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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: 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.