>> The loophole, which a source demonstrated for The Intercept, allows genealogists working with police to manipulate search fields within a DNA comparison tool to trick the system into showing opted-out profiles. In records of communications reviewed by The Intercept, Moore and two other forensic genetic genealogists discussed the loophole and how to trigger it. In a separate communication, one of the genealogists described hiding the fact that her organization had made an identification using an opted-out profile. <<
The fact you have to trick the system to do something should give pause then and there that maybe what you are doing is not the expected behavior. By deliberately doing something like this acknowledges the user is aware of the behavior and is okay with doing it anyways. This should be used in determining level of "guilt" or curiosity getting the cat.
> The fact you have to trick the system to do something should give pause
This sort of Exceeding Access isn't being used to violate copyright or expose Gov wrongdoing. There is zero politician outrage over it, purchased or otherwise.
I'm surprised that evidence gathered through this method can't be thrown out in court. The customer that provided the DNA did not give consent to sharing the data, and the company holding the data did not give consent to share it with law enforcement (would be entertaining if the act of exploiting a security hole in the search form could be a CFAA violation on top of that).
Of course, this doesn't stop parallel construction; once they find their likely suspects through the illegally-obtained genetic search, they can likely often construct a case without even mentioning the genetic tracing.
Actually, I've never really understood the reason behind this.
Surely, it doesn't really matter WHY you suspected somebody in the first place. If there's enough other evidence to show irrefutably that they committed the crime, there shouldn't be a huge difference between the first tip coming from some random guy phoning the cops and saying "there's a dodgy looking guy here" or getting a random match from a DNA database?
I can see the intent behind probable cause for e.g. traffic stops, because that is designed to stop prejudiced-based harassment. But if there is an extremely close DNA-match found randomly, that search hasn't caused any harm to anyone, and should be a perfectly good reason to investigate someone a little more thoroughly. Maybe it should be disclosed in the case, e.g. "we became suspicious because of the DNA matching, and further investigation showed the victim's blood all over his house, clothes, and the murder weapon that he'd put back in his tool rack" should be a slam dunk conviction not grounds for letting someone go on a technicality because e.g. there wasn't a nosy neighbour who'd reported them for being too noisy or whatever.
Using the interface in unintended (by the creators) ways is a prosecutable crime under the CFAA. People can be and have been imprisoned for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#Trial is a notable example.
They were imprisoned because there was political/economic will to throw book at them.
It's only illegal if you get caught and there is someone willing to prosecute(and sentence) you.
I have the same aversion to government power built into my bones but I can’t think of a concrete way the government would be able to abuse this capability to assert power over me.
Or they could bust a place where religious services were held in secret, or an apartment where gay people gather to socialize, or an underground abortion clinic, suck up the DNA and get warrants for everybody.
> It will be harder to get away with crimes if everyone's DNA is on file.
A core problem with any surveillance is that it is disproportional and only available to the powerful. If access to surveillance were as universal as possible, powerful interests would suddenly find the will to wind it back.
You can conjure many insane possibilities in a future unknown.
DNA could be tested for traits that are "more likely to cause criminality". People with those traits can be more heavily scrutinized and surveiled. Or have their employment opportunities limited.
DNA could be multiplied and planted as evidence.
DNA could be cloned, or used in scientific testing without consent.
DNA could be used for targeted biological warfare.
People leave traces of DNA everywhere they go. Who knows what type of detection mechanisms will exist in the future?
There's also the very likely scenario that a central database like this becomes a prime target and leaks. It's borderline guaranteed.
While racism is definitely a thing today, it seem to be dying. Slowly, but the trend is certain: modern society is way less racist than it was, say, a century ago (or worse, a few centuries ago). People stop caring about ethnic origins. The care about cultures and nationalities those days (notice how even the meaning of "racism" had shifted to account for this), and those are rapidly becoming less and less correlated with genetics.
While people won't stop being xenophobic (unless, idk, some miracle or catastrophe happens), in the modern world, when it comes to identity, genes are rapidly losing battle to memes.
Most sci-fi stories involving human cloning that cover legal aspects seem to predict that laws will be updated to account for a possibility that crime was performed by a clone. Laws tend to lag behind technologies, but not too drastically.
It's also much cheaper to just fabricate evidence (cf. XKCD #538 aka $5 wrench vs security). Worked well since time immemorial, and doesn't leave a clone.
> DNA could be tested for traits that are "more likely to cause criminality". People with those traits can be more heavily scrutinized and surveiled. Or have their employment opportunities limited.
I don't think you need to consider other possibilities, this is a good enough example. And unfortunately it is not insane in the sense of paranoid, because this is what Nazis would be doing with it. Or NK jailing entire families for one member's crimes but basing it on DNA matches.
TL;DR - Pasco County in Florida was using "predictive policing", where based on various statistics, they would predict who would commit crimes and harass the ever-loving shit out of them until they moved out of the county.
> DNA could be used for targeted biological warfare.
I'm no biologist, but I've heard that ethnic bioweapons (in a way portrayed in science fiction or conspiracy theories) are basically a myth and/or convenient propaganda fuel.
Read The White Plague by Frank Herbert. Scared the heck out of me as a teen. Considering how humanity still hasn't escaped tribalism even after two hundred millennia, just the thought of genealogically targeted viruses are a wonderful thought.
I'm far from a biologist as well but we're talking about an unknown future. We're entering an era of personalized medicine. Maybe you can't target an ethnic group but you could target a specific person. You could theoretically poison the water in a whole city to target one person. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But in 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?
Remember that you shed cells everywhere you go, so soon the tech will be advanced enough where we can do nearly real-time DNA matching. If you sneeze, a sniffer could pick that up and figure out who you are.
Imagine a camera that films not things that are visible, but people who were there, at that protest, in that store, in that hospital, boarding that plane. It's practically irrefutable (or currently legally is, even though it's inherently flawed.)
And you can never change that identifier. Once that data is out, it's out.
The last headline in that article, "Solving Crime Before It Happens" could have easily been entitled "Minority Report" (another great sci-fi movie that's not so fictitious anymore.)
The thing that broke my brain about Minority Report is, that after stopping the murder, they could have just let the people go a few days later. The person would know they couldn't get away with the crime and then wander off to take up pottery or whatever. Instead they Haloed them all for no good reason. No victim to seek retribution and no reason to restrain them any more.
At the same time, when you look at real life justice systems through the same lens we look at Gattaca and Minority Report it looks even more bizarre. We are pretty much running criminal training camps almost designed to make people more criminal, and then after they get out of the camps we structure our society to almost force them back into crime to survive. It's bonkers.
If you are called the 'Justice' system you are out of a job when there's no longer a need to implement 'Justice' because you solved the issue higher up the food chain. Why would they put themselves out of work?
Politicians don’t get votes for reducing crime, they get votes for being tough on crime. Building out ever larger repression systems instead of investing in prevention and rehabilitation is the better political strategy.
It seems bonkers, until you realize that that person who gets 5 years in prison for his 4th petty shoplifting offense is generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of checks being written to people who work within and who are contractors for the justice system. And on the streets, fighting crime is another place where massive checks are written in order to protect the public from small-time street and property crime.
If people are robbing other people for $100, especially in 2023 dollars, that's too stupid to be a failure of society, that has to be because small-time crime is a resource for a lot of justice system-connected industries, and as long as maintaining the level of it doesn't pit those industries against real estate interests, they can lobby for crime.
I think there are really three kinds of crime:
1) Crimes of need, where people need to feed themselves or their loved ones, so resort to crime because they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom,
2) Crimes of stupidity, where people just don't understand how unlikely they are to get away with something, or how bad the punishment could be, so they undervalue the cost of undertaking those crimes for the benefit they stand to gain, and
3) Crimes of compulsion, where people have enough, and mostly understand the costs and the benefits, yet risk their lives and freedom for more for some irrational reason; degenerate gamblers.
We can prevent all crimes of need immediately and easily. It's more difficult to prevent crimes of stupidity, but pouring education into everyone is the answer. It's idiopathic crimes of compulsion that are hard to deal with, because people have wildly different reasons for their compulsions.
As a society, we pour all of our efforts into crimes of compulsion, the only kind of crime that we're virtually guaranteed to be ineffective at stopping, and bad at controlling. Where the discussions between political factions are about whether we should kill them, give them therapy, drug them, corral them far away from people, let you look them up on a website after they're free, refuse them work, let them vote, etc., in the context of assuming that the vast majority of crime has unique causes and solutions. To assume that, we have to ignore that people are still sticking other people up for $100.
I would like to propose a fourth category. Crimes of perceived justice. Crimes committed to right perceived wrongs and balance personal justice against public justice.
Stuff like: Stealing from your employer because you believe they are treating you unfairly, keying someone's car because they cheated on you, trashing an apartment when the landlord evicts you, not paying a fine that you think is unfair, doing drugs because the law is stupid, etc...
They can derive health data from your DNA. Say if we finally move to "single payer health care"... but this is america so you get a tax penalty for being more prone to illness.
Now imagine they have the wrong DNA on file for you!
There could be various forms of discrimination by the government or private entities based on genetic characteristics. For instance, you could be denied health insurance or required to undergo a therapy or treatment based on genetic traits. If a government was to become more abusive, they could practice some form of eugenics such as forced sterilization.
> undergo a therapy or treatment based on genetic traits
Person X has a genetic predisposition that results in anger control issues in 87% of people, so they must subscribe to weekly anger management counselling or they'll be denied access to public areas such as malls and schools. The government certified and licensed suppliers are A, B, C.
Imagine the profits of legally compelling people to buy your stuff. History shows there would be a long lineup of people eager to exploit something like that.
I think in such a system, the people would rightfully target the law as the enemy and ramp things up until enforcing the law becomes too dangerous to attempt.
Too late. There's too much surveillance - how would you even discuss it with each other? The first thing they're going to do is target your phone and computers. Expect terrorism charges.
How long until LLMs and friends are capable of producing life-like video evidence suiting any facts for any case? The credibility of a recording is already tenuous. It's only going to get worse. You can have all the footage in the world, but if it's considered compromised or bunk, what then?
87% is a huge number. If person X has that genetic predisposition then what's wrong with that rule? If as a society you allow the government to impose 'weekly counselling' on people for some reasons, then you open it up to being imposed on people for other reasons too.
I don't think the government should be imposing anger management counselling on people in the first place. That has nothing to do with concern about DNA, and everything to do with concern about the government being able to tell me what to do when I've not been convicted of a crime.
> If person X has that genetic predisposition then what's wrong with that rule?
A lot of it would be based on junk science and the low rate of offenders, because the diagnosis is bullshit, would be touted as evidence of the value the program is providing.
So the problem is basing policy on junk science. Is basing policy on junk science okay in some fields, but suddenly bad when it applied to genetics? Of course not.
What if it's not based on junk science, but on good science?
Maybe guilt by association? Imagine going into a business, having some DNA based system identify you, and being denied entry because the majority of your relatives are criminals.
Realistically, I'd say the opposite will happen though. Being related to someone wealthy or influential will automatically get you special treatment and you won't even have to ask "do you know who I am?"
> but I can’t think of a concrete way the government would be able to abuse this capability to assert power over me
I think the war on drugs in the US is a pretty good example. If I say it was used to marginalized and disenfranchise one specific group of people, everyone knows what group I'm talking about, so, IMO, that's a good indication it was intentionally targeted at that group.
Now imagine the same thing, but you're in the targeted group and, instead of having the police roaming your neighbourhood, you're simply locked out of all the "opt-in" systems that are necessary to have a decent life; banking, real-estate, licensing, etc.. Maybe you're even prevented from shopping at stores that have reasonable prices and have to overpay for food because you're a "bad person".
Opting in to beneficial systems, with less beneficial defaults, is the new way of discriminating IMO.
Right now, the most likely outcome is that you will get convicted of a crime somebody else did because you "won" the lottery of being the false positive on the database.
I hate to go Godwin but within living memory we have an example of what governments do if they have (or think they have) information on your heritage or genetic background.
Or go back a few more generations, even here in the USA you might legally have been declared to be 3/5 of a person.
You think people have really changed since then? I don't.
Lack of a detailed census in your country was indisputably protective for Jews during the Holocaust. Plenty of people only discovered themselves that they had matrilineal Jewish descent during the Holocaust, because the Nazis had all those punchcards.
>Or go back a few more generations, even here in the USA you might legally have been declared to be 3/5 of a person.
Oh my god can we stop this absurd meme. Nobody was ever 'declared to be 3/5 of a person'. The point of the 3/5 compromise was to reduce the power of states with slaves. It was purely about counting the population of the state for the purpose of assigning seats in Congress. To suggest that it was racist to multiply the number of slaves by 0.6 before adding them to the non-slave population is truly insane. If it had been 1.0 then it would have given slave-owners more political power.
If you are born in an area that later hosts a separatist movement, you can be denied freedom of movement using a saliva swab. I believe the mostly likely abuse is to erode support for political factions.
not quite needed. People already volunteer this information. It only takes one relative to identify with reasonable certainty who you are based on a random blood sample because of this.
The problem is that it is not just used for running tests to see if the child is healthy.
From the article
>But while the state may not be making money off your child's DNA, Lorey admitted that there is the potential for outside researchers to profit off your child's genetic material.
And
>Law enforcement also can — and does — request identified blood spots. We found at least five search warrants and four court orders, including one to test a child's blood for drugs at birth.
That's my point. I just assumed DNA samples were being taken as well. Generously, I'd assume part of that was some sort of paternity testing since Maury Povich isn't on the air any longer.
Barely event matters, if your great aunt sends her DNA to some online heritage service, the game is basically over. Unfortunately, like it or not, your DNA isn't yours.
Perhaps not in the current legal climate, but those can be changed. Since DNA is the source code to your body, I think we're in for some interesting times. It can be argued that your DNA is a part of you, since it made you, and it can be made illegal to gather or even sequence our DNA unless certain thresholds are crossed.
Like it or not, politics is not a singular immutable thing. We can reframe things, just as governments do to justify their garbage. Society is but putty, and we can mold it to our liking, or sit quietly like livestock and await government to decide what we're allowed to think and feel.
Even if we change it today, wouldn't all of the docile little sheep that used ancestry.com or 23andMe type sites provide such a baseline that for generations future humans could be traced back. Supposedly, they can track back a very large portion of the population to Genghis Khan
It seems that the point which parent post wanted to make with "your DNA is not really yours" is that matching your DNA does not really need your DNA, as the DNA of your relatives (e.g. that aunt which opted-in to some genetic testing) is sufficient - your DNA isn't really yours because all your blood relatives share big parts of it, so their consent to use their DNA effectively provides most of your DNA as well.
> Unfortunately, like it or not, your DNA isn't yours.
The current trends seem to go against this, saying that even things like image, voice, or memories about us are all somehow private even in a public setting, and cannot be used without a permission of their owner. DNA is essentially in the same category - even more so, we leave it just about everywhere, yet most people think about it as something extremely intimate, much more so than a picture from a public venue (where opinions sort of diverge).
And whenever I agree on disagree, I can totally understand why this is happening and why the current trends are like this. It's basically a reaction of the society trying to protect itself from abuse by the entities of similar (large) scale.
All this stuff is basically a (relatively) new dilemma of the information age, where we've gained an ability to store, analyze and transfer large arrays of data efficiently. Paired with technologies (such as cameras or sequencers) becoming more affordable to deploy at scale.
Sadly, consumer technologies (empowering "normal" people) drastically lag behind business and government tech, so before your casual Joe ever gets a chance to have some meaningful (and not really privacy-breaking; although there's rarely an incentive to develop tech that doesn't break this) use cases, large corporations and governments ruin everything.
Samples are taken from inside the cheek, maybe when head transplants are more common, but even then you'd need the donor to have committed the crime, left their DNA via saliva, eyelash or such, then died, you receive the head transplant, then get collared for the crime.
All without pointing out anywhere that it's a head transplant and could they use a different source of DNA sample.
> It's always been a bit disturbing that there is no accounting for your tissue or organs after they're removed.
The hospital definitely has an accounting for them. Typically tissue or organs removed are sent to pathology, where they may be further tested and/or sold for research, data or other purposes. It's a dirty secret that hospitals make a ton of money off of parts of your body that they cut out.
> They'll just pull your foreskin out of cold storage.
It's fucked up how normalized circumcision is. Apparently some hospitals do it without even asking. Imagine your son's penis being mutilated so some person can have child-sacrfice skin cream.
More and more, the governments of the world try to erode the status of the lone, average human, for they think their efforts will protect countries and governments.
Fear has been the primary motivator in the world of government ever since 9/11. America is so scared of itself it has turned inward, against itself. She's willing to forget about the 4th Amendment, the 13th Amendment, and even her own founding document, as long as they get a little more data they can abuse on their own citizens.
At what point do we accuse the government of treason? None of this invasion of privacy was part of the deal, and Americans stand to gain nothing from these false assertions of privacy and opting out.
Our government is betraying us and the dominant ideology is to lay down and take it. This country will never improve until we can fight back against surveillance. They couldn't keep us safe during 9/11, and none of their desperate "security" efforts have protected us.
Again I ask, when do we accuse the government of betraying us and the social contract?
One of the issues that has emerged is a strange fixation (which the Anti-Federalists warned of) on the Bill of Rights as the source of these rights. But the Bill of Rights is merely a non-exhaustive index, not a grantor, of our natural rights. These rights do not depend on a document, they exist regardless.
It's frustrating because unless it's written in stone Americans won't even pretend to agree on it, we're a very chaotic culture that craves the predictability of rules and laws (unless they impact me specifically). There's no concept in American society of a universal ethical standard at even the most fundamental level, probably stemming from how much inequality exists.
I think the reason for this is because natural law assumes individual responsibility, and things have gotten far too comfy for most people to want that. So they outsource it to text and there are many experts at manipulating text.
Do you have some alternative in mind? If you don't communicate an idea, you don't even have the chance to agree on it because many people may not even consider it.
I really fail to imagine how a society can arrive at a universal ethical standard without writing a couple ideas down here and there. You're asking for a utopian society of mind readers, which hits me as just a touch unreasonable.
I'm not convinced a society can arrive at a universal ethical standard, period.
I was about to say, "we can at least agree that murder is bad", but I'm not sure that's even the case, given that it seems like some people would think it's ok to murder their political opponents if given the chance.
The standard used to be the concept of Imago Dei. Regardless of one’s individual beliefs it sets up an axiomatic basis for the worth of every individual and balancing that with the needs of a society.
> There's no concept in American society of a universal ethical standard at even the most fundamental level
When I grew up, which was not long ago, we viewed America as that curiously Christian country of the West. Everyone else was very secular, but those American? They're all Christians, they're crazily religious.
Maybe this has become less true over the last decade or so, but I think that you'll find that the percentage of Americans that describe themselves as Christian is still very high. It seems that there is a pretty universal ethical standard at the most fundamental level. It just turns out that, like all things in life, people disagree about how to translate broad, abstract moral claims into concrete policies. You might agree on a 'separation of church and state' or 'free speech' but that doesn't mean you agree on what that means in practice. Does it mean that public officials shouldn't be allowed to display religious symbols, like it does in France? Does it mean that Islamic headscarves on women and crucifix necklaces are banned in schools? Does the UK have separate religion and state? Certainly its political process is less influenced by religious voting blocs than America's. But its head of state is Supreme Governor of the Church of England. These things are complicated.
> These rights do not depend on a document, they exist regardless.
Damn straight!
One approach I’ve tried in the past is to explain that the people start with all rights, the government starts with zero privileges, and the explicit examples codified in the Constitution are simply bare minimum examples of lines that shall never be crossed.
The militia prefatory clause of the 2nd amendment is a great example of this as explained by Scalia in Heller. It’s not that that the right to bear arms is solely for members of a militia. It’s simply one example of how the individual freedom (that innately exists!) may be exercised.
That's meaningless. 'Rights' are a legal concept. They exist in law, nowhere else. You cannot just assert that they 'exist'. Where do they exist? Where are they enumerated? Who decides what is and isn't a 'right'? If I say I have a right, is that determinative? Is it based on what people thought in the 18th century, or what we think today? Much of what we think today is influenced by how people have interpreted those documents, so basing it on people's views today means it's essentially circular.
People assert they have all sorts of rights all the time. Most of them conflict with other rights that other people assert exist, and even other rights that they themselves assert exist. What do we do about this?
I actually think 'rights' legislation is pretty stupid. It's a lot easier to write an Act that says 'Every one has the right to a free, public and comprehensive secular education' than it is to write an Act that provides a free, public and comprehensive secular education system. The latter requires sorting out what all of those things actually mean in practice. What level of education do you provide for free? What level of choice do people have about their children's education, vs the view that as a society we should protect children from the 'bad' decisions of their parents? That also means protecting them from their parents' good decisions. Are we okay with that? What does it mean for education to be secular. Are they allowed to learn about religion? Are they allowed to close the school at lunchtime and teach religion in the afternoon, unofficially, as often happens? Concrete systems are much more important and much more effective than any abstract statement of 'rights'.
Say what you want about the second, the fastest growing groups to embrace it are black communities and the LGBTQ community and they as a whole take it fast more seriously, borderline professionally, than any other group I've ever seen. I used to be a skeptic but seeing that has really been eye opening.
[...] But O good Lord! What strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give to it? What is the
nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or, rather, what degradation? To see an endless multitude
of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility? Not ruled, but tyrannized over? These wretches
have no wealth, no kin, nor wife nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own. They
suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of
whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man; not from a Hercules
nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most
cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands
of the tournament; not only without energy to direct men by force, but with hardly enough virility to
bed with a common woman! Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? Shall we say that
those who serve him are cowardly and faint-hearted? If two, if three, if four, do not defend
themselves from the one, we might call that circumstance surprising but nevertheless conceivable. In
such a case one might be justified in suspecting a lack of courage. But if a hundred, if a thousand
endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the
desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice?
When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men,
refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom
and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? Of course there is in every vice inevitably some
limit beyond which one cannot go. Two, possibly ten, may fear one; but when a thousand, a million
men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be
called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth, any more than valor can be termed the
effort of one individual to scale a fortress, to attack an army, or to conquer a kingdom. What
monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no
term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name? [...]
–Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)
That was an interesting read! I relate to that very much, thanks for sharing. We read all about the rise and fall of governments, of political goals, of cultures... and yes, there is a certain moral failing or disconnected apathy that allows the greedy and sociopathic to prey upon their own kind. It's rather depressing to think of so many people convinced they can do nothing, by a group of people who is so scared of their people they sign deals with businesses behind closed doors.
I'm convinced many of our "leaders" could not argue their positions adequately if they were forced to defend them. I remember reading about events like the Million Man March on Washington DC, and I wonder how America would handle a massive, peaceful demonstration communicating the general discontent of the citizen with this potentially great country.
It seems there was a period in American history where the common man COULD and DID stand up for their countrymen, for the health and endurance of the entire country instead of a handful of rich fucks. Why do we not see these shows of solidarity in the modern age? I ask mostly rhetorically but the America of today looks and feels characteristically different from what it sells itself as or even who it was a mere 50 years ago.
> Why do we not see these shows of solidarity in the modern age?
When did you last sit down and have dinner with your next-door neighbor? Discuss the local happenings and politics of the neighborhood in person?
You might be able to answer that question in the affirmative. But many more don't. We're too busy isolating ourselves from one another to grow any form of culture from which organized efforts would spring.
Great point, the feeling of community has slowly faded from many parts of the country. Not all, of course. Hard to do it completely. But the loss of "third places" -- places you can exist with others in a non-vocational or business context -- is probably a big part of it.
Many places still sort of exist through stuff like farmer's markets, some clubs, libraries, swap meets, etc, but they seem less generalized for socializing.
I haven't met with my neighbors or sat down to chat with them. It does feel kind of alien and, dare I say it, rude to intrude on someone's life that way. Maybe it's not really an intrusion, and an atmosphere of fear and distrust has trained us to separate. I remember my parents meeting people and scheduling times to hang out all the time. Children from different families would mingle while the adults mingled, everyone got some dose of community.
I couldn't tell you where programming hobbyists meet up in my area. I might have to go up to Tacoma before I find any no-or-low-cost hacker groups. But, don't many communities also have common places they go routinely? I'm thinking gaming and TTRPG, TCG shops might be a good start to build a third place, despite being a business themselves.
> If two, if three, if four, do not defend themselves from the one [...] Two, possibly ten, may fear one; but when a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man
I get that the author is trying to motivate people, but logically that's a straw-man: Nobody actually thinks that the average individual Dirt-Farmer-Guy is being oppressed solely because they're terrified of Shiny-Hat-Guy's bulging biceps (2) and shouty voice (1).
No, each Dirt-Farmer's decision-making comes from a fear of very large numbers of violent angry men or institutions capable of destroying them financially and socially, fears which are often entirely justified.
If things were truly as straightforward as Étienne is suggesting, he wouldn't need to write about it: He could walk up to any random dude and say: "Hey, you're getting screwed, with two of us we could kick the Shiny-Hat-Guy's ass". And they'd do it, since every single person they'd meet would automatically join the mob or at least stand aside.
this is a partisan topic, since +1 million adults in the USA are actively enrolled and paid by the systems that demand identification at each step, most wear a uniform, and their employers are entrenched in the political process.
high-minded words plus the air used to say them, equals what? in reality I mean, not on chat boards
Not an american, but the EU/UK are following the same trend.
What is the proposed alternative? As we can see there are bad actors in our society that pose a higher risk than ever before, and their tools are ever more sophisticated.
Are these bad actors actually that big of a threat, though? And are they really that smart/sophisticated that they can elude more standard, "old school" investigative methods?
The problem is that we just don't know, and law enforcement agencies aren't giving us a detailed breakdown of which plots were foiled (or at least successfully prosecuted after the fact) via privacy-invading means vs. old-fashioned police work. Of course they'll never give us this data; we probably don't even hear about most investigations, even after the fact.
Just trust them? No thanks. They are very publicly incompetent in many ways (e.g. all airline "security" procedures developed post-9/11 -- except for locking and armoring cockpit doors -- seems pointless, and don't catch people during sanctioned penetration testing), and I don't see why they deserve any blind trust here.
We don't know if this sort of dragnet genetic database trawling will broadly close cases. Sure, it worked with the Golden State Killer, when no other methods seem to have worked. But that's just a single data point. And I'd rather that the occasional -- very occasional, as it turns out -- serial killer goes free, rather than live in a police state with no privacy.
This is a meandering way for me to say: we on the outside cannot propose alternatives, because we have scant data and little understanding of what works and what doesn't. And the people in power consider it a feature that we don't have access to this information.
Oh believe me they are. Even back when the london olympics took place people were quietly muttering about the risk of terrorist attacks. To be fair the UK/MI6 are doing one hell of a job at keeping people safe, but the risk is massive. If the US wouldn't be as paranoid as it is believe me it would be worse. I am not justying the level of government oversight, I am genuinely curious what the alternatives are.
"I would rather have one serial killer get away with it" would make for a hell of a sound-bite for your opponent in an election campaign.
Honestly this issue was already decided. No new arguments have been presented. I'm old enough to remember it.
One side talks about hypotheticals and constitutional principles. The other side holds up a photo of some poor murdered child. Can't win this one.
That's the most annoying part. They have literally every other tool and technology and scientific equipment/personnel to find out (sometimes even parallel construct) whatever they need for a case, why do they need to have access to ALL your private data and thoughts? How did thry ever solve a crime before the mass proliferation of all the data-rich personal tech we have today?
> Again I ask, when do we accuse the government of betraying us and the social contract?
"Ah, it's simple. It's the fault of this government, but when my party gets finally voted in, things will change."
And so the circle of the naivety perpetuates. We might hope for a better future only when citizens will realise that both sides are exactly the same, and that they've been lied to since we invented the career politician. Apparently 4 years is how long it takes people to forget whatever bullshit they were sold last time.
Both-sidesism? This goes beyond political party. Creating parties was where we fucked up. First-past-the-post almost ensured that our elections would end up becoming team sports, at that point.
I'd be much more trusting of democracy or even representative democracy if the demos had a real say -- We should be voting on issues more than we do people. People can betray trust or twist a vote's meaning. Most of politics, as practiced, is sleight of hand and misleading people. If we vote on issues and then also vote on people whose leadership we trust to execute said issue conclusion, we'd get much closer to something representing the will of the people while also guarding against populist BS. That is the supposed goal of representative democracies, and yet in practice it's bread, circuses, and zero accountability from the top. Losing an election is not a replacement for consequences or taking responsibility for defying the will of your constituents.
But, you can't sell that as a sport to people and foment tribal thoughts as easily, so that's no good. /s
> you can't sell that as a sport to people and foment tribal thoughts as easily
Panem et circenses. My niche theory on why we've become so politicised, is because it's become entertainment. Trash reality TV.
Today the circenses are not the gladiators fighting for their lives, but the Orange Man vs Old Geezer sitcom on dinner time TV and in the front page of your newspapers. One will find there is little difference between the trashy TV fan and the person avidly following political debates.
Meanwhile those reality stars keep stealing and making their friends richer, disregarding any laws because they're the ones making them.
> I'd be much more trusting of democracy or even representative democracy if the demos had a real say
The Swiss do a much better job of this! There the people can petition for a referendum to add or delete any law or amend the constitution. They can do this at the municipal, canton (state) or federal level. The result is that politicians know that they need to negotiate with motivated minorities. The people have a veto over the politicians.
> Again I ask, when do we accuse the government of betraying us and the social contract?
With kindness, I offer that voting for officials who've expanded surveillance isn't in harmony with the above sentiment. Neither is us failing to speak out to news orgs that are rarely willing to elevate surveillance abuses over far less important content.
I think about this question a lot. So much of our philosophy of government is about some nebulous "contract", as if we agreed to be governed. Sometimes you'll be asked, "Do you believe in the rule of law?" Why would one need to believe in it? Is it a religion? (I think it is one, personally) Government sometimes likes to claim a "monopoly" on violence as well. One generally cannot trade or purchase violence per se, so to act like it's a market, or that a government has any truly effective means of preventing the choice to commit violence, is silly to me. Police are typically late to the scene of a crime, after all, and even with their monopoly are terrible at de-escalation or deterring.
I think the social contract is different in every society, and changes based on the makeup of the groups. It's an amorphous thing that is always referenced, but never spelled out. It irks me that it gets referred to sometimes, but I think if we have them, they should be bidirectional and mutually beneficial.
In general, I think a government who expects something but doesn't offer anything in return is merely tyrannical. If we're going to go on with these fantasies of contracts without signatures and choices without markets, then the least that can be done is for a government to act in good faith that they are protecting or improving the lives of those they gave themselves permission to rule over.
As an American I do not see my "representatives" representing or helping me.
>I think about this question a lot. So much of our philosophy of government is about some nebulous "contract", as if we agreed to be governed.
I don't think this is actually true? Social contract theory is one of many, and has some pretty fundamental flaws. The theory isn't really a philosophy of government, either. It's a theory to explain the legitimacy of the state, and essentially answer the question: why do people follow the law? The idea is that people have consented to be governed. It probably made more sense back in the day that we were much less governed than we are now. You had the opportunity to go and live in the woods, essentially ungovernable. And people chose to stay part of society, tacitly agreeing to be governed in exchange for the benefits that come along with it. But there are obvious flaws in that idea. For one thing, minors follow the law and are expected to do so, but can't contract.
I think 'social contract' theory is weak.
>Government sometimes likes to claim a "monopoly" on violence as well. One generally cannot trade or purchase violence per se, so to act like it's a market, or that a government has any truly effective means of preventing the choice to commit violence, is silly to me. Police are typically late to the scene of a crime, after all, and even with their monopoly are terrible at de-escalation or deterring.
This is again not true. Governments don't "claim a monopoly on violence". States have been described by theorists as being characterised by their (implicit) claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. There are obvious flaws in that idea, like the legitimacy of self-defence. But it certainly has nothing to do with whether the government has "any truly effective means of preventing the choice to commit violence", because it's about legitimate use of force. The government can certainly pass laws that determine what is and isn't legitimate use of force.
You are, right now, in a we-gotta-do-something mindset. This is natural and understandable. You could revolt against the landlord back in the old days.
People don't understand how big has the world become. Because they can't. The scale of the current world is unintelligible. Economy, resources, war, geopolitics, politics. The way we live our lives is not under our control, it's not under anyone's control. The average person has no more freedom than an ant in his colony. An emergent collective mind rules the world, comprised of the technology and desires of the mankind. You can't predict the outcome of a certain quantum state, but in the grand scheme of things everything moves deterministically as per the laws of Newton.
> Fear has been the primary motivator in the world of government ever since 9/11.
Ah. I really don’t want to tell you what basis to build your private mythology on but fear as the primary motivator did not start with 9/11.
We feared the bear so we become the hunters and killed it. We feared the night so we made fire. We feared the others in the next valley so we sharpened our sticks.
We feared the flood so we built dams. We feared death so we invented delusions to placate ourselves.
Even if you somehow constrain yourself to the history of the US government, would you say the cold war was not driven by fear?
Perhaps it's better to call it another wave, or another style of fear. The point is that the events of 9/11 scared Americans enough to hand over their freedoms with the PATRIOT Act. The impact of surveillance everywhere in society has had an overall chilling effect on public discourse and activity. People act differently when they know they're being watched.
I'm reminded of Ben Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Before 9/11 we were told to fear the U.S.S.R., right up until the day they fell apart. Then there was global warming, crime, terrorists, immigrants, trans people, and who knows what next.
They always want to keep us afraid, it seems. It doesn't help that people in general are not good at qualifying risk.
The concept of a corporation and instutional society has died and we don't really want to admit it.
The government is the last leg standing.. otherwise it's just everyone out for themselves.
Rational thinking and debate is not leading the way, it's following. Getting the kind of verbal and rational agreements the baby boomers enjoyed, in today's system, is not happening.
It is trivially easy to release personalized media that pumps up the grief and isolates people even more, then offer political and commercial products as a salve.
We all pretend the primary cause is an great computing conspiracy, and we are being manipulated by our devices.
Primarily, people have changed and tech is capitalizing on a more emotional and feelings based populace, whilst it's leaders head for dry land and buy up farmland.
The popular Nietschze quote about the death of God and washing away infinite blood, doesn't go far enough. The conscious, alienated, knowledge of what should be and the subconscious social experience of grief - combined together - is absolutely deadly.
When something is known, it becomes easier to be controlled and manipulated. And soon the government, both the elected ones and the incorporated ones, will know everything about everyone.
That is, in fact, an optimistic position. Police are so ineffective at solving crimes that "easier" and "getting an edge" overstate the possibility of a publicly minded motivation to cheat.
i would go a step further, and insist that test results of evidentiary DNA be provided for defense discovery, before probative DNA [sample from accused] is even touched by an examiner from forensic services lab.
as is the only thing stopping probative DNA from ending up in the evidence lane is a promise not to abuse the opportunity, that also says nothing about "by mistake" occurances
Jesus what a shit show. What’s the point if the sites can change their ToS and flip opt-out to opt-in at whatever whimsy they do choose. Needs to be some kind of uniform privacy enforced.
I'm a genealogist. I discourage everyone I can from uploading their DNA. For DNA to be secure, there doesn't just need to be firm walls, they can't ever be breached for a moment - not now or a generation from now.
Holders of DNA can't be bought out or come under the control of leadership that doesn't fully grasp and exercise privacy safeguards. They can't allow laws to be bought or leveraged that will compromise their ability to safeguard it.
LEO's use of DNA is a surveillance method and powerful interests will always feel compelled to use it to hunt people they perceive are enemies. Whatever info we may get by uploading it can't possibly be worth the risk to our descendants and relations.
There is always that one asshole in your family that thinks they're clever by uploading their DNA to one of the ancestry services. By doing that they've leaked a fair bit of information about their relatives who never consented.
I have a dumb brother who I won’t talk to decides to be a shitty career criminal. They took his dna so I’m in the same boat as family uploading it. Not that I am worried about it being used for a crime but I worry in future people will be discriminated on by dna. Life insurance could be more expensive if they know you have a slight chance of x disease for examples.
If you have a higher chance of getting a disease, why wouldn't life insurance be more expensive? Life insurance will also be cheaper if you don't have that chance.
The point of insurance is to spread random risk around. Nobody complains that young women have cheaper car insurance than young men, or that young people have more expensive car insurance than older people, but cheaper health insurance. Young men are more likely to have car accidents, but less likely to have cancer. The point of insurance is not wealth redistribution or the spreading of systemic risk, but the spreading of random risk. (I mean this in the sense of 'systemic error' vs 'random error' that you will remember from high school physics.)
This directly leads to discrimination against disabled people among other groups.
For instance wheelchair bound people have a much lower average live expectancy. The lives of people who are (born) disabled or have some debilitating genetic disease don't need society to make their lives even harder.
> If you have a higher chance of getting a disease, why wouldn't life insurance be more expensive?
The answer to that is: Not spreading such risks evenly among everyone is morally reprehensible. Imagine your reward for living in constant pain and having a higher chance of dying early is society kicking you in the balls for the crime of being born like that.
No, we should not 'strive to eliminate' them. The entire point of insurance is that it is based on risk assessments that are as accurate as possible, using all the information that is available. It is not a wealth redistribution mechanism, but a randomness redistribution system. If you know that you have an illness, and don't tell your insurance company, then you're a fraudster. If you know you have a genetic predisposition to illness, that's no different.
Discrimination is not inherently a bad thing. There are specific lists of special reasons, and discrimination on those bases is considered bad and has widely been made unlawful. Usually, insurance is an exception! And it should be. I don't see why men should subsidise the health insurance of women or why women should subsidise the car insurance of men. I don't see why the young should subsidise the health insurance of the old. That's not the point of insurance.
You're pushing a very limited view of insurance, here. There are plenty of cases in the world where insurance is a "randomness redistribution system" across a whole population, where the lottery of genetics is also considered part of that randomness, avoiding building in discrimination.
Health insurance in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland, among others, cannot charge more for pre-existing conditions. If you include state-provided care, then health care in basically every EU country, as a core principle of the EU is that everyone has the right to timely access to affordable, preventive, and curative health care of good quality.
Also, it's law in many countries that you cannot discriminate against people on the basis of protected characteristics, no matter the mechanism or how unfair it may seem to those with privilege.
>No, we should not 'strive to eliminate' them. The entire point of insurance is that it is based on risk assessments that are as accurate as possible, using all the information that is available.
And we should change the law so that point of insurance is made illegal, and insurance companies can only use generic, broad, information about a person, not bend over so that they can maximize their profit margins and minimize their risks.
Seems like you're thinking of personal savings accounts. The whole point of insurance is that everyone subsidizes the poor souls who end up needing it. Understanding that the tables could easily be turned.
Insurance is about spreading unknown risk. If it is known that you have a higher risk of being paid out then you pay a higher premium. You are hedging against future bad luck (future in the sense of the point in time of the discovery of claimable damage, not when the damage actually occurred, of course).
I think you have been misled. It seems to me that all insurance is purchased to hedge against known risks. Risks like death, which comes for us all. Risks like forest fires, hurricanes, and many other regularly occurring natural disasters. Risks like unemployment which will effect nearly everyone at some point in their life. If the risks were unknown, no one would know that they should be buying insurance to hedge against them.
>against known risks. Risks like death, which comes for us all. Risks like forest fires, hurricanes, and many other regularly occurring natural disasters.
These are clearly not known risks. If you knew when you were going to die, you would not purchase life insurance, as the total premiums due by the date of your death would equal or exceed the insured amount.
If you knew a forest fire was bearing down on your house, you wouldn't be able to insure against it. And in many areas prone to forest fires, you cannot insure against them, because they are so likely to occur.
Hurricanes and flooding are similar: build on a floodplain and you will either pay exorbitant amounts for, or be unable to purchase, flooding insurance.
> Risks like unemployment which will effect nearly everyone at some point in their life
This is not true, and even if it were the risk you are hedging against is that it will happen to YOU at an unpredictable time.
That is obviously completely different from insuring yourself against a risk that has a higher chance of affecting you than the average person and expecting that risk not to be factored into your premiums.
> If the risks were unknown, no one would know that they should be buying insurance to hedge against them.
Do you just pattern match against words? Do you see "known risk" and just assume it means something I clearly did not mean and which makes absolutely no sense?
There's insurance from the point of "how we as an insurance company maximize profits" and insurance as "how we, as society, support a scheme to provide a net against various risks".
Societies have no reason to ensure insurance companies maximize their profits. In fact, briberry and lobbying aside, they have all the reason to regulate them for modest profits and wider spread safety net.
Thus health issues seen from DNA should be regulated to remain an unknown risk as far as insurance premiums go.
Except if somebody is more concerned about maximum insurance company profits, than for public health. In that case, can they suggest an Ayn Rand book for someone new to the author?
What does this even mean? Stop assuming everyone in the world thinks the same way you do and has the same pants-on-head-retarded hatred of insurance companies.
Guess what? Sane people in sane countries recognise that insurance isnt the best mechanism for accomplishing every social outcome. In fact, it is terrible at doing that for healthcare. So we dont use it that way. Instead, we do the sane thing of taxing people.
Instead you insane parochial exceptionalists think "hurr durr ill force everyone to buy insurance and ban insurance from taking into account people's health, basically making it not insurance". Then it confuses stupid people like YOU into not knowing what the term means.
Please microwave your balls. You are too stupid to be allowed to reproduce.
Subsidizing others is the whole point of insurance. It is not about your individual contributions matching the money you'll might need on a disaster scenario. It's "making money by taking from many and only giving to some".
If it was about getting what you put in back, it would be a savings account.
No it isn't. Insurance is about spreading random risk - hedging against unknowns. It is not about redistributing risk from people that are at higher risk to people that are at lower risk.
You're trying really hard to redefine a bunch of words, yet the set of people you can meaningfully communicate with using your alternative language is small, so what is the point?
It's on you to lead your texts with a disclaimer of what various words mean to you if you're not using them as they're commonly understood.
What drugs are you on? If you pay a percentage of your income mandated by the government for some service then that is income tax. Insurance is a private contract with premiums based on actuarial assessment of risk. This is not some distinction I have come up with. It is what the words have always meant.
I am sorry that you have been misled to think insurance is some sort of government wealth redistribution program but that just isn't so.
They are probably mixing up the different kinds of state-organized social support (one being the unemployment insurance) with "real" insurance business like car accidents or legal responsibility or yeah also health.
> This directly leads to discrimination against disabled people among other groups.
Yes, of course if someone has a disability that puts them at a higher risk of some event, and they want to insure themselves against that event, they'd pay higher insurance premiums. That's like, the entire point of insurance.
If you live in an area that is prone to flooding, then you either can't insure yourself against flood damage or the insurance premiums are a lot more expensive than someone living in a desert. If you smoke, your health insurance and life insurance premiums are higher. If you have type 1 diabetes, you will probably struggle to get any meaningful amount of life insurance.
What alternative are you proposing? That anyone purchasing insurance will automatically be expected to subsidise the insurance premiums of people that are at higher risk? That's not what insurance is for. If you want to redistribute wealth from people without disabilities to people with disabilities, then you can do that using taxes. But not by pretending there's anything wrong with honest risk assessment in insurance.
>The answer to that is: Not spreading such risks evenly among everyone is morally reprehensible. Imagine your reward for living in constant pain and having a higher chance of dying early is society kicking you in the balls for the crime of being born like that.
Nobody is being 'kicked in the balls'. Stop using such emotionally manipulative tactics and such charged language. Insurance is about spreading random risk. It is not for spreading systemic risk.
I don't think you understand the purpose of insurance at all.
There are plenty of systemic factors that we have banned from being considered in things like insurance.
Black men have a lower life expectancy and higher chances of certain illnesses or of being the victim of a violent crime than white men. If you put a race question on your life insurance form and incorporate that into your pricing you’ll be looking at a a brutal lawsuit.
Actuarial math is not some moral law that we are beholden to as a society. There are discriminations that we decide are unjust and make society worse even if they spread the costs of insurance more accurately.
I certainly hope race is factored into insurance! Sex is. Why wouldn't race be? Geographical location is, and that is largely a proxy for race.
It is not "unjust" to make more accurate predictions using the data you have available. It is fundamentally incapable of being unjust. Injustice comes from making wrong decisions, not from making right decisions.
You seem like the type of person that would declare statistics racist because it reveals facts you don't want to hear.
Justice is not derived from statistics. Espousing statistics does not justify racial discrimination.
We did not ban racial discrimination because we engaged with statistical arguments for racism and decided they were unfounded. A decision can be supported statistically (in some contrived way “right”) and be ethically wrong.
We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.
>We did not ban racial discrimination because we engaged with statistical arguments for racism and decided they were unfounded.
That is exactly what we did. Legally entrenched racial discriminatiom was widely supported pretty much exactly up until science refuted scientific racism.
The whole argument against racism is that race doesn't matter, it is just a social construct, "race" is meaningless because there is more variability with races than between them, etc. That has always been a key argument against racism.
>We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.
It is morally repugnant because it is incorrect. It would not be morally repugnant to discriminate racially if it wasn't baseless, just as it isn't morally repugnant to discriminate in any situation where it is justifiable.
For example nobody has a problem with not hiring a black man to play a white female character in a film. Nobody has a problem with having publicly funded breast cancer screening programs that are only available for women, even though in very rare cases males can get breast cancer.
Racism is morally repugnant when you make decisions based on race. It is obviously not morally repugnant if you are making decisions based on something else, and that happens to correlate with race. There is quite obviously nothing wrong with basing insurance premiums on all available information about someone, including genetic information.
Would you say it is morally repugnant to charge higher premiums to white people for skin cancer health insurance cover? Come on! Use your brain, man.
> The whole argument against racism is that race doesn't matter, it is just a social construct
That's an interesting misunderstanding you have. Perhaps telling. From my perspective, the whole argument against racism is that it paints people as something other than individuals with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and positions in life.
> Nobody complains that young women have cheaper car insurance than young men, or that young people have more expensive car insurance than older people, but cheaper health insurance.
On the contrary. People complain about stuff like this all the time.
An example: for whatever reason (genetic factors, stress, lifestyle factors) black people are much more likely to have high blood pressure than white people. That's a fact.
What do you suppose would happen if insurance companies tried to charge black people more money, or simply refused to cover them for conditions related to high blood pressure?
>On the contrary. People complain about stuff like this all the time.
Yes. Ignorant people do. They lose the argument because they can't justify their position.
>What do you suppose would happen if insurance companies tried to charge black people more money, or simply refused to cover them for conditions related to high blood pressure?
Performative outrage from the insanely woke mainstream media, because racial issues drive ratings like nothing else.
Insurance companies wouldn't refuse to cover them for those conditions because it isn't good business sense, both for the above reason and because the rational thing is to charge a slightly higher premium.
Why should white people getting insurance subsidise the insurance of unhealthy people that make bad lifestyle choices just because those people happen to be black, but not otherwise?
"While the best-known examples involve denial of credit and insurance, also sometimes attributed to redlining in many instances are denial of healthcare and the development of food deserts in minority neighborhoods."
It's a woke conspiracy called "historical facts" which forces you to waste all your time on the internet trying to convince people that you're right and everyone else is wrong.
None of what you linked to has anything at all to do with the definition of the word 'insurance', which existed as a concept before your shitty, racist, backwater colony even existed you stupid, ignorant, parochial American exceptionalist.
You losers know nothing about history, geography or law. Your entire legal system is a running joke amongst lawyers in every other country in the world. Your "supreme court" spent 100 years being an activist political body, finally is saved by (of all people) a clown President, ans gets crucified for being "politicised" when it points out that a constitutional amendment that was passed in the era when every single state and every single country in the world banned abortion as murder probably shouldnt be interpreted as making it a constitutional right.
You are a joke country and a joke person. Fuck off.
> >On the contrary. People complain about stuff like this all the time.
> Yes.
Nice backpedaling. First it was "no one", now just "ignorant people".
The whole point of insurance is to create a risk pool. The more information one has, the less sense it makes to have insurance at all.
For example, suppose you had a genetic condition that made it a near-certainty you'd die of cancer. Under your model, no one would sell you cancer insurance.
On the other side of the coin, suppose you had a genetic condition that made you virtually immune to cancer. In that case, you'd be foolish to buy cancer insurance.
The insurance industry seems determined to slice and dice its way into irrelevancy.
>The whole point of insurance is to create a risk pool. The more information one has, the less sense it makes to have insurance at all.
Yes! Exactly. This is my entire point. The point of insurance is to spread around randomness, bad luck.
>For example, suppose you had a genetic condition that made it a near-certainty you'd die of cancer. Under your model, no one would sell you cancer insurance.
Yes, this is already how the world works already. This isn't "my model" it is just how insurance already works. It is based on an assessment of risk.
Note that you may still be able to get the insurance, but all you would be doing is hedging against the risk you get it sooner or later than you would expect to get it on average. Might still be useful if you have a mortgage and a young family.
>On the other side of the coin, suppose you had a genetic condition that made you virtually immune to cancer. In that case, you'd be foolish to buy cancer insurance.
Yes obviously...? This is why the first category exists too. If you allow people that know they're higher risk to insure but allow people that know they're lower risk not to, then insurance doesn't work. This is why you have a legal duty to disclose all relevant information in your possession to your insurance company.
> Nice backpedaling. First it was "no one", now just "ignorant people".
I don't see backpedaling, I see a semi-concerted effort between two random individuals on what looks to be a prime opportunity to engage in their favorite pasttime: talking past the point and taking arguments with the least charitable interpretation to be able to definitively resolve a useless binary answer on a complicated subject.
you've been able to make them specify "no ignorant people" when they're making the claim, but why stop there? would any more drilling help qualify their statement further, like questioning the demographics of people that they interact with? how about questioning the racial makeup of their associates to point out their perspective COULD be biased towards specific types of thinking? have they surveyed and done single blind studies on finding out the proclaimable truth to the statement that "no one" truly makes this claim?
maybe they can adjust their statement to add more conditionals on what should be assumed premises: how about people who actively try to be illogical in arguments, they would disagree right? how about children who don't know anything about insurance, did they specify an age range where "no one" is applicable?
or is it possible you can read a statement like "no one would ___" to automatically not include people who would act/think/behave irrationally without needing a disclaimer and list of provided sources?
would it have been a good use of time to get any more clarification on the meaning of their statement with the included groups of people, or does the pedantic question framing to reach your "gotcha" and win the pointless online argument justify the narcissistic means?
Neither of us is "talking past the point", either.
> how about questioning the racial makeup of their associates to point out their perspective COULD be biased towards specific types of thinking?
Speaking of "talking past the point"...the race thing was just an example. Many people complain about insurance discrimination for reasons that have nothing to do with race.
They’re not an asshole the companies are for letting the government search the data without a warrant. This kind of data collection and abuse without informed consent can easily spread and probably already has with modalities like facial recognition and needs to be banned.
>They’re not an asshole the companies are for letting the government search the data without a warrant.
In my opinion trusting anyone with your DNA makes you an asshole. The possibility of a leak, hack, misuse or government search (consensual or non-consensual) approaches 100% very rapidly over time.
More like "you have no alarm, no guard dog, no fence, and your doors and windows are always open, even when you're on vacations. Why are you worried about the spare keys you've sent to some key analysis service?"
In my view DNA privacy is already defeated, enough people have already submitted that the intersection of distant relatives really narrows down who a given sample could be. When I submitted my own I had a long list of distant relatives on both sides come up and I suspect that is pretty typical for Europeans.
"If you’re doing something you wouldn’t want blasted on the front page of the
New York Times, Moore said, you should probably rethink what you’re doing."
Then proceeds to deliberately search the DNA of people who explicitly opted out of sharing genetic information with police.
And if this doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck:
---
In fact, Moore told the audience, she believes that forensic genetic genealogy can help to eradicate crime. “We can stop criminals in their tracks,” she said. “I really believe we can stop serial killers from existing, stop serial rapists from existing.”
“We are an army. We can do this! So repeat after me,” Moore said, before leading the audience in a chant. “No more serial killers!”
---
There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.
> In a statement posted to the Facebook group, Pam Lauritzen, the project’s communications director, said the loophole was an artifact of changes GEDmatch implemented in 2019, when it made opting out the default for all profiles. “While we knew that the intent of the change was to make opted-out users unavailable, some volunteers with the DNA Doe Project continued to use the reports that allowed access to profiles that were opted out,” she wrote. That use was neither “encouraged nor discouraged,” she continued. Still, she claimed the access was somehow “in compliance” with GEDmatch’s terms of service — which at the time promised that DNA uploaded for law enforcement purposes would only be matched with customers who’d opted in — and that the loophole was closed “years ago.”
Huh?
> In July 2020, GEDmatch was hacked, which resulted in all 1.45 million profiles then contained in the database to be briefly opted in to law enforcement matching; at the time, BuzzFeed News reported, just 280,000 profiles had opted in.
How rather convenient.
Realistically, I think there’s likely a bit of parallel construction going on too, likely making up flimsy excuses to hide the fact that some crimes were solved with the use of surveillance programs that have not been revealed to the general public. I’d be extremely surprised if the CIA doesn’t have a secret copy of all major commercial DNA databases.
If they were using Mitre to try to build a database of [actual, physical] fingerprints by scraping social media images, there’s no way they’d leave such low hanging fruit… hanging.
If the federal government was to establish a pilot program
designed to covertly collect the DNA of every person living in,
say, Denver.
In a way where the DNA was matched to a person with a high degree of
confidence. and the feds were willing to spend some serious resource on it.
Wow long do people think it would take?
Would it be possible?
Big conferences must be an awesome opportunity.
When people go to sign in and show id to pick up their badges
and then wear the badges but that goes for a lot of companies
too that have people wear various forms of cards / badges.
Physical access to homes, work, gyms, public transit, hospitals,
nursing homes, and cars
would make it fairly straight forward for the majority of
citizens. I dont think you could scale that to a city and do it quickly.
Send out snail mail with some motivation for people to send back a
physical reply?
Send out snail mail ads and collect from the garbage / recycling?
Keyboards would be awesome but harder to get to without physical access.
Public transit is good. Airports.
A crime spree could be arranged that gave law enforcement a good reason
to stop and id people driving or walking around would be effective.
Vaccines would be great but hard to establish in a specific regional area.
A Qtip (or whatever)swipe of the screen of a cellphone?
Free in person give aways that required a signature?
If you just follow a person for a while walking in the city is there
an easy covert way to get a sample?
(Yanking out a hair is going to raise questions. )
Some form of "specialized" mini "vacum cleaner" to "suck"
in cells from a bit of a distance. Probably hard to be accurate.
Could probably do mass harvesting of DNA at gyms with a certain
expectations of inaccuracy that would be improved with multiple runs
or DNA from sets of people in different mixes.
210 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadThis sort of Exceeding Access isn't being used to violate copyright or expose Gov wrongdoing. There is zero politician outrage over it, purchased or otherwise.
Of course, this doesn't stop parallel construction; once they find their likely suspects through the illegally-obtained genetic search, they can likely often construct a case without even mentioning the genetic tracing.
I think that would be cause to throw the whole thing out, if it was eluted during discovery.
Surely, it doesn't really matter WHY you suspected somebody in the first place. If there's enough other evidence to show irrefutably that they committed the crime, there shouldn't be a huge difference between the first tip coming from some random guy phoning the cops and saying "there's a dodgy looking guy here" or getting a random match from a DNA database?
I can see the intent behind probable cause for e.g. traffic stops, because that is designed to stop prejudiced-based harassment. But if there is an extremely close DNA-match found randomly, that search hasn't caused any harm to anyone, and should be a perfectly good reason to investigate someone a little more thoroughly. Maybe it should be disclosed in the case, e.g. "we became suspicious because of the DNA matching, and further investigation showed the victim's blood all over his house, clothes, and the murder weapon that he'd put back in his tool rack" should be a slam dunk conviction not grounds for letting someone go on a technicality because e.g. there wasn't a nosy neighbour who'd reported them for being too noisy or whatever.
I have the same aversion to government power built into my bones but I can’t think of a concrete way the government would be able to abuse this capability to assert power over me.
Of course if you recently visited the place where a crime took place you might also be falsely accused.
I suppose they could also use it to track your movements if there was some way to massively collect DNA samples from the environment.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2375624-air-pollution-m...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230606-how-air-pollutio...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
these can be deployed at great density in an array providing granularity made to order.
That isn't being falsely accused, it's worse.
A core problem with any surveillance is that it is disproportional and only available to the powerful. If access to surveillance were as universal as possible, powerful interests would suddenly find the will to wind it back.
DNA could be tested for traits that are "more likely to cause criminality". People with those traits can be more heavily scrutinized and surveiled. Or have their employment opportunities limited.
DNA could be multiplied and planted as evidence.
DNA could be cloned, or used in scientific testing without consent.
DNA could be used for targeted biological warfare.
People leave traces of DNA everywhere they go. Who knows what type of detection mechanisms will exist in the future?
There's also the very likely scenario that a central database like this becomes a prime target and leaks. It's borderline guaranteed.
While racism is definitely a thing today, it seem to be dying. Slowly, but the trend is certain: modern society is way less racist than it was, say, a century ago (or worse, a few centuries ago). People stop caring about ethnic origins. The care about cultures and nationalities those days (notice how even the meaning of "racism" had shifted to account for this), and those are rapidly becoming less and less correlated with genetics.
While people won't stop being xenophobic (unless, idk, some miracle or catastrophe happens), in the modern world, when it comes to identity, genes are rapidly losing battle to memes.
It's also much cheaper to just fabricate evidence (cf. XKCD #538 aka $5 wrench vs security). Worked well since time immemorial, and doesn't leave a clone.
I don't think you need to consider other possibilities, this is a good enough example. And unfortunately it is not insane in the sense of paranoid, because this is what Nazis would be doing with it. Or NK jailing entire families for one member's crimes but basing it on DNA matches.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
TL;DR - Pasco County in Florida was using "predictive policing", where based on various statistics, they would predict who would commit crimes and harass the ever-loving shit out of them until they moved out of the county.
Leaks/bugs already blamed, in the article:
>GEDmatch tools that provided access to DNA profiles that were opted out of law enforcement searches, which she described as “a bug in the software.”
I'm no biologist, but I've heard that ethnic bioweapons (in a way portrayed in science fiction or conspiracy theories) are basically a myth and/or convenient propaganda fuel.
Could there be some genes already circulating in certain ethnicities that would protect from a specially designed virus?
Remember that you shed cells everywhere you go, so soon the tech will be advanced enough where we can do nearly real-time DNA matching. If you sneeze, a sniffer could pick that up and figure out who you are.
Imagine a camera that films not things that are visible, but people who were there, at that protest, in that store, in that hospital, boarding that plane. It's practically irrefutable (or currently legally is, even though it's inherently flawed.)
And you can never change that identifier. Once that data is out, it's out.
The last headline in that article, "Solving Crime Before It Happens" could have easily been entitled "Minority Report" (another great sci-fi movie that's not so fictitious anymore.)
At the same time, when you look at real life justice systems through the same lens we look at Gattaca and Minority Report it looks even more bizarre. We are pretty much running criminal training camps almost designed to make people more criminal, and then after they get out of the camps we structure our society to almost force them back into crime to survive. It's bonkers.
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol118/iss5/4/
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... [PDF]
If people are robbing other people for $100, especially in 2023 dollars, that's too stupid to be a failure of society, that has to be because small-time crime is a resource for a lot of justice system-connected industries, and as long as maintaining the level of it doesn't pit those industries against real estate interests, they can lobby for crime.
I think there are really three kinds of crime:
1) Crimes of need, where people need to feed themselves or their loved ones, so resort to crime because they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom,
2) Crimes of stupidity, where people just don't understand how unlikely they are to get away with something, or how bad the punishment could be, so they undervalue the cost of undertaking those crimes for the benefit they stand to gain, and
3) Crimes of compulsion, where people have enough, and mostly understand the costs and the benefits, yet risk their lives and freedom for more for some irrational reason; degenerate gamblers.
We can prevent all crimes of need immediately and easily. It's more difficult to prevent crimes of stupidity, but pouring education into everyone is the answer. It's idiopathic crimes of compulsion that are hard to deal with, because people have wildly different reasons for their compulsions.
As a society, we pour all of our efforts into crimes of compulsion, the only kind of crime that we're virtually guaranteed to be ineffective at stopping, and bad at controlling. Where the discussions between political factions are about whether we should kill them, give them therapy, drug them, corral them far away from people, let you look them up on a website after they're free, refuse them work, let them vote, etc., in the context of assuming that the vast majority of crime has unique causes and solutions. To assume that, we have to ignore that people are still sticking other people up for $100.
That sounds good until you realize that algebra won't help... You're proposing a "scared straight" program, essentially.
Stuff like: Stealing from your employer because you believe they are treating you unfairly, keying someone's car because they cheated on you, trashing an apartment when the landlord evicts you, not paying a fine that you think is unfair, doing drugs because the law is stupid, etc...
Now imagine they have the wrong DNA on file for you!
Person X has a genetic predisposition that results in anger control issues in 87% of people, so they must subscribe to weekly anger management counselling or they'll be denied access to public areas such as malls and schools. The government certified and licensed suppliers are A, B, C.
Imagine the profits of legally compelling people to buy your stuff. History shows there would be a long lineup of people eager to exploit something like that.
I don't think the government should be imposing anger management counselling on people in the first place. That has nothing to do with concern about DNA, and everything to do with concern about the government being able to tell me what to do when I've not been convicted of a crime.
A lot of it would be based on junk science and the low rate of offenders, because the diagnosis is bullshit, would be touted as evidence of the value the program is providing.
What if it's not based on junk science, but on good science?
Maybe guilt by association? Imagine going into a business, having some DNA based system identify you, and being denied entry because the majority of your relatives are criminals.
Realistically, I'd say the opposite will happen though. Being related to someone wealthy or influential will automatically get you special treatment and you won't even have to ask "do you know who I am?"
> but I can’t think of a concrete way the government would be able to abuse this capability to assert power over me
I think the war on drugs in the US is a pretty good example. If I say it was used to marginalized and disenfranchise one specific group of people, everyone knows what group I'm talking about, so, IMO, that's a good indication it was intentionally targeted at that group.
Now imagine the same thing, but you're in the targeted group and, instead of having the police roaming your neighbourhood, you're simply locked out of all the "opt-in" systems that are necessary to have a decent life; banking, real-estate, licensing, etc.. Maybe you're even prevented from shopping at stores that have reasonable prices and have to overpay for food because you're a "bad person".
Opting in to beneficial systems, with less beneficial defaults, is the new way of discriminating IMO.
Or go back a few more generations, even here in the USA you might legally have been declared to be 3/5 of a person.
You think people have really changed since then? I don't.
Lack of a detailed census in your country was indisputably protective for Jews during the Holocaust. Plenty of people only discovered themselves that they had matrilineal Jewish descent during the Holocaust, because the Nazis had all those punchcards.
Oh my god can we stop this absurd meme. Nobody was ever 'declared to be 3/5 of a person'. The point of the 3/5 compromise was to reduce the power of states with slaves. It was purely about counting the population of the state for the purpose of assigning seats in Congress. To suggest that it was racist to multiply the number of slaves by 0.6 before adding them to the non-slave population is truly insane. If it had been 1.0 then it would have given slave-owners more political power.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-biobank-dna-babies-w...
The linked article clearly says "Like many states.." but does not list which states.
The only way you are beating this is by birthing at home and hoping no complications occur.
>Some states destroy the blood spots after a year, 12 states store them for at least 21 years.
>California, however, is one of a handful of states that stores the remaining blood spots for research indefinitely in a state-run biobank.
From the article
>But while the state may not be making money off your child's DNA, Lorey admitted that there is the potential for outside researchers to profit off your child's genetic material.
And
>Law enforcement also can — and does — request identified blood spots. We found at least five search warrants and four court orders, including one to test a child's blood for drugs at birth.
Like it or not, politics is not a singular immutable thing. We can reframe things, just as governments do to justify their garbage. Society is but putty, and we can mold it to our liking, or sit quietly like livestock and await government to decide what we're allowed to think and feel.
The current trends seem to go against this, saying that even things like image, voice, or memories about us are all somehow private even in a public setting, and cannot be used without a permission of their owner. DNA is essentially in the same category - even more so, we leave it just about everywhere, yet most people think about it as something extremely intimate, much more so than a picture from a public venue (where opinions sort of diverge).
And whenever I agree on disagree, I can totally understand why this is happening and why the current trends are like this. It's basically a reaction of the society trying to protect itself from abuse by the entities of similar (large) scale.
All this stuff is basically a (relatively) new dilemma of the information age, where we've gained an ability to store, analyze and transfer large arrays of data efficiently. Paired with technologies (such as cameras or sequencers) becoming more affordable to deploy at scale.
Sadly, consumer technologies (empowering "normal" people) drastically lag behind business and government tech, so before your casual Joe ever gets a chance to have some meaningful (and not really privacy-breaking; although there's rarely an incentive to develop tech that doesn't break this) use cases, large corporations and governments ruin everything.
The cops don't need to swipe your DNA from a complimentary drink during questioning. They'll just pull your foreskin out of cold storage.
something I had never thought about, but what does an organ transplant do to these tests if a sample was taken from a recipient?
All without pointing out anywhere that it's a head transplant and could they use a different source of DNA sample.
The hospital definitely has an accounting for them. Typically tissue or organs removed are sent to pathology, where they may be further tested and/or sold for research, data or other purposes. It's a dirty secret that hospitals make a ton of money off of parts of your body that they cut out.
It's fucked up how normalized circumcision is. Apparently some hospitals do it without even asking. Imagine your son's penis being mutilated so some person can have child-sacrfice skin cream.
Fear has been the primary motivator in the world of government ever since 9/11. America is so scared of itself it has turned inward, against itself. She's willing to forget about the 4th Amendment, the 13th Amendment, and even her own founding document, as long as they get a little more data they can abuse on their own citizens.
At what point do we accuse the government of treason? None of this invasion of privacy was part of the deal, and Americans stand to gain nothing from these false assertions of privacy and opting out.
Our government is betraying us and the dominant ideology is to lay down and take it. This country will never improve until we can fight back against surveillance. They couldn't keep us safe during 9/11, and none of their desperate "security" efforts have protected us.
Again I ask, when do we accuse the government of betraying us and the social contract?
I really fail to imagine how a society can arrive at a universal ethical standard without writing a couple ideas down here and there. You're asking for a utopian society of mind readers, which hits me as just a touch unreasonable.
I was about to say, "we can at least agree that murder is bad", but I'm not sure that's even the case, given that it seems like some people would think it's ok to murder their political opponents if given the chance.
When I grew up, which was not long ago, we viewed America as that curiously Christian country of the West. Everyone else was very secular, but those American? They're all Christians, they're crazily religious.
Maybe this has become less true over the last decade or so, but I think that you'll find that the percentage of Americans that describe themselves as Christian is still very high. It seems that there is a pretty universal ethical standard at the most fundamental level. It just turns out that, like all things in life, people disagree about how to translate broad, abstract moral claims into concrete policies. You might agree on a 'separation of church and state' or 'free speech' but that doesn't mean you agree on what that means in practice. Does it mean that public officials shouldn't be allowed to display religious symbols, like it does in France? Does it mean that Islamic headscarves on women and crucifix necklaces are banned in schools? Does the UK have separate religion and state? Certainly its political process is less influenced by religious voting blocs than America's. But its head of state is Supreme Governor of the Church of England. These things are complicated.
Damn straight!
One approach I’ve tried in the past is to explain that the people start with all rights, the government starts with zero privileges, and the explicit examples codified in the Constitution are simply bare minimum examples of lines that shall never be crossed.
The militia prefatory clause of the 2nd amendment is a great example of this as explained by Scalia in Heller. It’s not that that the right to bear arms is solely for members of a militia. It’s simply one example of how the individual freedom (that innately exists!) may be exercised.
an inherent right to defend ones self includes ability to equip to do so effectively
People assert they have all sorts of rights all the time. Most of them conflict with other rights that other people assert exist, and even other rights that they themselves assert exist. What do we do about this?
I actually think 'rights' legislation is pretty stupid. It's a lot easier to write an Act that says 'Every one has the right to a free, public and comprehensive secular education' than it is to write an Act that provides a free, public and comprehensive secular education system. The latter requires sorting out what all of those things actually mean in practice. What level of education do you provide for free? What level of choice do people have about their children's education, vs the view that as a society we should protect children from the 'bad' decisions of their parents? That also means protecting them from their parents' good decisions. Are we okay with that? What does it mean for education to be secular. Are they allowed to learn about religion? Are they allowed to close the school at lunchtime and teach religion in the afternoon, unofficially, as often happens? Concrete systems are much more important and much more effective than any abstract statement of 'rights'.
–Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)
I'm convinced many of our "leaders" could not argue their positions adequately if they were forced to defend them. I remember reading about events like the Million Man March on Washington DC, and I wonder how America would handle a massive, peaceful demonstration communicating the general discontent of the citizen with this potentially great country.
It seems there was a period in American history where the common man COULD and DID stand up for their countrymen, for the health and endurance of the entire country instead of a handful of rich fucks. Why do we not see these shows of solidarity in the modern age? I ask mostly rhetorically but the America of today looks and feels characteristically different from what it sells itself as or even who it was a mere 50 years ago.
When did you last sit down and have dinner with your next-door neighbor? Discuss the local happenings and politics of the neighborhood in person?
You might be able to answer that question in the affirmative. But many more don't. We're too busy isolating ourselves from one another to grow any form of culture from which organized efforts would spring.
Many places still sort of exist through stuff like farmer's markets, some clubs, libraries, swap meets, etc, but they seem less generalized for socializing.
I haven't met with my neighbors or sat down to chat with them. It does feel kind of alien and, dare I say it, rude to intrude on someone's life that way. Maybe it's not really an intrusion, and an atmosphere of fear and distrust has trained us to separate. I remember my parents meeting people and scheduling times to hang out all the time. Children from different families would mingle while the adults mingled, everyone got some dose of community.
I couldn't tell you where programming hobbyists meet up in my area. I might have to go up to Tacoma before I find any no-or-low-cost hacker groups. But, don't many communities also have common places they go routinely? I'm thinking gaming and TTRPG, TCG shops might be a good start to build a third place, despite being a business themselves.
I get that the author is trying to motivate people, but logically that's a straw-man: Nobody actually thinks that the average individual Dirt-Farmer-Guy is being oppressed solely because they're terrified of Shiny-Hat-Guy's bulging biceps (2) and shouty voice (1).
No, each Dirt-Farmer's decision-making comes from a fear of very large numbers of violent angry men or institutions capable of destroying them financially and socially, fears which are often entirely justified.
If things were truly as straightforward as Étienne is suggesting, he wouldn't need to write about it: He could walk up to any random dude and say: "Hey, you're getting screwed, with two of us we could kick the Shiny-Hat-Guy's ass". And they'd do it, since every single person they'd meet would automatically join the mob or at least stand aside.
this is a partisan topic, since +1 million adults in the USA are actively enrolled and paid by the systems that demand identification at each step, most wear a uniform, and their employers are entrenched in the political process.
high-minded words plus the air used to say them, equals what? in reality I mean, not on chat boards
What is the proposed alternative? As we can see there are bad actors in our society that pose a higher risk than ever before, and their tools are ever more sophisticated.
The problem is that we just don't know, and law enforcement agencies aren't giving us a detailed breakdown of which plots were foiled (or at least successfully prosecuted after the fact) via privacy-invading means vs. old-fashioned police work. Of course they'll never give us this data; we probably don't even hear about most investigations, even after the fact.
Just trust them? No thanks. They are very publicly incompetent in many ways (e.g. all airline "security" procedures developed post-9/11 -- except for locking and armoring cockpit doors -- seems pointless, and don't catch people during sanctioned penetration testing), and I don't see why they deserve any blind trust here.
We don't know if this sort of dragnet genetic database trawling will broadly close cases. Sure, it worked with the Golden State Killer, when no other methods seem to have worked. But that's just a single data point. And I'd rather that the occasional -- very occasional, as it turns out -- serial killer goes free, rather than live in a police state with no privacy.
This is a meandering way for me to say: we on the outside cannot propose alternatives, because we have scant data and little understanding of what works and what doesn't. And the people in power consider it a feature that we don't have access to this information.
Honestly this issue was already decided. No new arguments have been presented. I'm old enough to remember it. One side talks about hypotheticals and constitutional principles. The other side holds up a photo of some poor murdered child. Can't win this one.
"Ah, it's simple. It's the fault of this government, but when my party gets finally voted in, things will change."
And so the circle of the naivety perpetuates. We might hope for a better future only when citizens will realise that both sides are exactly the same, and that they've been lied to since we invented the career politician. Apparently 4 years is how long it takes people to forget whatever bullshit they were sold last time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
But seeing how everybody is politicised and ultra-partisan today, I can only shake my head and despair. People get the government they deserve.
I'd be much more trusting of democracy or even representative democracy if the demos had a real say -- We should be voting on issues more than we do people. People can betray trust or twist a vote's meaning. Most of politics, as practiced, is sleight of hand and misleading people. If we vote on issues and then also vote on people whose leadership we trust to execute said issue conclusion, we'd get much closer to something representing the will of the people while also guarding against populist BS. That is the supposed goal of representative democracies, and yet in practice it's bread, circuses, and zero accountability from the top. Losing an election is not a replacement for consequences or taking responsibility for defying the will of your constituents.
But, you can't sell that as a sport to people and foment tribal thoughts as easily, so that's no good. /s
Panem et circenses. My niche theory on why we've become so politicised, is because it's become entertainment. Trash reality TV.
Today the circenses are not the gladiators fighting for their lives, but the Orange Man vs Old Geezer sitcom on dinner time TV and in the front page of your newspapers. One will find there is little difference between the trashy TV fan and the person avidly following political debates.
Meanwhile those reality stars keep stealing and making their friends richer, disregarding any laws because they're the ones making them.
The Swiss do a much better job of this! There the people can petition for a referendum to add or delete any law or amend the constitution. They can do this at the municipal, canton (state) or federal level. The result is that politicians know that they need to negotiate with motivated minorities. The people have a veto over the politicians.
With kindness, I offer that voting for officials who've expanded surveillance isn't in harmony with the above sentiment. Neither is us failing to speak out to news orgs that are rarely willing to elevate surveillance abuses over far less important content.
Part of the equation: Better behavior by us.
I think about this question a lot. So much of our philosophy of government is about some nebulous "contract", as if we agreed to be governed. Sometimes you'll be asked, "Do you believe in the rule of law?" Why would one need to believe in it? Is it a religion? (I think it is one, personally) Government sometimes likes to claim a "monopoly" on violence as well. One generally cannot trade or purchase violence per se, so to act like it's a market, or that a government has any truly effective means of preventing the choice to commit violence, is silly to me. Police are typically late to the scene of a crime, after all, and even with their monopoly are terrible at de-escalation or deterring.
I think the social contract is different in every society, and changes based on the makeup of the groups. It's an amorphous thing that is always referenced, but never spelled out. It irks me that it gets referred to sometimes, but I think if we have them, they should be bidirectional and mutually beneficial.
In general, I think a government who expects something but doesn't offer anything in return is merely tyrannical. If we're going to go on with these fantasies of contracts without signatures and choices without markets, then the least that can be done is for a government to act in good faith that they are protecting or improving the lives of those they gave themselves permission to rule over.
As an American I do not see my "representatives" representing or helping me.
I don't think this is actually true? Social contract theory is one of many, and has some pretty fundamental flaws. The theory isn't really a philosophy of government, either. It's a theory to explain the legitimacy of the state, and essentially answer the question: why do people follow the law? The idea is that people have consented to be governed. It probably made more sense back in the day that we were much less governed than we are now. You had the opportunity to go and live in the woods, essentially ungovernable. And people chose to stay part of society, tacitly agreeing to be governed in exchange for the benefits that come along with it. But there are obvious flaws in that idea. For one thing, minors follow the law and are expected to do so, but can't contract.
I think 'social contract' theory is weak.
>Government sometimes likes to claim a "monopoly" on violence as well. One generally cannot trade or purchase violence per se, so to act like it's a market, or that a government has any truly effective means of preventing the choice to commit violence, is silly to me. Police are typically late to the scene of a crime, after all, and even with their monopoly are terrible at de-escalation or deterring.
This is again not true. Governments don't "claim a monopoly on violence". States have been described by theorists as being characterised by their (implicit) claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. There are obvious flaws in that idea, like the legitimacy of self-defence. But it certainly has nothing to do with whether the government has "any truly effective means of preventing the choice to commit violence", because it's about legitimate use of force. The government can certainly pass laws that determine what is and isn't legitimate use of force.
People don't understand how big has the world become. Because they can't. The scale of the current world is unintelligible. Economy, resources, war, geopolitics, politics. The way we live our lives is not under our control, it's not under anyone's control. The average person has no more freedom than an ant in his colony. An emergent collective mind rules the world, comprised of the technology and desires of the mankind. You can't predict the outcome of a certain quantum state, but in the grand scheme of things everything moves deterministically as per the laws of Newton.
Read some Ted Kaczynski.
You just scoop out the centralized means of access to resources and the semi-anarchist masses don't have anything to with their power.
You can't predict quantum states, but you sure can build walls around valuable resources and imprison unpredictable quantum technologists.
All it takes is a conspiracy/agreement among the heads of resources industry and the world is 'owned' again.
Not advocating for that outcome, it's just unfortunately true.
Ah. I really don’t want to tell you what basis to build your private mythology on but fear as the primary motivator did not start with 9/11.
We feared the bear so we become the hunters and killed it. We feared the night so we made fire. We feared the others in the next valley so we sharpened our sticks.
We feared the flood so we built dams. We feared death so we invented delusions to placate ourselves.
Even if you somehow constrain yourself to the history of the US government, would you say the cold war was not driven by fear?
I'm reminded of Ben Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
They always want to keep us afraid, it seems. It doesn't help that people in general are not good at qualifying risk.
I don't recall being asked if I wanted to hand over any freedoms to anyone. Nobody asked. This was done to me, not done for me.
It's grief.
The concept of a corporation and instutional society has died and we don't really want to admit it.
The government is the last leg standing.. otherwise it's just everyone out for themselves.
Rational thinking and debate is not leading the way, it's following. Getting the kind of verbal and rational agreements the baby boomers enjoyed, in today's system, is not happening.
It is trivially easy to release personalized media that pumps up the grief and isolates people even more, then offer political and commercial products as a salve.
We all pretend the primary cause is an great computing conspiracy, and we are being manipulated by our devices.
Primarily, people have changed and tech is capitalizing on a more emotional and feelings based populace, whilst it's leaders head for dry land and buy up farmland.
The popular Nietschze quote about the death of God and washing away infinite blood, doesn't go far enough. The conscious, alienated, knowledge of what should be and the subconscious social experience of grief - combined together - is absolutely deadly.
But sure, AI will empower the average joe.
https://www.bytebacklaw.com/2022/02/how-do-the-cpra-cpa-vcdp...
Though not sure if law enforcement exemptions apply, AFAICT you need a subpoena to get a company to disclose sensitive personal information like DNA.
Instances like the Massachusetts crime lab scandal should destroy all confidence in evidence handling: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/massachusetts-cr...
All evidence handling and analysis should be performed by an independent agency, maybe answerable to courts, not cops.
as is the only thing stopping probative DNA from ending up in the evidence lane is a promise not to abuse the opportunity, that also says nothing about "by mistake" occurances
Holders of DNA can't be bought out or come under the control of leadership that doesn't fully grasp and exercise privacy safeguards. They can't allow laws to be bought or leveraged that will compromise their ability to safeguard it.
LEO's use of DNA is a surveillance method and powerful interests will always feel compelled to use it to hunt people they perceive are enemies. Whatever info we may get by uploading it can't possibly be worth the risk to our descendants and relations.
The point of insurance is to spread random risk around. Nobody complains that young women have cheaper car insurance than young men, or that young people have more expensive car insurance than older people, but cheaper health insurance. Young men are more likely to have car accidents, but less likely to have cancer. The point of insurance is not wealth redistribution or the spreading of systemic risk, but the spreading of random risk. (I mean this in the sense of 'systemic error' vs 'random error' that you will remember from high school physics.)
For instance wheelchair bound people have a much lower average live expectancy. The lives of people who are (born) disabled or have some debilitating genetic disease don't need society to make their lives even harder.
> If you have a higher chance of getting a disease, why wouldn't life insurance be more expensive?
The answer to that is: Not spreading such risks evenly among everyone is morally reprehensible. Imagine your reward for living in constant pain and having a higher chance of dying early is society kicking you in the balls for the crime of being born like that.
Discrimination is not inherently a bad thing. There are specific lists of special reasons, and discrimination on those bases is considered bad and has widely been made unlawful. Usually, insurance is an exception! And it should be. I don't see why men should subsidise the health insurance of women or why women should subsidise the car insurance of men. I don't see why the young should subsidise the health insurance of the old. That's not the point of insurance.
Also, it's law in many countries that you cannot discriminate against people on the basis of protected characteristics, no matter the mechanism or how unfair it may seem to those with privilege.
And we should change the law so that point of insurance is made illegal, and insurance companies can only use generic, broad, information about a person, not bend over so that they can maximize their profit margins and minimize their risks.
These are clearly not known risks. If you knew when you were going to die, you would not purchase life insurance, as the total premiums due by the date of your death would equal or exceed the insured amount.
If you knew a forest fire was bearing down on your house, you wouldn't be able to insure against it. And in many areas prone to forest fires, you cannot insure against them, because they are so likely to occur.
Hurricanes and flooding are similar: build on a floodplain and you will either pay exorbitant amounts for, or be unable to purchase, flooding insurance.
> Risks like unemployment which will effect nearly everyone at some point in their life
This is not true, and even if it were the risk you are hedging against is that it will happen to YOU at an unpredictable time.
That is obviously completely different from insuring yourself against a risk that has a higher chance of affecting you than the average person and expecting that risk not to be factored into your premiums.
> If the risks were unknown, no one would know that they should be buying insurance to hedge against them.
Do you just pattern match against words? Do you see "known risk" and just assume it means something I clearly did not mean and which makes absolutely no sense?
Societies have no reason to ensure insurance companies maximize their profits. In fact, briberry and lobbying aside, they have all the reason to regulate them for modest profits and wider spread safety net.
Thus health issues seen from DNA should be regulated to remain an unknown risk as far as insurance premiums go.
Except if somebody is more concerned about maximum insurance company profits, than for public health. In that case, can they suggest an Ayn Rand book for someone new to the author?
Guess what? Sane people in sane countries recognise that insurance isnt the best mechanism for accomplishing every social outcome. In fact, it is terrible at doing that for healthcare. So we dont use it that way. Instead, we do the sane thing of taxing people.
Instead you insane parochial exceptionalists think "hurr durr ill force everyone to buy insurance and ban insurance from taking into account people's health, basically making it not insurance". Then it confuses stupid people like YOU into not knowing what the term means.
Please microwave your balls. You are too stupid to be allowed to reproduce.
If it was about getting what you put in back, it would be a savings account.
It's on you to lead your texts with a disclaimer of what various words mean to you if you're not using them as they're commonly understood.
I am sorry that you have been misled to think insurance is some sort of government wealth redistribution program but that just isn't so.
Yes, of course if someone has a disability that puts them at a higher risk of some event, and they want to insure themselves against that event, they'd pay higher insurance premiums. That's like, the entire point of insurance.
If you live in an area that is prone to flooding, then you either can't insure yourself against flood damage or the insurance premiums are a lot more expensive than someone living in a desert. If you smoke, your health insurance and life insurance premiums are higher. If you have type 1 diabetes, you will probably struggle to get any meaningful amount of life insurance.
What alternative are you proposing? That anyone purchasing insurance will automatically be expected to subsidise the insurance premiums of people that are at higher risk? That's not what insurance is for. If you want to redistribute wealth from people without disabilities to people with disabilities, then you can do that using taxes. But not by pretending there's anything wrong with honest risk assessment in insurance.
>The answer to that is: Not spreading such risks evenly among everyone is morally reprehensible. Imagine your reward for living in constant pain and having a higher chance of dying early is society kicking you in the balls for the crime of being born like that.
Nobody is being 'kicked in the balls'. Stop using such emotionally manipulative tactics and such charged language. Insurance is about spreading random risk. It is not for spreading systemic risk.
I don't think you understand the purpose of insurance at all.
This is not true, and sadly it's a harmful myth in the T1D community. More info - https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetic-life-insurance.html.
Black men have a lower life expectancy and higher chances of certain illnesses or of being the victim of a violent crime than white men. If you put a race question on your life insurance form and incorporate that into your pricing you’ll be looking at a a brutal lawsuit.
Actuarial math is not some moral law that we are beholden to as a society. There are discriminations that we decide are unjust and make society worse even if they spread the costs of insurance more accurately.
It is not "unjust" to make more accurate predictions using the data you have available. It is fundamentally incapable of being unjust. Injustice comes from making wrong decisions, not from making right decisions.
You seem like the type of person that would declare statistics racist because it reveals facts you don't want to hear.
Justice is not derived from statistics. Espousing statistics does not justify racial discrimination.
We did not ban racial discrimination because we engaged with statistical arguments for racism and decided they were unfounded. A decision can be supported statistically (in some contrived way “right”) and be ethically wrong.
We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.
That is exactly what we did. Legally entrenched racial discriminatiom was widely supported pretty much exactly up until science refuted scientific racism.
The whole argument against racism is that race doesn't matter, it is just a social construct, "race" is meaningless because there is more variability with races than between them, etc. That has always been a key argument against racism.
>We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.
It is morally repugnant because it is incorrect. It would not be morally repugnant to discriminate racially if it wasn't baseless, just as it isn't morally repugnant to discriminate in any situation where it is justifiable.
For example nobody has a problem with not hiring a black man to play a white female character in a film. Nobody has a problem with having publicly funded breast cancer screening programs that are only available for women, even though in very rare cases males can get breast cancer.
Racism is morally repugnant when you make decisions based on race. It is obviously not morally repugnant if you are making decisions based on something else, and that happens to correlate with race. There is quite obviously nothing wrong with basing insurance premiums on all available information about someone, including genetic information.
Would you say it is morally repugnant to charge higher premiums to white people for skin cancer health insurance cover? Come on! Use your brain, man.
That's an interesting misunderstanding you have. Perhaps telling. From my perspective, the whole argument against racism is that it paints people as something other than individuals with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and positions in life.
On the contrary. People complain about stuff like this all the time.
An example: for whatever reason (genetic factors, stress, lifestyle factors) black people are much more likely to have high blood pressure than white people. That's a fact.
What do you suppose would happen if insurance companies tried to charge black people more money, or simply refused to cover them for conditions related to high blood pressure?
Yes. Ignorant people do. They lose the argument because they can't justify their position.
>What do you suppose would happen if insurance companies tried to charge black people more money, or simply refused to cover them for conditions related to high blood pressure?
Performative outrage from the insanely woke mainstream media, because racial issues drive ratings like nothing else.
Insurance companies wouldn't refuse to cover them for those conditions because it isn't good business sense, both for the above reason and because the rational thing is to charge a slightly higher premium.
Why should white people getting insurance subsidise the insurance of unhealthy people that make bad lifestyle choices just because those people happen to be black, but not otherwise?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
"While the best-known examples involve denial of credit and insurance, also sometimes attributed to redlining in many instances are denial of healthcare and the development of food deserts in minority neighborhoods."
You losers know nothing about history, geography or law. Your entire legal system is a running joke amongst lawyers in every other country in the world. Your "supreme court" spent 100 years being an activist political body, finally is saved by (of all people) a clown President, ans gets crucified for being "politicised" when it points out that a constitutional amendment that was passed in the era when every single state and every single country in the world banned abortion as murder probably shouldnt be interpreted as making it a constitutional right.
You are a joke country and a joke person. Fuck off.
> Yes.
Nice backpedaling. First it was "no one", now just "ignorant people".
The whole point of insurance is to create a risk pool. The more information one has, the less sense it makes to have insurance at all.
For example, suppose you had a genetic condition that made it a near-certainty you'd die of cancer. Under your model, no one would sell you cancer insurance.
On the other side of the coin, suppose you had a genetic condition that made you virtually immune to cancer. In that case, you'd be foolish to buy cancer insurance.
The insurance industry seems determined to slice and dice its way into irrelevancy.
Yes! Exactly. This is my entire point. The point of insurance is to spread around randomness, bad luck.
>For example, suppose you had a genetic condition that made it a near-certainty you'd die of cancer. Under your model, no one would sell you cancer insurance.
Yes, this is already how the world works already. This isn't "my model" it is just how insurance already works. It is based on an assessment of risk.
Note that you may still be able to get the insurance, but all you would be doing is hedging against the risk you get it sooner or later than you would expect to get it on average. Might still be useful if you have a mortgage and a young family.
>On the other side of the coin, suppose you had a genetic condition that made you virtually immune to cancer. In that case, you'd be foolish to buy cancer insurance.
Yes obviously...? This is why the first category exists too. If you allow people that know they're higher risk to insure but allow people that know they're lower risk not to, then insurance doesn't work. This is why you have a legal duty to disclose all relevant information in your possession to your insurance company.
I don't see backpedaling, I see a semi-concerted effort between two random individuals on what looks to be a prime opportunity to engage in their favorite pasttime: talking past the point and taking arguments with the least charitable interpretation to be able to definitively resolve a useless binary answer on a complicated subject.
you've been able to make them specify "no ignorant people" when they're making the claim, but why stop there? would any more drilling help qualify their statement further, like questioning the demographics of people that they interact with? how about questioning the racial makeup of their associates to point out their perspective COULD be biased towards specific types of thinking? have they surveyed and done single blind studies on finding out the proclaimable truth to the statement that "no one" truly makes this claim?
maybe they can adjust their statement to add more conditionals on what should be assumed premises: how about people who actively try to be illogical in arguments, they would disagree right? how about children who don't know anything about insurance, did they specify an age range where "no one" is applicable?
or is it possible you can read a statement like "no one would ___" to automatically not include people who would act/think/behave irrationally without needing a disclaimer and list of provided sources?
would it have been a good use of time to get any more clarification on the meaning of their statement with the included groups of people, or does the pedantic question framing to reach your "gotcha" and win the pointless online argument justify the narcissistic means?
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
Q.E.D.
Neither of us is "talking past the point", either.
> how about questioning the racial makeup of their associates to point out their perspective COULD be biased towards specific types of thinking?
Speaking of "talking past the point"...the race thing was just an example. Many people complain about insurance discrimination for reasons that have nothing to do with race.
In my opinion trusting anyone with your DNA makes you an asshole. The possibility of a leak, hack, misuse or government search (consensual or non-consensual) approaches 100% very rapidly over time.
It's not like they can't get your DNA in several ways without you volunteering it...
Or that they need your DNA to get to things about you, unless you're living incognito or something...
---
In fact, Moore told the audience, she believes that forensic genetic genealogy can help to eradicate crime. “We can stop criminals in their tracks,” she said. “I really believe we can stop serial killers from existing, stop serial rapists from existing.”
“We are an army. We can do this! So repeat after me,” Moore said, before leading the audience in a chant. “No more serial killers!”
---
There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.
Huh?
> In July 2020, GEDmatch was hacked, which resulted in all 1.45 million profiles then contained in the database to be briefly opted in to law enforcement matching; at the time, BuzzFeed News reported, just 280,000 profiles had opted in.
How rather convenient.
Realistically, I think there’s likely a bit of parallel construction going on too, likely making up flimsy excuses to hide the fact that some crimes were solved with the use of surveillance programs that have not been revealed to the general public. I’d be extremely surprised if the CIA doesn’t have a secret copy of all major commercial DNA databases.
If they were using Mitre to try to build a database of [actual, physical] fingerprints by scraping social media images, there’s no way they’d leave such low hanging fruit… hanging.
In a way where the DNA was matched to a person with a high degree of confidence. and the feds were willing to spend some serious resource on it.
Wow long do people think it would take? Would it be possible?
Big conferences must be an awesome opportunity. When people go to sign in and show id to pick up their badges and then wear the badges but that goes for a lot of companies too that have people wear various forms of cards / badges.
Physical access to homes, work, gyms, public transit, hospitals, nursing homes, and cars would make it fairly straight forward for the majority of citizens. I dont think you could scale that to a city and do it quickly.
Send out snail mail with some motivation for people to send back a physical reply?
Send out snail mail ads and collect from the garbage / recycling?
Keyboards would be awesome but harder to get to without physical access.
Public transit is good. Airports.
A crime spree could be arranged that gave law enforcement a good reason to stop and id people driving or walking around would be effective.
Vaccines would be great but hard to establish in a specific regional area.
A Qtip (or whatever)swipe of the screen of a cellphone?
Free in person give aways that required a signature?
If you just follow a person for a while walking in the city is there an easy covert way to get a sample? (Yanking out a hair is going to raise questions. ) Some form of "specialized" mini "vacum cleaner" to "suck" in cells from a bit of a distance. Probably hard to be accurate.
Could probably do mass harvesting of DNA at gyms with a certain expectations of inaccuracy that would be improved with multiple runs or DNA from sets of people in different mixes.