BCT Editorial – 4/21/08

This page was last updated on April 21, 2008.

Invasion of privacy; Editorial; Beaver County Times; April 21, 2008.

The editorial subtitle is “Innocent Americans will be forced to give the government samples of their DNA.”

Since I’m lazy today, I’m taking a huge leap of faith and will assume the facts as presented in the editorial are true without doing the research I normally do. Historically, I believe you’ll find Times editorials aren’t rigorous in presenting the whole story.

To begin, I’m not in favor of this policy. Truly innocent citizens should not have their DNA on record. A compromise would be to let the courts hold the sealed DNA sample until a person is charged. If a person weren’t charged, the sample would be destroyed in the presence of the person and/or his attorney.

The Times, however, has a definite tendency when it comes to “privacy” concerns. Though the editorial claims to be upset because the laws “allow the federal government to take DNA samples from people who are guilty of no crime,” I suspect the Times would have come up with another reason to object even if there were little chance a DNA sample would be taken “from people who are guilty of no crime.”

If you recall, the Times also opposed spying on international terrorist communications without a search warrant in the name of “privacy.”

To have any credibility on privacy, the Times needs to convince me it wants to see income taxes eliminated and opposes socialized healthcare. Why? What greater invasion of privacy is there than the financial “full body cavity search” we go through every year when we must detail every aspect of our finances for multiple levels of government? The only greater invasion of privacy may be the access to our healthcare records required by socialized healthcare programs like Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, et cetera. How far would I get if I demanded a court-approved subpoena/warrant for my financial records before I submitted my tax returns? Let’s not forget roadside sobriety checkpoints.

Here’s a summary of the Times position on privacy. The Times is concerned about the privacy of probable criminals, but not about the privacy of the rest of us.