, to the Holodomor. We're talking so much suffering that you can't even comprehend it (think of it like a moral neutron star). Millions murdered, raped, and tortured over the course of decades. Given what history has taught us so far, the ethical downsides of authoritarian carte blanche by far exceeds the downsides of erring on the side of protecting individual rights.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    DNA testing revealed that I am 47% Jewish, so yes, the holocaust argument is particularly relevant. I have weighed these concerns. But you’re vaguely gesturing towards atrocities and saying “There are good reasons, right there!” And I just don’t see them. Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people? Because certain unnamed countries seem to already be doing that, and they are either already using DNA or don’t need it. The argument here seems to be “if we let the US do this, there is a very real risk of authoritarian overreach.” Sure, I see that. I just don’t buy it. What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing? Even if the world mandated DNA testing tomorrow for the entire population, we would largely be in the same position we’re already in, thanks to the internet and smartphones. I realize this is an unpopular stance. But is it mistaken?
    - kube-system 6y ago
      > What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing? Nobody can say, because the conditions that would lead to abuse would manifest themselves in the future. The only thing we do know for sure is that there is no form of government that is immune to potential abuses of power. They have all had abuses in the past, and we can be confident that abuses of power will happen again.
    - jyrkesh 6y ago
      My issue is largely the assumption that presence of DNA == person who committed the crime. We leave DNA all over the place. If I drop some hair at the scene of a crime 12 hours before it was committed, I could become the innocent sole suspect of something heinous.
    - cogman10 6y ago
      > Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people? Imagine a genetic marker predisposes someone towards crime X. Now imagine that in the hands of law enforcement. If X happens one of the first things they'll do is round up everyone with genes for X and try to place them at the scene of the crime. The problem with that is that it means nothing. Just because a person is more likely to do X does not mean they've done X. How do we know that will happen? Because it already happens with DNA evidence today. It weighs far more heavily in cases than it should. It may prove that you were there, but it doesn't show what you did. And that's a problem. Juries aren't generally good at realizing what DNA does and does not show. You might think "Well, the defense should do a better job at debunking the DNA evidence". Yeah, they should. However, it's a long uphill battle to educate someone. Most people still think lie detectors and handwriting analysis actually work. Hell, many people believe that "essential oils" have mystical healing properties. You want to walk those people through the long process of "correlation is not causation"? Good luck. All the prosecutor has to do is get a DNA analysis finished which proves the presence and a cop to say "Oh, he was really evasive when I arrested him". The state of our justice system is perfectly summed up by this tweet. "I actually wore a bandana covering my face, nose down, to go to the bank today. Whole time I'm thinking, 'I've convicted people on less evidence than this ...'", Andy McCarthy [0] It takes staggering little evidence to convict someone of a crime and the general public sees DNA evidence (due to shows like CSI) as absolute proof of guilt. This may not be "murder of millions" but it certainly wouldn't be a place I'd want to live. I'd rather not be arrested by a lazy cop because I happened to go to the bank the same day it was robbed. [0] https://twitter.com/andrewcmccarthy/status/1258154195104018432?lang=en https://twitter.com/andrewcmccarthy/status/12581541951040184...
- gentleman11 6y ago
  You are using an argument style of the sort “there is a good reason to do this, and a bad thing that will happen if we don’t do this.” It’s flaw is that it ignores the bigger picture and competing interests, where we find there are other competing good and bad things to think about. If you imagine a world where crime is truly impossible, it is a world where humans are utterly incapable of disobeying the government under any desperate or impassioned circumstance
- davidu 6y ago
  This perspective is understandable, but requires a lot more reading before you stick to it. There's a lot of bad bad history based on this viewpoint.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  This justification could have literally come from the mouth of a Simpsons parody of a republican talk show host[1]. By that logic, what can't we justify by imagining the worst criminals in history and how they could have been stopped with a surveillance state? [1] https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E05/743793 https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E05/743793
- xcavier 6y ago
  I’ll ignore the “won’t someone think of the children” argument, and highlight the research into how frequently DNA evidence is misused, and how poor juries are at understanding both DNA science and probability/stats.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  This is a tale as old as time, seeing something that can, in morally-perfect hands, be used for good and saying "why not!?" while ignoring the human capacity (inevitability?) to use it ignorantly or outright maliciously and cause harm that outweighs the potential good.
- user5994461 6y ago
  If it makes you sleep better, these crimes happened 50 ago, it wouldn't be possible to repeat today with the prevalence of technology (phone tracing, fingerprints, cameras, fingerprints, etc...). The perpetrator would be caught fairly quickly.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  The vast majority of murders that we are in fact actually pretty poor at preventing or solving are the result of people killing people they know or criminals killing one another. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/clearances https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-... We only solve less than 2/3 of murders that are known to be murders which individually ought to be vastly easier than random murders. It is hard to quantify how many of the missing are victims estimates range from 180 to 1800 annual deaths. This means its between half as many as drown in their bathtub and 5 times as many in the worst case. All this out of a population of aprox 330M people 600k people who will for example die of cancer for context. It is terrible that serial murderers exist but we cannot and should not rearrange all of our priorities and ignore the rights of the hundreds of millions in order to protect the few.
xadhominemx 6y ago
> DNA acquisition is rife with privacy concerns Such as?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You know, collecting the DNA of everyone and being able to use it to trace them.
  - xadhominemx 6y ago
    Trace them how?
    - cosmiccatnap 6y ago
      Don't be nieve. Imagine that one day you can't get insurance because you have a family history of Parkinson's. Imagine being put on a watch list when you are born because someone two generations ago on your fathers side killed someone in self defense and they think it relates to anger tendencies derived from his genetics. There are a lot of concerns over the nature and use of DNA. One thing that they don't bring up is that there were actually two candidates for the golden State murders for awhile and luckaly one simply fit the profile better, it wasn't a perfect science and we still could have locked the wrong person up had they also been an old man.
- erulabs 6y ago
  Supposed you lived in Nazi germany during Kristallnacht and someone could just say "Hallo Siri, wo sind die Nicht-Arier?"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by dvt 6y ago

sillysaurusx 6y ago

I urge you to spend time reading the Wikipedia page of the golden state killer. Put yourself in the victims’ shoes. Imagine someone waking you in the middle of the night with a floodlight, shoving a gun in your face, screaming at you to lay on the floor while they put dishes on your back, saying “If I hear these fall, I’ll kill everyone.” Then he takes your loved one to the livingroom and mercilessly rapes her for hours. The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA. How, then, is it ethical to look someone in the eye and say “Your lover was murdered, and we could find who did it, but we won’t”?

dvt 6y ago
> The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA. The atrocities committed by authoritarian governments by far exceed the emotional force of your argument. From the Holocaust, to the Great Leap Forward, to the Holodomor. We're talking so much suffering that you can't even comprehend it (think of it like a moral neutron star). Millions murdered, raped, and tortured over the course of decades. Given what history has taught us so far, the ethical downsides of authoritarian carte blanche by far exceeds the downsides of erring on the side of protecting individual rights.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  DNA testing revealed that I am 47% Jewish, so yes, the holocaust argument is particularly relevant. I have weighed these concerns. But you’re vaguely gesturing towards atrocities and saying “There are good reasons, right there!” And I just don’t see them. Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people? Because certain unnamed countries seem to already be doing that, and they are either already using DNA or don’t need it. The argument here seems to be “if we let the US do this, there is a very real risk of authoritarian overreach.” Sure, I see that. I just don’t buy it. What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing? Even if the world mandated DNA testing tomorrow for the entire population, we would largely be in the same position we’re already in, thanks to the internet and smartphones. I realize this is an unpopular stance. But is it mistaken?
  - kube-system 6y ago
    > What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing? Nobody can say, because the conditions that would lead to abuse would manifest themselves in the future. The only thing we do know for sure is that there is no form of government that is immune to potential abuses of power. They have all had abuses in the past, and we can be confident that abuses of power will happen again.
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    My issue is largely the assumption that presence of DNA == person who committed the crime. We leave DNA all over the place. If I drop some hair at the scene of a crime 12 hours before it was committed, I could become the innocent sole suspect of something heinous.
  - cogman10 6y ago
    > Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people? Imagine a genetic marker predisposes someone towards crime X. Now imagine that in the hands of law enforcement. If X happens one of the first things they'll do is round up everyone with genes for X and try to place them at the scene of the crime. The problem with that is that it means nothing. Just because a person is more likely to do X does not mean they've done X. How do we know that will happen? Because it already happens with DNA evidence today. It weighs far more heavily in cases than it should. It may prove that you were there, but it doesn't show what you did. And that's a problem. Juries aren't generally good at realizing what DNA does and does not show. You might think "Well, the defense should do a better job at debunking the DNA evidence". Yeah, they should. However, it's a long uphill battle to educate someone. Most people still think lie detectors and handwriting analysis actually work. Hell, many people believe that "essential oils" have mystical healing properties. You want to walk those people through the long process of "correlation is not causation"? Good luck. All the prosecutor has to do is get a DNA analysis finished which proves the presence and a cop to say "Oh, he was really evasive when I arrested him". The state of our justice system is perfectly summed up by this tweet. "I actually wore a bandana covering my face, nose down, to go to the bank today. Whole time I'm thinking, 'I've convicted people on less evidence than this ...'", Andy McCarthy [0] It takes staggering little evidence to convict someone of a crime and the general public sees DNA evidence (due to shows like CSI) as absolute proof of guilt. This may not be "murder of millions" but it certainly wouldn't be a place I'd want to live. I'd rather not be arrested by a lazy cop because I happened to go to the bank the same day it was robbed. [0] https://twitter.com/andrewcmccarthy/status/1258154195104018432?lang=en https://twitter.com/andrewcmccarthy/status/12581541951040184...
gentleman11 6y ago
You are using an argument style of the sort “there is a good reason to do this, and a bad thing that will happen if we don’t do this.” It’s flaw is that it ignores the bigger picture and competing interests, where we find there are other competing good and bad things to think about. If you imagine a world where crime is truly impossible, it is a world where humans are utterly incapable of disobeying the government under any desperate or impassioned circumstance
davidu 6y ago
This perspective is understandable, but requires a lot more reading before you stick to it. There's a lot of bad bad history based on this viewpoint.
AlexandrB 6y ago
This justification could have literally come from the mouth of a Simpsons parody of a republican talk show host[1]. By that logic, what can't we justify by imagining the worst criminals in history and how they could have been stopped with a surveillance state? [1] https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E05/743793 https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E05/743793
xcavier 6y ago
I’ll ignore the “won’t someone think of the children” argument, and highlight the research into how frequently DNA evidence is misused, and how poor juries are at understanding both DNA science and probability/stats.
RankingMember 6y ago
This is a tale as old as time, seeing something that can, in morally-perfect hands, be used for good and saying "why not!?" while ignoring the human capacity (inevitability?) to use it ignorantly or outright maliciously and cause harm that outweighs the potential good.
user5994461 6y ago
If it makes you sleep better, these crimes happened 50 ago, it wouldn't be possible to repeat today with the prevalence of technology (phone tracing, fingerprints, cameras, fingerprints, etc...). The perpetrator would be caught fairly quickly.
michaelmrose 6y ago
The vast majority of murders that we are in fact actually pretty poor at preventing or solving are the result of people killing people they know or criminals killing one another. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/clearances https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-... We only solve less than 2/3 of murders that are known to be murders which individually ought to be vastly easier than random murders. It is hard to quantify how many of the missing are victims estimates range from 180 to 1800 annual deaths. This means its between half as many as drown in their bathtub and 5 times as many in the worst case. All this out of a population of aprox 330M people 600k people who will for example die of cancer for context. It is terrible that serial murderers exist but we cannot and should not rearrange all of our priorities and ignore the rights of the hundreds of millions in order to protect the few.

xadhominemx 6y ago

> DNA acquisition is rife with privacy concerns Such as?

saagarjha 6y ago
You know, collecting the DNA of everyone and being able to use it to trace them.
- xadhominemx 6y ago
  Trace them how?
  - cosmiccatnap 6y ago
    Don't be nieve. Imagine that one day you can't get insurance because you have a family history of Parkinson's. Imagine being put on a watch list when you are born because someone two generations ago on your fathers side killed someone in self defense and they think it relates to anger tendencies derived from his genetics. There are a lot of concerns over the nature and use of DNA. One thing that they don't bring up is that there were actually two candidates for the golden State murders for awhile and luckaly one simply fit the profile better, it wasn't a perfect science and we still could have locked the wrong person up had they also been an old man.
erulabs 6y ago
Supposed you lived in Nazi germany during Kristallnacht and someone could just say "Hallo Siri, wo sind die Nicht-Arier?"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]