5 ms·

IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information, then I feel like people having a DNA test at birth or on becomin

IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information, then I feel like people having a DNA test at birth or on becoming a citizen could be useful, both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") and from a policing standpoint ("we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" or "we were able to identify this john doe because their DNA was on record"). However, given that companies and governments are awful, I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/

usrnm 2mo ago
Life in general would be a lot simpler and nicer in a perfect world with perfect (whatever it means) people in it
mft_ 2mo ago
Indeed. It’s essentially the age-old conundrum: I don’t need to worry about my privacy because I’m not breaking the rules… until someone changes the rules.
- bookofjoe 2mo ago
  In December 2009, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously stated during a CNBC interview, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
- redsparrow 2mo ago
  I don't close the door when I'm taking a crap because I have something to hide, I do it for privacy. And whether people are breaking the rules or not, the more someone knows about you the easier it is for them to influence and manipulate you. (This is the basis of the online advertising industry.) I think people who don't value privacy must not know what it is.
  - mft_ 2mo ago
    To build on your analogy, one could easily imagine a situation where there was no need to close the toilet door - because there's no-one around, or if there is, no-one cares about you taking a crap, and no-one pays any attention. In this case, 'privacy' is unnecessary. (You, personally, in 2026 feel the need to close the door for 'privacy' because of some combination of societal programming, learned experience, personal psychology, choice, whatever.)
sidewndr46 2mo ago
There are several European countries that do this from what I understand
- hvb2 2mo ago
  Do what, fingerprinting or collecting DNA? Not sure what you're trying to say, if Europe does it, it's fine? The gist is that this was always done when people were arrested for criminal offences. They're now doing it for civil offences and, like with all the ICE stuff, it seems to be do first, ask questions later. So you can be a citizen but your data might end up in their systems anyway as it's submitted before they find out you are a citizen...
  - spwa4 2mo ago
    A few things we can know for sure. The Dutch immigration enforcement authority, IND, has a blanket exception for to the GPDR collecting any kind of information on anybody "for the purposes of immigration enforcement". 10 years ago we found out, from a budget proposal that was in dispute, that the police had sent every mental health database in the Netherlands to Palantir. Regular health databases too, but if you're Dutch, Peter Thiel knows exactly what you told the "the law guarantees you can trust me" social worker 20 years ago. Or what you told any Dutch police officer at the border, on the street, ... Everything. That's what the Dutch state used their authority for.
    - microtonal 2mo ago
      As far as I know the IND only gives the option for a DNA test (voluntary choice), if as a refugee you want to let your family come over to prove that someone is actually your family. This is not great, but faked familial ties have been used in the past to get people into the country. Also, the DNA test is not done by the IND, but by the NFI (Dutch Forensic Institute), who destroy the material after six months. sidewndr46 had a pretty grandiose claim (I don't think there are any European countries that do a DNA test at birth and store the data) and you only come with a lot of handwaving that is not even about DNA.
inigyou 2mo ago
Perfect enforcement of crimes is a bad thing. If criminal law was perfectly enforced we'd still be in Prohibition and PGP would also be illegal.
- voidUpdate 2mo ago
  It's generally quite hard to get a DNA sample from someone's PGP signature
  - netsharc 2mo ago
    "This software is for verified downloaders only. Please scan your ID card to start downloading.".
alistairSH 2mo ago
How close does a DNA "match" have to be to get somebody tossed in jail? Do they actually require 100%, or is a "match" something less? What's the false-positive rate? Would a non-twin sibling's DNA "match"? Yes, I'm aware that, in theory, DNA is unique. As is the theory for finger-prints. But, I'm also aware that theory is rarely reality.
- assimpleaspossi 2mo ago
  Remember that one still needs proof. My DNA on a victim's clothes does not mean I committed the crime.
  - estearum 2mo ago
    In principle. In reality, juries often hold evidence like this (and also-very-unreliable eye witness testimony) in high regard, based on how it's positioned into the narrative.
    - alistairSH 2mo ago
      In reality, juries often hold evidence like this in high regard, based on how it's positioned on CSI:Some-City television.
  - alistairSH 2mo ago
    Are you willing to trust 12 random schmoes to make that call correctly? Especially in the face of an overzealous prosecutor?
    - bell-cot 2mo ago
      The fake-it-'till-you-make-it crime lab "scientist" is worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Gilchrist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Gilchrist
    - dpb001 2mo ago
      Exactly. I’ve served on two juries and the experiences left me shaking my head. In one case the judge’s instructions were dismissed by a majority of the jury members with a “yeah, but…”.
tremon 2mo ago
> IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?
- jvanderbot 2mo ago
  Right, and that's why it's preposterous to even imagine this happening. In no time you'd have an administration that was providing that DNA evidence to defense contractors for Top Secret clearance, background checks, etc. "We're sorry your job application was rejected because we found you were 4% less maximally conscientious than the median applicant" I've had job applications (albeit in secured projects) rejected for similarly vague bullshit ("Insufficiently candid")
  - tyingq 2mo ago
    Health insurance actuaries would be a concern also.
kelnos 2mo ago
Your argument boils down to "if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we could do this", so I'm not sure what the point of it is. (Entertainingly, if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we wouldn't need this database... or police or militaries for that matter.) At any rate, even if I could ensure, in perpetuity, that my DNA would not be used inappropriately (where I get to decide what that means), I would still not want it collected and database'd. People deserve to have privacy in their bodies.
- voidUpdate 2mo ago
  People don't have to be 100% for it to work, the system would have to be so that if a human was to be evil, then they couldn't compromise it single handed-ly. I'll admit, I've not figured out implementation details, I just like thinking about nice things
RajT88 2mo ago
When I was a kid, I recall police coming to our classrooms to fingerprint us. The whole school got fingerprinted. The idea was to help police if kids went missing. Whether or not you believe that justification ("Stranger Danger" was a scare at the time), I can promise you those fingerprints were used to put people in jail later.
- voidUpdate 2mo ago
  I think that's a bit safer, because you could deduce very private information from a DNA sample, but you can't really tell anything about a person from their fingerprints, except maybe the size of their fingers. It's a one way match
  - kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
    Identical prints do exist. As with lab contamination of DNA, there is a potential for false accusation when you submit to dragnet biometric databases.
    - rationalist 2mo ago
      > Identical prints do exist. Evidence? It's theoretically possible, but as far as I'm aware, no one has found a matching set.
      - kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
        Not whole sets but individual fingers have turned up duplicates.
        rationalist 2mo ago
        Source? ( > Evidence? )
- elevation 2mo ago
  > those fingerprints were used A detective in a ~150K pop. municipality told me that while they might dust for prints, they rarely use them in court because computer matches are very noisy and actually entering prints as evidence in court requires an expensive expert witness to evaluate and attest to a supposed match. The prosecutor can't afford the fees for every case, so a lot of fingerprint evidence goes unused.
microtonal 2mo ago
I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/ Exactly. I can think of so many bad outcomes. Just the medical point: both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") You know how this will end in the modern tech dystopia. In countries where health care insurance is not mandatory or there is a large gap between collectivized and private insurance, DNA would be used to reject or raise the prices for people with 'unlucky DNA'. A government that could be trusted now is not necessarily trustable in the future. I am pretty sure the orange guy clan would love to lone their pockets by selling such information. Also, apart from these issues, a lot of people simply do not want to know these things. Suppose that the outcome is "you have a 30% risk of dementia by 60". For most people such kind of information is hard to act on, while it increases worry significantly. I do think it can help for some treatable illnesses, enabling early monitoring.
- haritha-j 2mo ago
  You could potentially make DNA a 'protected class' of data, implying insuarance companies cannot look at it in their decision making, same as something like race.
  - aaomidi 2mo ago
    We do basically have this, kinda, with not being able to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. The law however is only as good as it is being enforced. And if recent events is anything to go by, not having this data is generally the strongest protection.
  - pibaker 2mo ago
    The US has the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and I'm sure you can find similar laws elsewhere. The problem is a law can be repealed any time. Might take some heavy lobbying to get there but nothing is impossible.
kelvinjps10 2mo ago
Why has to be the government if anything could be done by health providers and be guarded by the existing privacy laws that don’t allow the government to indiscriminately access it
amiga386 2mo ago
On the downside, millions wrongly killed, imprisoned, fined, families torn apart. On the upside, think how good that Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA article will be.
K3UL 2mo ago
As someone who loves Gattaca, no thanks !
danilocesar 2mo ago
A historical reminder: the Nazis were highly effective at persecuting Jews in the Netherlands precisely because of the country's meticulous population registry. You never know who will be in power tomorrow. The convenience of a centralized system today does not outweigh the catastrophic danger of that system in the wrong hands in the future. Specially nowadays.
BrokenCogs 2mo ago
The movie Gattaca deals with this theme and it has a good plot too!
- xxs 2mo ago
  One of the downsides of the movie is the lack of exploration of entertainment - outside 6 finger person piano concerts...
dlahoda 2mo ago
ZK, FHE, MPC is written in Rust/Swift/C(pp) to support proper DNA data management. I assume that there is already done research related to DNA. Any modern phone has enough to crank needed bits. These schemes do not need trust to company nor government. Remaining is to upgrade old phones of every body.
bluegatty 2mo ago
Totally agree; we can't leverage good stuff because we are mess. There are some sorts of protocols and conventions that might help with this. For example, not-for profit medical systems can hold certain records , then problems are regionally isolated and have extra layers of protection. Biosignatures, similarly, we may want to only enabling 'matching, and with a warrant' - so that gov may not procure individuals biometrics, but only require a 3rd party lab to do matching, with oversight, process etc. That would radically limit concentration of of actual power, likelhihood of problems. If biometric matching companies were liable for failure to implement protocol (aka delete after test) etc - then that's powerful. Regulations are never perfect, but they work. Companies can skirt the law - but 99% of the time it's just normal compliance. The trick is to make regs that don't encourage breaking compliance, and when it happens, the blast radius is limited.
rtkwe 2mo ago
That's the issue with granting the government more surveillance powers, you can never trust it will only be used 'properly' and more and more in the US the Supreme Court is tearing down the minor safeguards of independent agencies so more and more it's up to the whims of the current President.
lithos 2mo ago
New Jersey "government-ize-ed" this quite a while with a database that's quite abused. But every US hospital does genetics testing for allergies (a few for milk and similar that are nearly a death sentence for the new born). NJ is just ahead of giving law enforcement access whenever it wants for searches, and renting the data to whoever pays.
mindslight 2mo ago
You've unwittingly demonstrated why it's impossible to have a "trusted government", and why governments are inherently awful even without nefarious motives! > "we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" You've casually thrown out a use that sounds like it would be valuable, and thus has political appeal - but it actually fails hard to false positives. If you're merely confirming a DNA match, then the small chance of a false positive remains small - you're only comparing against one candidate. But if you do a population-wide search, then that chance of finding false positive multiplies [0] across the whole population! So even with good intentions, you've invented a process that picks random people out of society and harasses them (at best, with the way justice systems actually work this would lead to false convictions).
sonrics1611 2mo ago
Subhuman zog
ExoticPearTree 2mo ago
In some countries, when you go to work there they take full fingerprints (fingers, palm, etc.) plus a blood sample for DNA. Works extremely well in deterring crime. From a technology perspective, it is really not that hard to keep all this on an air-gapped network and just run comparisons against it "offline" and get a result back with all the info you need when there is a match.
cyanydeez 2mo ago
so, ultimately, it doesn't matter what the technology, the operative word is always "trusted government" and there isn't like, a replacement to "trusted government"; people who trust fascists will of course tell you they have a "Trusted government". So it all really just comes back to implementing governance that has the correct leverage on power. America is definitely not that, and this will be abused in all manners if america continues down fascism. Of course there's always things we just shouldn't store, like logs of password hashes or whatever, but most of reality hinged on "trusted government"

usrnm 2mo ago

Life in general would be a lot simpler and nicer in a perfect world with perfect (whatever it means) people in it

mft_ 2mo ago

Indeed. It’s essentially the age-old conundrum: I don’t need to worry about my privacy because I’m not breaking the rules… until someone changes the rules.

bookofjoe 2mo ago
In December 2009, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously stated during a CNBC interview, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
redsparrow 2mo ago
I don't close the door when I'm taking a crap because I have something to hide, I do it for privacy. And whether people are breaking the rules or not, the more someone knows about you the easier it is for them to influence and manipulate you. (This is the basis of the online advertising industry.) I think people who don't value privacy must not know what it is.
- mft_ 2mo ago
  To build on your analogy, one could easily imagine a situation where there was no need to close the toilet door - because there's no-one around, or if there is, no-one cares about you taking a crap, and no-one pays any attention. In this case, 'privacy' is unnecessary. (You, personally, in 2026 feel the need to close the door for 'privacy' because of some combination of societal programming, learned experience, personal psychology, choice, whatever.)

sidewndr46 2mo ago

There are several European countries that do this from what I understand

hvb2 2mo ago
Do what, fingerprinting or collecting DNA? Not sure what you're trying to say, if Europe does it, it's fine? The gist is that this was always done when people were arrested for criminal offences. They're now doing it for civil offences and, like with all the ICE stuff, it seems to be do first, ask questions later. So you can be a citizen but your data might end up in their systems anyway as it's submitted before they find out you are a citizen...
- spwa4 2mo ago
  A few things we can know for sure. The Dutch immigration enforcement authority, IND, has a blanket exception for to the GPDR collecting any kind of information on anybody "for the purposes of immigration enforcement". 10 years ago we found out, from a budget proposal that was in dispute, that the police had sent every mental health database in the Netherlands to Palantir. Regular health databases too, but if you're Dutch, Peter Thiel knows exactly what you told the "the law guarantees you can trust me" social worker 20 years ago. Or what you told any Dutch police officer at the border, on the street, ... Everything. That's what the Dutch state used their authority for.
  - microtonal 2mo ago
    As far as I know the IND only gives the option for a DNA test (voluntary choice), if as a refugee you want to let your family come over to prove that someone is actually your family. This is not great, but faked familial ties have been used in the past to get people into the country. Also, the DNA test is not done by the IND, but by the NFI (Dutch Forensic Institute), who destroy the material after six months. sidewndr46 had a pretty grandiose claim (I don't think there are any European countries that do a DNA test at birth and store the data) and you only come with a lot of handwaving that is not even about DNA.

inigyou 2mo ago

Perfect enforcement of crimes is a bad thing. If criminal law was perfectly enforced we'd still be in Prohibition and PGP would also be illegal.

voidUpdate 2mo ago
It's generally quite hard to get a DNA sample from someone's PGP signature
- netsharc 2mo ago
  "This software is for verified downloaders only. Please scan your ID card to start downloading.".

alistairSH 2mo ago

How close does a DNA "match" have to be to get somebody tossed in jail? Do they actually require 100%, or is a "match" something less? What's the false-positive rate? Would a non-twin sibling's DNA "match"? Yes, I'm aware that, in theory, DNA is unique. As is the theory for finger-prints. But, I'm also aware that theory is rarely reality.

assimpleaspossi 2mo ago
Remember that one still needs proof. My DNA on a victim's clothes does not mean I committed the crime.
- estearum 2mo ago
  In principle. In reality, juries often hold evidence like this (and also-very-unreliable eye witness testimony) in high regard, based on how it's positioned into the narrative.
  - alistairSH 2mo ago
    In reality, juries often hold evidence like this in high regard, based on how it's positioned on CSI:Some-City television.
- alistairSH 2mo ago
  Are you willing to trust 12 random schmoes to make that call correctly? Especially in the face of an overzealous prosecutor?
  - bell-cot 2mo ago
    The fake-it-'till-you-make-it crime lab "scientist" is worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Gilchrist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Gilchrist
  - dpb001 2mo ago
    Exactly. I’ve served on two juries and the experiences left me shaking my head. In one case the judge’s instructions were dismissed by a majority of the jury members with a “yeah, but…”.

tremon 2mo ago

> IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?

jvanderbot 2mo ago
Right, and that's why it's preposterous to even imagine this happening. In no time you'd have an administration that was providing that DNA evidence to defense contractors for Top Secret clearance, background checks, etc. "We're sorry your job application was rejected because we found you were 4% less maximally conscientious than the median applicant" I've had job applications (albeit in secured projects) rejected for similarly vague bullshit ("Insufficiently candid")
- tyingq 2mo ago
  Health insurance actuaries would be a concern also.

kelnos 2mo ago

Your argument boils down to "if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we could do this", so I'm not sure what the point of it is. (Entertainingly, if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we wouldn't need this database... or police or militaries for that matter.) At any rate, even if I could ensure, in perpetuity, that my DNA would not be used inappropriately (where I get to decide what that means), I would still not want it collected and database'd. People deserve to have privacy in their bodies.

voidUpdate 2mo ago
People don't have to be 100% for it to work, the system would have to be so that if a human was to be evil, then they couldn't compromise it single handed-ly. I'll admit, I've not figured out implementation details, I just like thinking about nice things

RajT88 2mo ago

When I was a kid, I recall police coming to our classrooms to fingerprint us. The whole school got fingerprinted. The idea was to help police if kids went missing. Whether or not you believe that justification ("Stranger Danger" was a scare at the time), I can promise you those fingerprints were used to put people in jail later.

voidUpdate 2mo ago
I think that's a bit safer, because you could deduce very private information from a DNA sample, but you can't really tell anything about a person from their fingerprints, except maybe the size of their fingers. It's a one way match
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
  Identical prints do exist. As with lab contamination of DNA, there is a potential for false accusation when you submit to dragnet biometric databases.
  - rationalist 2mo ago
    > Identical prints do exist. Evidence? It's theoretically possible, but as far as I'm aware, no one has found a matching set.
    - kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
      Not whole sets but individual fingers have turned up duplicates.
      - rationalist 2mo ago
        Source? ( > Evidence? )
elevation 2mo ago
> those fingerprints were used A detective in a ~150K pop. municipality told me that while they might dust for prints, they rarely use them in court because computer matches are very noisy and actually entering prints as evidence in court requires an expensive expert witness to evaluate and attest to a supposed match. The prosecutor can't afford the fees for every case, so a lot of fingerprint evidence goes unused.

microtonal 2mo ago

I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/ Exactly. I can think of so many bad outcomes. Just the medical point: both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") You know how this will end in the modern tech dystopia. In countries where health care insurance is not mandatory or there is a large gap between collectivized and private insurance, DNA would be used to reject or raise the prices for people with 'unlucky DNA'. A government that could be trusted now is not necessarily trustable in the future. I am pretty sure the orange guy clan would love to lone their pockets by selling such information. Also, apart from these issues, a lot of people simply do not want to know these things. Suppose that the outcome is "you have a 30% risk of dementia by 60". For most people such kind of information is hard to act on, while it increases worry significantly. I do think it can help for some treatable illnesses, enabling early monitoring.

haritha-j 2mo ago
You could potentially make DNA a 'protected class' of data, implying insuarance companies cannot look at it in their decision making, same as something like race.
- aaomidi 2mo ago
  We do basically have this, kinda, with not being able to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. The law however is only as good as it is being enforced. And if recent events is anything to go by, not having this data is generally the strongest protection.
- pibaker 2mo ago
  The US has the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and I'm sure you can find similar laws elsewhere. The problem is a law can be repealed any time. Might take some heavy lobbying to get there but nothing is impossible.

kelvinjps10 2mo ago

Why has to be the government if anything could be done by health providers and be guarded by the existing privacy laws that don’t allow the government to indiscriminately access it

amiga386 2mo ago

On the downside, millions wrongly killed, imprisoned, fined, families torn apart. On the upside, think how good that Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA article will be.

K3UL 2mo ago

As someone who loves Gattaca, no thanks !

danilocesar 2mo ago

A historical reminder: the Nazis were highly effective at persecuting Jews in the Netherlands precisely because of the country's meticulous population registry. You never know who will be in power tomorrow. The convenience of a centralized system today does not outweigh the catastrophic danger of that system in the wrong hands in the future. Specially nowadays.

BrokenCogs 2mo ago

The movie Gattaca deals with this theme and it has a good plot too!

xxs 2mo ago
One of the downsides of the movie is the lack of exploration of entertainment - outside 6 finger person piano concerts...

dlahoda 2mo ago

ZK, FHE, MPC is written in Rust/Swift/C(pp) to support proper DNA data management. I assume that there is already done research related to DNA. Any modern phone has enough to crank needed bits. These schemes do not need trust to company nor government. Remaining is to upgrade old phones of every body.

bluegatty 2mo ago

Totally agree; we can't leverage good stuff because we are mess. There are some sorts of protocols and conventions that might help with this. For example, not-for profit medical systems can hold certain records , then problems are regionally isolated and have extra layers of protection. Biosignatures, similarly, we may want to only enabling 'matching, and with a warrant' - so that gov may not procure individuals biometrics, but only require a 3rd party lab to do matching, with oversight, process etc. That would radically limit concentration of of actual power, likelhihood of problems. If biometric matching companies were liable for failure to implement protocol (aka delete after test) etc - then that's powerful. Regulations are never perfect, but they work. Companies can skirt the law - but 99% of the time it's just normal compliance. The trick is to make regs that don't encourage breaking compliance, and when it happens, the blast radius is limited.

rtkwe 2mo ago

That's the issue with granting the government more surveillance powers, you can never trust it will only be used 'properly' and more and more in the US the Supreme Court is tearing down the minor safeguards of independent agencies so more and more it's up to the whims of the current President.

lithos 2mo ago

New Jersey "government-ize-ed" this quite a while with a database that's quite abused. But every US hospital does genetics testing for allergies (a few for milk and similar that are nearly a death sentence for the new born). NJ is just ahead of giving law enforcement access whenever it wants for searches, and renting the data to whoever pays.

mindslight 2mo ago

You've unwittingly demonstrated why it's impossible to have a "trusted government", and why governments are inherently awful even without nefarious motives! > "we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" You've casually thrown out a use that sounds like it would be valuable, and thus has political appeal - but it actually fails hard to false positives. If you're merely confirming a DNA match, then the small chance of a false positive remains small - you're only comparing against one candidate. But if you do a population-wide search, then that chance of finding false positive multiplies [0] across the whole population! So even with good intentions, you've invented a process that picks random people out of society and harasses them (at best, with the way justice systems actually work this would lead to false convictions).

sonrics1611 2mo ago

Subhuman zog

ExoticPearTree 2mo ago

In some countries, when you go to work there they take full fingerprints (fingers, palm, etc.) plus a blood sample for DNA. Works extremely well in deterring crime. From a technology perspective, it is really not that hard to keep all this on an air-gapped network and just run comparisons against it "offline" and get a result back with all the info you need when there is a match.

cyanydeez 2mo ago

so, ultimately, it doesn't matter what the technology, the operative word is always "trusted government" and there isn't like, a replacement to "trusted government"; people who trust fascists will of course tell you they have a "Trusted government". So it all really just comes back to implementing governance that has the correct leverage on power. America is definitely not that, and this will be abused in all manners if america continues down fascism. Of course there's always things we just shouldn't store, like logs of password hashes or whatever, but most of reality hinged on "trusted government"