Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

So New York has taken samples for all felony convictions. Now they're going to start taking them for ALL convictions: drunk and disorderly, shoplifting, turnstile jumping. Heck, I suppose if you fight a speeding ticket in court and lose that they might take a sample.

Their reasoning is that repeat offenders start small, and by getting that sample early on, they might be easier to catch later on.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/16/1428243/new-york-state-passes-dna-requirement-for-almost-all-convicted-criminals

It's only for certain crimes, mainly high-level violence. The thing that really sucks is that there's no provision for the sample being expunged if there's no indictment or conviction. If you don't want to let them take a sample, they can get a court order and forcibly take a cheek swab or blood sample. And the act of refusing it can make you guilty of another charge, sort of like refusing DUI testing.

I'm absolutely confident that there would be no mission creep, so that an arrest for shoplifting or DUI would not result in your DNA being taken.

The ACLU is suing in California, which has been collecting samples and using them to trace back family information to form new investigative leads: if they can't find Bobby, maybe Bobby's daddy or cousin knows where he is.

One of the problems with this is the concept of medical privacy. If they have your blood sample, aside from identifying "you" to a certain degree, all sorts of tests can be run: are you pregnant, do you have cancer, etc. At a basic level, I don't think this is a problem because there's probably not a single law enforcement agency crime lab in the country who has the time to run such tests when they have a back log of other identification tests to be run. But at the same time, Texas passed a law or regulation that required fetal stem cell blood to be collected and sent to a central repository, which was supposedly private and secure, then turned around and allowed research to be performed on that blood without the knowledge or consent of the parents.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20005458-38.html

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/05/20/2032223/House-Votes-To-Expand-National-DNA-Arrest-Database

Another interesting thing is that Nick Kleg, the new British Assistant Prime Minister has said that they're going to start purging the UK DNA database which has suffered from mission creep, so England is going in the exact opposite direction that we are.