He argues that at present, DNA databases are 'fraught' with problems of discrimination, the disproportionate bias towards racial minorities already having prompted one commentator to dub it 'Jim Crow's database'. This is exacerbated by the use of profiling methods and 'familial DNA search' - searching among the relatives of partial DNA matches as potential suspects when full matches cannot be found.
Instead, he recommends the far more just solution of placing everybody's DNA profile on the database:
Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of “junk” DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA “fingerprint.”
The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole. Aside from the ability in some cases to determine whether two individuals are closely related, DNA profiles have nothing sensitive to disclose.
He thinks this would be relatively easy to administer, requiring only the introduction of a mandatory sample taking either at birth, or as prerequisites to a drivers licence or social security card. Samples taken at this point would be used only to produce one of these 26 numbered profiles, after which they would be destroyed. I think there may still be objections to make here, however, that derive simply from the administrative scale of the proposal. It seems plausible to me to worry about DNA samples being taken for the purposes of creating a profile being destroyed in a timely fashion and being kept securely in the interim. I can well believe that the process would be secure and efficient much of the time, for much of the country, but if the proposal is to take samples from every single citizen I suspect its inevitable that there will be some malfunction of the sort that has become all too familiar - the information is placed on a CD or laptop that is left on a train, or some disgruntled employee decides to start selling the information on.
One part of his argument I find even more interesting is what he has to say about how this would change people's attitudes to the security and integrity of such a database:
Since every American would have a stake in keeping the data private and ensuring that only the limited content vital to law enforcement was recorded, there would be far less likelihood of government misuse than in the case of a more selective database.
I'm sympathetic to this line of thought, but I'm not wholly convinced that it would change people's priorities as much as Seringhaus thinks: 'everybody' has been quite vulnerable to clumsy losing of private government held data on previous occasions without it turning into an enormous issue. Furthermore, malfunctions in the security of such a system might easily be localised to particular areas or sectors of the community. For example, suppose that the function of generating profiles becomes the responsibility of those issuing driving licenses or birth certificates and that these are matters for local authorities. Some will fulfil this function much better than others and thus, the security of the DNA may be much lower in areas where these local authorities perform poorly. In such a case a majority could remain unconcerned about the risk the policy poses to a minority.
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