Defense lawyers fight DNA sampling on the sly

[flashl]

The two Sacramento, California, sheriff detectives tailed their suspect, Rolando Gallego, at a distance. They did not have a court order to compel him to give a DNA sample, but their assignment was to get one anyway - without his knowledge.

Recently, the sheriff's cold case unit had extracted a DNA profile from blood on a towel found 15 years earlier at the scene of the slaying of Gallego's aunt. If his DNA matched, they believed they would finally be able to close the case.

On that spring day in 2006, the detectives watched as Gallego lit a cigarette, smoked it and threw away the butt. That was all they needed.

The practice, known among law enforcement officials as surreptitious sampling, is growing in popularity even as defense lawyers and civil liberties advocates argue that it violates a constitutional right to privacy. Gallego's trial on murder charges, scheduled for May, is the latest of several in which the defense argues that the police circumvented the protection against unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

IHT

Law Enforcement-->ChoicePoint-->Feds

ChoicePoint Government Services is a leading provider of fusion center (state databases) technology and implementation. Our flexible approach allows us to create a fusion

ChoicePoint (NYSE: CPS) is a data aggregation company based in Alpharetta, near Atlanta, Georgia, USA, that acts as a private intelligence service to government and industry ... The firm maintains more than 17 billion records of individuals and businesses, which it sells to an estimated 100,000 clients, including 7,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies (30 March 2005 estimates) ... ChoicePoint's database of personal information contains names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit reports, and other sensitive data. In 2005, this database contained 250 terabytes of data on 220 million people ... The company's acquisition of publicly listed investigative database company - DBT Online of Boca Raton, Florida - for US$444 million in 2000 led to its involvement in the Florida Election Controversy in the 2000 US presidential elections ... ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.

The Spies Who Shag Us: HR 811, ChoicePoint, and our elections For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

edit: Changed highlights

[DCKit]

1. How does ChoicePoint get our DNA commercially?

The only accurate and reliable source I can think of is our doctors and that would be a breach of ethics.

[flashl]

2. Other sources ....

Big Brother's little helper
ChoicePoint's mission is simple. The company amasses oodles of gigabytes of little pieces of just about every American's existence. Some of the information may be public and obvious, like property records or criminal histories. But one might mistakenly consider other pieces confidential or inconsequential, such as DNA samples turned over in a criminal investigation, or responses to a magazine survey asking where you last bought toothpaste, and what brand you chose.

"ChoicePoint Cares" - taking DNA samples to hunt for those missing kids on milk cartons.

ChoicePoint Affiliate:Bode Technology Group, Inc., a DNA identification company;

[Callisto32]

3. The most telling

I think this particular statement, from the first article linked above is probably the most interesting in its implications."We are beginning to see a shift in the traditional privacy debate from simply focusing on an individual's right to privacy, to also including consideration of society's right to protect itself..." As far as I can tell "society" as such, has no rights. Rather, rights are things which are reserved to the individuals within that society. To assert such comes frighteningly close, in my mind, to the fascist assertion that the state/society is an organic being with its own interests. That this is coming from a company that does what this one does, and that has such apparent ties with our federal government is most disconcerting to me.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[OKthatsIT]

5. So where is CONGRESS when you need them?

I heard they're collecting DNA for traffic tickets in Texas.