And now back to our regularly scheduled program...

...Minnesota politics.

Seems that some legislators are floating a plan to expand the state's database of DNA samples. I'm a person who is pretty consistently against Big Brother uses of technology, which is so much easier these days. I am pessimistic in that barring a catastrophe or widespread opposition, eventually we will live in a society where it will be impossible to hide from anybody, government, law enforcement agency, or business, and countless databases will track who we are, where we go, and what we do. But I prefer to be dragged kicking and screaming to that future.

The thing that concerns me most in this plan is that eventually (so the story says) the program will expand to include taking DNA from 50,000 felony arrestees each year. If I'm reading that right, it would mean that people simply arrested, not convicted, could be put on file. You could do no wrong and still be swabbed.

I'm not saying that there aren't some real law enforcement benefits to having a database of DNA; there are. What I'm worried about is feature creep. Once you have this data, there are so many things you can do with it, and when the state gets pestered to allow them, what do you think they will say? As an example, remember when your Social Security Number was just for getting Social Security benefits and was not some globally used unique identifier? Me neither.