February 28, 2017 at 3:13 pm
jasona.work - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 2:15 PMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 11:56 AMIt's not perfect, because it addresses one aspect of a multifaceted problem. However, it would be an improvement. As it stands today, if I walk into the bank and request a cash withdrawal of everything in my saving account, the manager will ask me for:
- my account number
- my name
- my date of birth
- my drivers license or other photo idAny of this could be stolen and/or forged, and if my name recently changed due to marriage or my appearance changes due to a health condition, gender reassignment operation or whatever, then it gets confusing. However, a DNA scan with a hash match lookup against a central database eliminates any subjective criteria like the presentation of personal information or the authenticity of documents. You either do or don't have a genetic profile that matches the owner of the bank account.
Eric, and please don't take this as criticism, I find it interesting that on the one hand, you seem to be arguing for a worldwide (or at least nationwide) "person registry" yet on the other (your next comment about Radio Shack and batteries) you're concerned about RS collecting that information.
Not to be a tin foil hat, but personally I'd be extremely leery of any sort of nation \ world wide registry for people, both from the privacy aspect and from the security aspect.
My remark about Radio Shack was a joke; I was simply remarking about it being odd that Radio Shack's marketing department would require salespeople to ask customers of batteries for their phone number while ignoring other types of purchases.
When it comes to privacy, I'm not so much concerned about a national registry or national ID. It's the collection, hoarding, and sharing of personal data that's a problem, not the ID itself. One reason why personal data is poorly secured is because there is inconsistency and a lack of standardization in how the data is stored. I used to work in the healthcare industry, and there were occasions where folks would login to their portal and see data belonging to other people, even non-related people. It's difficult and sometimes impossible to link together doctor visits, prescriptions, and lab results from multiple providers, each of whom have their own version of a patients name, dob, address, and insurance information. If you could walk into a hospital or bank and show a national ID card with your photo and fingerprint, something that's universally accepted and not easily forged, then there would be less reliance on more subjective trust based information like "What is your name, date of birth, and last address?".
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
February 28, 2017 at 3:40 pm
Eric M Russell - Monday, February 27, 2017 8:56 AMI've wondered for a long time why issues like like digital privacy and identity theft don't get talked about more often by politicians. It's something that 99% of the public care deeply and consistently about. But for whatever reason politicians even during an election season don't seem to want to go there; perhaps because certain segments of the corporate community actually profit from unregulated and friction-less digital transactions, even if it means increased incidences of fraud.
I suspect it's because the politicians don't want to upset their busisnessman cronies, who feed their campaign funding. A bigshot businessman doesn't want to be inconvenienced by people taking notice of the fact that his so-called "compliance officers" wouldn't dream of allowing heir own data into any of his corporate databases because they are absolutely unable to get anyone to address data security seriously as it might require some spending.
Tom
February 28, 2017 at 3:51 pm
Part of the issue of DNA is that it is not like a digital signature, producing a specific result. Dna matching samples a bunch of points along DNA (not the whole sequence) and compares them. Try it a different time and you may get somewhat of a different sample.
In forensic cases, this is not fatal. If the DNA sample does not match, it exonerates the individual. DNA that seems to match needs to be coordinated with other evidence, or involves a much more extensive survey than would normally be done quickly.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
February 28, 2017 at 4:47 pm
The idea of not storing much data, but merely authenticating someone's identity is interesting. I have no idea how likely collisions are, the complexity of somehow matching identity based on some test, etc. is, but it's more acceptable to me than having other data about me being stored with it. A way to authenticate a person would be a great way to ensure we identify people.
However, there will be unintended consequences and issues here. Certainly anything that tries to be factual and authoritative needs to have some way of double checking validity, which is hard to build in while maintaining security.
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March 1, 2017 at 1:29 am
drew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:15 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 8:42 AMGary Varga - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:52 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:03 AMIn a world with 7 billion people, most of whom have (or soon will have) digitized records, we need some type of unique universal identifier, like a SSN...It just isn't practical. If solely in the US you lot couldn't manage to keeps SSNs unique do you think you'll do any better when the rest of us join in? Each of our countries probably have the same horror stories. Definitely here in the UK we have had the same, or at least similar, problems with our National Insurance numbers (a.k.a. NI Number or NIN).
Eventually someone will invent an internet enabled table top DNA scanning device capable of generating a 12 alpha-numeric code which can then be used as a unique non-mutable identifier. A code generated using this method would not be dependent on regional coding standards, name changes, or any other user supplied information. You simply pass the scanner over a man's palm and it comes back with B7CEEC4C0EC4. Even he turns up dead with no personal belongings on the other side of the world, his identity could be immediately and positively identified.
As someone who has a twin brother, I'm not so sure that a DNA scanning device will ever be able to distinguish between me and my brother.
Drew
How do we know you posted this? 😉
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 1, 2017 at 6:14 am
jay-h - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 3:51 PMPart of the issue of DNA is that it is not like a digital signature, producing a specific result. Dna matching samples a bunch of points along DNA (not the whole sequence) and compares them. Try it a different time and you may get somewhat of a different sample.In forensic cases, this is not fatal. If the DNA sample does not match, it exonerates the individual. DNA that seems to match needs to be coordinated with other evidence, or involves a much more extensive survey than would normally be done quickly.
That sounds conceptually similar to (but of course an order of magnitude more complex than) the challenges involved in retina, fingerprint, or voice recognition which already exists. They would have to isolate specific DNA sequences that are proven to be suitable for the task. If the government or a well funded corporation like Google wanted to, I believe they could invent a process to scan a DNA sample and produce a unique and repeatable hash code that would scale for a population of 7 billion people. The technology wouldn't be small or cheap enough to incorporate into a cell phone, at least not until a generation later, but would rather be a device installed at banks, court houses, police departments, immigration offices, and other institutions where show-up-in-person positive identification is required.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
March 1, 2017 at 6:24 am
drew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:15 AMquote]
How do we know you posted this? 😉
Reminds me of the marvelous Mark Twain story about tweaking a reporter:
(The full account is here: http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/wilson/enconter.html)
Q. How could I think otherwise? Why, look here! who is this a picture of on the wall? Isn't that a brother of yours?
A. Oh! yes, yes, yes! Now you remind me of it, that was a brother of mine. That's William,--Bill we called him. Poor old Bill!
Q. Why? Is he dead, then?
A. Ah, well, I suppose so. We never could tell. There was a great mystery about it.
Q. That is sad, very sad. He disappeared, then?
A. Well, yes, in a sort of general way. We buried him.
Q. Buried him! Buried him without knowing whether he was dead or not?
A. O no! Not that. He was dead enough.
Q. Well, I confess that I can't understand this. If you buried him and you knew he was dead--
A. No! no! we only thought he was.
Q. O, I see! He came to life again?
A. I bet he didn't.
Q. Well, I never heard anything like this. Somebody was dead. Somebody was buried. Now, where was the mystery?
A. Ah, that's just it! That's it exactly. You see we were twins,--defunct and I,--and we got mixed in the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was drowned. But we didn't know which. Some think it was Bill, some think it was me.
Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do you think?
A. Goodness knows! I would give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful mystery has cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now, which I never have revealed to any creature before. One of us had a peculiar mark, a large mole on the back of the left hand,--that was me. That child was the one that was drowned.
Q. Very well, then, I don't see that there is any mystery about it, after all.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
March 1, 2017 at 8:50 am
drew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 2:43 PMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:40 AMdrew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:15 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 8:42 AMGary Varga - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:52 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:03 AMIn a world with 7 billion people, most of whom have (or soon will have) digitized records, we need some type of unique universal identifier, like a SSN...It just isn't practical. If solely in the US you lot couldn't manage to keeps SSNs unique do you think you'll do any better when the rest of us join in? Each of our countries probably have the same horror stories. Definitely here in the UK we have had the same, or at least similar, problems with our National Insurance numbers (a.k.a. NI Number or NIN).
Eventually someone will invent an internet enabled table top DNA scanning device capable of generating a 12 alpha-numeric code which can then be used as a unique non-mutable identifier. A code generated using this method would not be dependent on regional coding standards, name changes, or any other user supplied information. You simply pass the scanner over a man's palm and it comes back with B7CEEC4C0EC4. Even he turns up dead with no personal belongings on the other side of the world, his identity could be immediately and positively identified.
As someone who has a twin brother, I'm not so sure that a DNA scanning device will ever be able to distinguish between me and my brother.
Drew
You and your brother share very similar DNA, but not identical. As it stands today, hospitals routinely co-mingle the medical records of same sex twins.
I know that there are differences due to random mutations, DNA methylation, and mitochondrial DNA distribution during mitosis and possibly viral exposure, but I don't know exactly what the implications of that are as far as a DNA scanning device is concerned. Specifically, I don't know how much variation there is within one individual, so I don't know if the range of variations is limited enough to conclusively exclude a sample from an identical twin. Are there any other variations that I may have missed?
Drew
A normal DNA test doesn't compare the entire genome (that's a pretty big dataset, about 100Mb raw IIRC), but a range of selected markers. So, depanding on how many and which are tested ...
I'm a DBA.
I'm not paid to solve problems. I'm paid to prevent them.
March 1, 2017 at 9:27 am
andrew gothard - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 8:50 AM...So, depanding on how many and which are tested ...I'm a DBA.
Funny when considering your signature 😀
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 1, 2017 at 10:47 am
andrew gothard - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 8:50 AMdrew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 2:43 PMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:40 AMdrew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:15 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 8:42 AMGary Varga - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:52 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:03 AMIn a world with 7 billion people, most of whom have (or soon will have) digitized records, we need some type of unique universal identifier, like a SSN...It just isn't practical. If solely in the US you lot couldn't manage to keeps SSNs unique do you think you'll do any better when the rest of us join in? Each of our countries probably have the same horror stories. Definitely here in the UK we have had the same, or at least similar, problems with our National Insurance numbers (a.k.a. NI Number or NIN).
Eventually someone will invent an internet enabled table top DNA scanning device capable of generating a 12 alpha-numeric code which can then be used as a unique non-mutable identifier. A code generated using this method would not be dependent on regional coding standards, name changes, or any other user supplied information. You simply pass the scanner over a man's palm and it comes back with B7CEEC4C0EC4. Even he turns up dead with no personal belongings on the other side of the world, his identity could be immediately and positively identified.
As someone who has a twin brother, I'm not so sure that a DNA scanning device will ever be able to distinguish between me and my brother.
Drew
You and your brother share very similar DNA, but not identical. As it stands today, hospitals routinely co-mingle the medical records of same sex twins.
I know that there are differences due to random mutations, DNA methylation, and mitochondrial DNA distribution during mitosis and possibly viral exposure, but I don't know exactly what the implications of that are as far as a DNA scanning device is concerned. Specifically, I don't know how much variation there is within one individual, so I don't know if the range of variations is limited enough to conclusively exclude a sample from an identical twin. Are there any other variations that I may have missed?
Drew
A normal DNA test doesn't compare the entire genome (that's a pretty big dataset, about 100Mb raw IIRC), but a range of selected markers. So, depanding on how many and which are tested ...
That's what I'm trying to say. Eric said that there were differences, but I don't think those differences are sufficient to distinguish between me and my identical twin brother in typical DNA scanning device. I'm asking him to clarify, because he seems to know a lot more about scanning DNA.
Drew
J. Drew Allen
Business Intelligence Analyst
Philadelphia, PA
March 1, 2017 at 1:52 pm
drew.allen - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 10:47 AMandrew gothard - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 8:50 AMdrew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 2:43 PMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:40 AMdrew.allen - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 9:15 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 8:42 AMGary Varga - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:52 AMEric M Russell - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:03 AMIn a world with 7 billion people, most of whom have (or soon will have) digitized records, we need some type of unique universal identifier, like a SSN...It just isn't practical. If solely in the US you lot couldn't manage to keeps SSNs unique do you think you'll do any better when the rest of us join in? Each of our countries probably have the same horror stories. Definitely here in the UK we have had the same, or at least similar, problems with our National Insurance numbers (a.k.a. NI Number or NIN).
Eventually someone will invent an internet enabled table top DNA scanning device capable of generating a 12 alpha-numeric code which can then be used as a unique non-mutable identifier. A code generated using this method would not be dependent on regional coding standards, name changes, or any other user supplied information. You simply pass the scanner over a man's palm and it comes back with B7CEEC4C0EC4. Even he turns up dead with no personal belongings on the other side of the world, his identity could be immediately and positively identified.
As someone who has a twin brother, I'm not so sure that a DNA scanning device will ever be able to distinguish between me and my brother.
Drew
You and your brother share very similar DNA, but not identical. As it stands today, hospitals routinely co-mingle the medical records of same sex twins.
I know that there are differences due to random mutations, DNA methylation, and mitochondrial DNA distribution during mitosis and possibly viral exposure, but I don't know exactly what the implications of that are as far as a DNA scanning device is concerned. Specifically, I don't know how much variation there is within one individual, so I don't know if the range of variations is limited enough to conclusively exclude a sample from an identical twin. Are there any other variations that I may have missed?
Drew
A normal DNA test doesn't compare the entire genome (that's a pretty big dataset, about 100Mb raw IIRC), but a range of selected markers. So, depanding on how many and which are tested ...
That's what I'm trying to say. Eric said that there were differences, but I don't think those differences are sufficient to distinguish between me and my identical twin brother in typical DNA scanning device. I'm asking him to clarify, because he seems to know a lot more about scanning DNA.
Drew
There may yet be hope for you and your twin brother.
... Using what’s known as ultra-deep, next-generation sequencing, a team in Germany has developed a test that claims to reliably identify which twin a biological sample belongs to. The test works by taking a close look at the genetic letters (called base pairs) comprising the 3 billion-base-pair human genome. Because mutations randomly occur during development, even genetically “identical†twins will vary at a handful of locations, says Burkhard Rolf, a forensic scientist at Eurofins Scientific, the company that developed the test. ...
DNA Test That Distinguishes Identical Twins May Be Used in Court for First Time
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/genetic-test-distinguishes-identical-twins-may-used-court-first-time/
As for a consumer end device that can scan DNA and calculate something like a 12 character hash code, that's probably years away, but if Google or DOD set their mind to it, I fell confident they could puzzle out a solution, especially when next generation quantum processors are readily available.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
March 2, 2017 at 6:38 am
Also we need to realize that PCR amplification used in DNA matching is a slow process that must be performed under meticulous laboratory standards to prevent cross contamination. Not close to be currently usable as a quick test.
[And be sure not to shake hands with anyone before putting your hand in that scanner]
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
March 2, 2017 at 8:56 am
jay-h - Thursday, March 2, 2017 6:38 AMAlso we need to realize that PCR amplification used in DNA matching is a slow process that must be performed under meticulous laboratory standards to prevent cross contamination. Not close to be currently usable as a quick test.[And be sure not to shake hands with anyone before putting your hand in that scanner]
So we are basically saying that DNA tests are good for a scenario like a court but not so much for something like passport control.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 2, 2017 at 9:36 am
Gary Varga - Thursday, March 2, 2017 8:56 AMjay-h - Thursday, March 2, 2017 6:38 AMAlso we need to realize that PCR amplification used in DNA matching is a slow process that must be performed under meticulous laboratory standards to prevent cross contamination. Not close to be currently usable as a quick test.[And be sure not to shake hands with anyone before putting your hand in that scanner]
So we are basically saying that DNA tests are good for a scenario like a court but not so much for something like passport control.
Court cases involve lots of evidence and extended process (which could take weeks or months) to generate the DNA report and expertise to do the matching. A great deal care must be used to avoid contamination and mixing other DNA, especially that in the area of the crime scene. It is not suitable for a quick check on the way through a checkpoint.
On the other hand, electronic fingerprint scans are simple and fast.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
March 2, 2017 at 10:17 am
jay-h - Thursday, March 2, 2017 9:36 AMGary Varga - Thursday, March 2, 2017 8:56 AMjay-h - Thursday, March 2, 2017 6:38 AMAlso we need to realize that PCR amplification used in DNA matching is a slow process that must be performed under meticulous laboratory standards to prevent cross contamination. Not close to be currently usable as a quick test.[And be sure not to shake hands with anyone before putting your hand in that scanner]
So we are basically saying that DNA tests are good for a scenario like a court but not so much for something like passport control.
Court cases involve lots of evidence and extended process (which could take weeks or months) to generate the DNA report and expertise to do the matching. A great deal care must be used to avoid contamination and mixing other DNA, especially that in the area of the crime scene. It is not suitable for a quick check on the way through a checkpoint.
On the other hand, electronic fingerprint scans are simple and fast.
Which is great, unless they're involved in a fire and their hands are burned. After major trauma, your fingerprints might not ever come back the same.
Also - once you start putting those numbers out, someone will invariably find a way to hijack the numbering somehow. What do we do then? issue them new hands?
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
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