Could national ID be coming? DNA ruling has experts debating broader database

Could national ID be coming?
DNA ruling has experts debating broader database

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana law enforcement officials could find it easier to fight crime if a national database holding DNA profiles of everyone born in the United States is created as the result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month, experts say.

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But some are worried that the definition of offenses that qualify for DNA samples could be stretched to include things as minor as traffic tickets. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says allowing law enforcement to take DNA samples is simply the first step toward collecting DNA from everyone in the country.

“People are arrested all the time for talking back to a police officer, things like that,” said Ruthann Robson, a professor of constitutional law at the City University of New York. A broader database, she said, would be “kind of a profile of everybody by name, which sounds like Brave New World and Big Brother-ish.”

Supporters like Penn State Dickinson School of Law Professor David Kaye say broadening the database would make the system fairer and more effective. The current system containing only convicts and arrestees disproportionately represents minorities, Kaye said, and only allows DNA to be matched to people who already have a criminal record. Broadening the sample increases the odds of someone getting caught, even if they haven’t been caught before. “The more people who are in it, the greater the chance of finding matches when searches are done,” said Kaye, an expert on the use of DNA evidence.

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130707/NEWS07/307079913/1002/LOCAL