The Washington Post has a story on the privacy of newborn children’s DNA, noting that sometimes the medical data is collected and retained without parents’ knowledge or consent. The data collection is done when children are born in hospitals. “Hospitals prick the heels of more than 4 million babies born each year in the United States to collect a few drops of blood under state programs requiring that all newborns be screened for dozens of genetic disorders.”

A group of parents [is] challenging Minnesota’s practice of storing babies’ blood samples and allowing researchers to study them without their permission. The confrontation, and a similar one in Texas, has focused attention on the practice at a time when there is increasing interest in using millions of these collected “blood spots” to study diseases.

Michigan, for example, is moving millions of samples from a state warehouse in Lansing to freezers in a new “neonatal biobank” in Detroit in the hopes of helping make the economically downtrodden city a center for biomedical research. The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, is funding a $13.5 million, five-year project aimed at creating a “virtual repository” of blood samples from around the country. (more…)

In an 8-1 decision, US Supreme Court has held (pdf) that a strip search of a 13-year-old girl by Arizona school officials who were looking for drugs was illegal. Justice Souter wrote the majority opinion in Safford United School District #1 v. Redding (08-479), and Justice Thomas was the lone dissenter.

The school officials searched Savana because another student, who had been caught with ibuprofen, had accused Savana of giving her the pills. The court held that the search of Savana’s backpack and outer clothing for drugs was legal, but it was not legal to require her “to pull her bra out and to the side and shake it, and to pull out the elastic on her underpants, thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree.” Justice Souter wrote, “The meaning of such a search, and the degradation its subject may reasonably feel, place a search that intrusive in a category of its own demanding its own specific suspicions.” (more…)

Two years ago, Congress argued about overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, but failed to pass comprehensive immigration law reform. Now, the Washington Post reports that Senate Democrats are again looking to change federal immigration laws. Instead of just creating an error-filled national database of Americans’ employment eligibility, this time legislators are seeking to require “that all U.S. workers verify their identity through fingerprints or an eye scan.” I would like to emphasize that they would gather biometric data from “all U.S. workers”; not just undocumented workers.

Speaking on the eve of a White House summit with congressional leaders on immigration, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said a national system to verify work documents is necessary because Congress has failed to crack down on unscrupulous employers and illegal immigrants with fake documents.

“I’m sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card — although . . . there’ll be all kinds of protections — but we’re going to have to do it. It’s the only way,” Schumer said. [...]

A senior White House official said Obama is open to all of Schumer’s proposals, including his ID plan, saying that “he wants to listen, he wants to talk. All of it is on the table.”

There are numerous privacy and civil liberty problems that are fundamental in the creation of a national database of fingerprints and eye scans for all U.S. workers, a database that places the burden on the individual to prove that he or she is allowed to work in this country. How quickly will this database go from being strictly to prove employment eligibility to being used by police departments to gather fingerprints while circumventing the warrant process and Fourth Amendment rights of search and seizure? Who else could have access to your fingerprint and iris scans? The United States already has discussed sharing fingerprint and other biometric data of suspects with European countries. It’s a small step to opening up a national employee biometrics database to other countries. (more…)