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U.S. to Collect DNA of All Undocumented Migrants:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing a plan to take DNA samples from each of the undocumented immigrants and store it in a national database for criminal DNA profiles, they said.
Speaking to journalists on grounds of anonymity, DHS officials said the new policy would give immigration and border control agents a broader picture of the migrant and detainee situation.
And stored on the FBI's CODIS DNA database, it could also be used by others in law enforcement and beyond.
[...] Officials said they were in fact required to take the DNA samples by rules about the handling of arrested and convicted people that were issued by the Justice Department in 2006 and 2010, but which had not been implemented.
They said the program for collecting DNA was still being developed, and they did not have a date set for implementation.
Collecting and storing the DNA of people simply detained and not tried or convicted of a crime has drawn criticism from civil rights advocates.
"Forced DNA collection raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns and lacks justification, especially when DHS is already using less intrusive identification methods like fingerprinting," Vera Eidelman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
"This kind of mass collection also alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation to population surveillance, which is contrary to our basic notions of freedom and autonomy," Eidelman said.
If it becomes okay to do this to "them", how long will it take before they want to do it to "us"?
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 03 2019, @05:07PM (11 children)
Nah, I meant before 1776 there was no US. In 1775 they were British slave owners. Once we took governance in our own hands, we got rid of slavery pretty damned quickly compared to most anyone else.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday October 03 2019, @05:16PM (4 children)
Well then you're being obtuse. In absolute terms (i.e. year of emancipation), we got rid of it slower than the obvious comparison states. You're just making a silly argument based on when we had a revolution, despite knowing full well that the institution of slavery was around before and after that date. It's not like your record of horrors gets erased the moment you raise a new flag, the institutions that became the new government were pieces of the old one before it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 03 2019, @05:28PM (3 children)
No, I'm saying you can't hang anything from before the US existed on the US. We had no say in our governance and cannot be held accountable for for it prior to 1776. If you want to hang the pre-revolution slavery on anyone, you have no choice but to hang it on Britain.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Touché) by dry on Friday October 04 2019, @01:48AM (2 children)
You had quite a bit of self-governance before 1776, which is why you had legal things that were illegal in the mother country. You guys just got pissed at the King saying everyone was equal, including Jesuits and Natives, and no, you couldn't steal the natives land or keep Catholics out of office so you revolted for the freedom to repress others and have done a good job of it for close to 250 years.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday October 06 2019, @04:09AM (1 child)
Wow, that was some quality ignorance there. Or was it willful denial of reality?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday October 06 2019, @04:39AM
Do you even know what the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was?
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday October 04 2019, @01:44AM (5 children)
Actually, it was some British colonies that had legal slavery due to Great Britain allowing some self-government. Slavery was illegal in England and Great Britain. So it was the American colonists who decided slavery was legal, I believe by doing an end run around the thing about being put into servitude for X years as a punishment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04 2019, @01:53AM (1 child)
Get it through your skull: the colonists were people straight from Britain living under British law.
No USA yet.
(Score: 3, Touché) by dry on Friday October 04 2019, @02:23AM
They were colonists from several nations, eg New York was originally Dutch and they all had legislatures. A couple of links if you'd like to educate yourself,
https://www.thoughtco.com/colonial-governments-of-the-thirteen-colonies-104595 [thoughtco.com]
And from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_government_in_the_Thirteen_Colonies [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday October 06 2019, @04:12AM (2 children)
Sorry, no. It didn't become illegal in Britain until 1807. Prior to that Britain was the largest slave trading nation in the world.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday October 06 2019, @04:43AM (1 child)
Slave trading nation, true. Legal in Great Britain, very questionable due to this thing called Habeas corpus. Sorta like how America can do things out of country that would be illegal in country. It's even commonly argued that the Bill of Rights only apply to American citizens.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday October 06 2019, @06:17AM
Dude, I get that Brits don't like being the primary asshats in the historical African slave trade but they absolutely were. They brought slavery to the colonies and they sold the slaves to the colonies. For hundreds of years they treated Africans worse than cattle. That it took us 89 years to get rid of it after giving them the boot is both impressive in its historical brevity and atrocious in that we didn't do it immediately. It does not remotely mitigate anything they did nor does it make us even close to their level of bastardry though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.