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They just solved the murder of a child near my house using a technique like this.

My understanding is they asked everyone they could find in a specific ethnic community if they would volunteer a sample for a kind of dna dragnet.

The killer was related to one of the many people sampled.

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If the DNA was gathered for one specific purpose like this and not kept on file, I think that's pretty unobjectionable. As soon as it's on file in a database, though, there's potential for uses further and further removed from those envisioned by the owners when they gave the samples.

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