Friday, February 15, 2019

Who Favors the Arizona Rapid DNA Database Expansion Bill?

Arizona Senate Bill 1475, discussed yesterday, has not been greeted with widespread joy. The West Maricopa Association of Realtors was apoplectic. Its Director of Government Affairs had this to say:
Senator Livingston, you and I would do well to read Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”. His premise is as true today as it was 250 years ago: Man is given natural rights as part of his existence. He does not join a society or form a government in order to lose those rights.
She did not explain why the "rights of man" enjoyed by real estate agents keep the state from ascertaining and recording their "DNA IDs" but not their fingerprints.

The vociferous opposition already has produced drastic surgery to the bill. According to YourValley.net,
[An] updated draft of the bill focuses on jobs that involve caring for people with intellectual disabilities. It is restricted to those who ... provide[] direct care in an intermediate care facility for individuals with intellectual disabilities .... Messages to Sen. Livingston were not returned, however, according to chamber sources, he introduced the bill in response to Phoenix’s Hacienda Healthcare incident in which a licensed nurse practitioner impregnated a comatose patient.
But the sheer scope of the bill is not the only unusual part of it. Why, for example, does it demand samples to be processed solely by a particular type of instrument -- a self contained microfluidic capillary electrophoreses system known colloquially as "Rapid DNA"? Where did the bill's operative language and definitions of "DNA ID" and "genetic profile" come from? They are not standard terms in the forensic DNA field. But they appear on the website of a particular manufacturer of a Rapid DNA instrument. That manufacturer is ANDE, "the global leader in Rapid DNA," and the only request to speak in favor of the bill comes from "Mike Williams, ANDE(2/15/2019)."

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