EFF: Victory! Gov. Brown Signs Bill Adding Sensible Requirements for DNA Collection From Minors

Victory! Gov. Brown Signs Bill Adding Sensible Requirements for DNA Collection From Minors

California's kids now have common-sense protections against unwarranted DNA collection. Gov. Jerry Brown this week signed A.B. 1584, a new law requiring law enforcement to get either judicial approval or permission from both the minor and a parent, legal guardian, or attorney before collecting a DNA sample from the minor.

EFF has supported the bill, introduced earlier this year by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, from the beginning. DNA can reveal an extraordinary amount of private information about a person, from familial relationships to medical history to predisposition for disease. Children should not be exposed to this kind of privacy invasion without strict guidelines and the advice and consent of a parent, legal guardian, or attorney. Kids need to have an adult present who represents their interests and can help them understand both their rights and the lifelong implications of handing one’s sensitive genetic material over to law enforcement.

This law will make sure that happens.

Thanks to A.B. 1584, police will now have to obtain a court order, search warrant, or the consent of both the minor and their parent, legal guardian, or attorney before collecting DNA. They will also have to automatically expunge any voluntary sample collected from a minor within two years, if the sample doesn't implicate that minor as a suspect for a criminal offense. Law enforcement must also give kids a form requesting to have their DNA sample expunged and make reasonable efforts to comply promptly with such requests.

This law was necessary to close a loophole in an existing law that attempted to limit the circumstances under which law enforcement could collect DNA from kids. Unlike A.B. 1584, however, that law only applied to DNA seized for inclusion in statewide or federal DNA databases. As Kelly Davis of the Voice of San Diego reported, police in San Diego realized they could get around the existing protections by storing DNA locally, and then instituted a policy of collecting samples from kids for "investigative purposes" by obtaining minors' "consent" but without any parental notice or approval. In at least one case, which has given rise to an ACLU lawsuit, police stopped a group of kids who were walking through a park after leaving a basketball game at a rec center and asked each to sign a form “consenting” to a cheek swab.

We applaud Gov. Brown's decision to protect the rights of California's youth by signing A.B. 1584 into law.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EFF: No Digital Surveillance of Iranians at the U.S. Border—or Within the U.S.

No Digital Surveillance of Iranians at the U.S. Border—or Within the U.S. Only days into heightened tensions between the United States and Iran, media outlets have published disturbing reports of increased scrutiny of people of Iranian descent at U.S. borders, including in at least one case involving a traveler’s phone. EFF strongly opposes any targeting of people for digital surveillance based on their race, religion, or nationality, at our border and in our interior. And we remind all members of the public to practice surveillance self-defense. Disturbing Reports from the Border On January 5, media outlets reported that more than 60 people of Iranian descent, including U.S. citizens, were held at the border between Canada and Washington state for many hours and questioned about their perceived connections to Iran. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) denied that it detained or refused entry to Iranians based on their national origin, a claim contested by accounts f
Read more

EFF: Corporate Speech Police Are Not the Answer to Online Hate

Corporate Speech Police Are Not the Answer to Online Hate A coalition of civil rights and public interest groups issued recommendations today on policies they believe Internet intermediaries should adopt to try to address hate online. While there’s much of value in these recommendations, EFF does not and cannot support the full document. Because we deeply respect these organizations, the work they do, and the work we often do together; and because we think the discussion over how to support online expression—including ensuring that some voices aren’t drowned out by harassment or threats—is an important one, we want to explain our position. We agree that online speech is not always pretty—sometimes it’s extremely ugly and causes real world harm. The effects of this kind of speech are often disproportionately felt by communities for whom the Internet has also provided invaluable tools to organize, educate, and connect. Systemic discrimination does not disappear and can even be ampl
Read more

Living on the (IT) Edge: Schneider Electric at HPE Discover 2018

Image
We’re here at HPE Discover 2018 , proudly sponsoring the event and enjoying a jam-packed few days in Las Vegas. The data center industry has experienced tremendous disruption in the last decade. The fourth Industrial Revolution, with its IT/OT convergence, the proliferation of IoT, and insatiable demand for digital connectivity, is creating the opportunity to push the envelope of performance beyond the obvious and create new business value. And there’s no bigger opportunity right now than at the edge. At the same time, these new paradigms are also driving more complexity: companies today are trying to manage a combination of environments, from large centralized data centers on-premises or in the cloud, regional edge data centers, to local edge data centers. We have more data centers, intertwined across more locations, and with more data, than ever before. All of this adds up to promising opportunities on the horizon for our customers – but an equally daunting number of new challenges
Read more