The Austin American Statesman published an investigative article
on the 18th of January about Travis County's colossal negligence that
led to the spoil of a freezer full of DNA samples at their crime lab.
The article goes into detail about how Travis County employees that
worked in the lab admitted in emails that they thought that the DNA
samples that were in the freezer had been compromised as well as how the
Austin Police Department believed that the DNA testing lab was "deeply
flawed".
This incident occurred last spring when crime lab employees failed
to notice that one of their freezers, that contained hundreds of DNA
samples, had stopped working. The system that they had in place to alert
them if the temperature rose past a certain amount malfunctioned, so
instead of someone being informed of the error so that it could be
corrected within a few hours, no one took notice of the improper
temperature for eight days. But what is far more troubling is the fact
that the forensic lab decided to keep the incident quiet, and dare I say
"cover up" this oversight, alerting no one outside the lab of this
serious matter. To make matters worse, the lead forensic scientist kept
putting all the blame on lack of funding.
I was shocked when I read this article. It has made me far less
trustworthy of our police force and now wonder how many other matters of
have gone unreported in different departments. It also bothers me that
no one has reported any repercussions for the individuals responsible
for the malfunction.
I am like almost everyone else and had no idea what electronic direct democracy was. After researching it, I can see the benefits of this form of government, however I believe that the cons greatly outweigh the pros.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kelli and Saba as far as their concerns go. Hacking is a big concern for me, because as we have seen time and time again, anything from the FBI to the NSA can be hacked. Right now I do not believe that the government has the sufficient resources to be able to avoid hackers from getting into the system and not only speak on other peoples' behalf but potentially shutting down the whole system which everyone would be dependent on to cast their votes.
But my biggest concern is how this will affect our generation and the next. We have all seen the rapid growth of social media and how addicted most people are to it. It seems like it would be much too easy for people to see a video, be outraged by it, and start sharing it with everyone they know, without first verifying the validity of the story. Do you remember how many people believed that they would see a green moon last year in April? All because one person posted that, and the sad reality is that this story went on for days before anyone started posting that it was a hoax. I keep seeing videos put out daily on Facebook about Donald Trump and the majority are either false or one-sided. I honestly think that today's youth would be incapable of making a correctly informed political decision since the majority simply don't go through the trouble of fact checking.
And as far as resources go, the government spend $2.1 BILLION dollars on the Obamacare website that they couldn't prevent from crashing the very first day it was launched. Right now I wouldn't trust the government to make me a cup of coffee.