New federal rules limit police searches of family tree DNA databases | Hacker News Reader

New federal rules limit police searches of family tree DNA databases

sciencemag.org

382 pointsbookofjoe217 comments

I think if law enforcement uses these DNA databases then their entire department should be required to submit each officer’s DNA and that of their immediate family members too. If prosecutors or defending attorneys want to use these databases, then the same should go for them. If a judge admits the use of DNA evidence for a case, then the same goes for them. Politicians by virtue passing these laws should get that same treatment.

Maybe the way to solve this issue is for law enforcement to be required to mail a letter to everyone who is in the database that they are a suspect in whatever crime being investigated each time law enforcement executed or delegates the execution of a search query. I mean that is how search works: you search everything or you compute hash functions on everything to avoid searching everything, but you’ve effectively tested whether or not everyone in the database is the suspect.

On a slightly different topic, how well are these DNA databases secured and maintained? A person’s DNA might not change, but the corresponding entry in the DNA database is subject to theft, manipulation, and data corruption. What’s stopping the presumption of innocence until proven guilty becoming the presumption of innocence until the DNA database reports a match? Arguably, people should treat DNA databases with the same level of suspicion and concern as some view electronic voting: absolutely vulnerable and absolutely abusable until repeatedly proven to be not sufficiently many times.

I don't think these are typically used (or could be used) to convict someone, I think it's mostly used to guide investigations.

This is correct, it's used to find suspects, not to convict anyone.

AKA fishing

If done right, spear fishing.

I'm a privacy guy, but the science really is there to use DNA to narrow a list of suspects. You can't say the same for much of forensic science, or for that matter mass surveillance technologies.

However, the list of suspects can still lack the actual criminal(s), but still contain an innocent with poor, but true alibi.

Here's an actual case of an innocent person who faced charges and a high probability of losing their freedom due to DNA transference:

https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/

The take-away is that shed skin cells containing DNA can migrate and a DNA match from that type of evidence shouldn't be relied on as proof of anything.

To my view, the combination of DNA transference, advancing DNA collection / analysis techniques, the mere existence of DNA databases, and familial searches are absolutely terrifying.

Good counterpoint, definitely an issue. When the police find macroscopic quantities of bodily fluids, however, it would seem to be madness not to use the evidence.

Absolutely.

I do question if society is better off catching a few more criminals through these databases and familial matching vs the potential for innocents to be imprisoned based on nothing more than a DNA match against skin cells.

I'm also not too fond of the idea of my relatives' DNA being used to draw suspicion to another relative just because someone's DNA wound up in a database. To me it's just another one of those things (ALPRs, all the compilations of "it's just metadata") that erode our privacy and give the state a great deal of power for relatively little benefit to the people.

All crimes don't get solved, all criminals don't get caught, and in a society where everyone's a law-breaker because there are too many laws to know them all and so many of them are dumb, that's how things should be.

"Fishing" in police work is kinda the opposite:

You investigate someone, hoping to find some law they might have broken.

This is trying to find out who committed an already known serious crime. That's just "police work", in my view.

Except of course that possibly the only link between the suspects and the crime is the DNA, they may not have committed anything.

But once such a suspect is lined up the search is over and all that will happen is to look for confirmation rather than exculpation.

Any suspect can always be innocent.

There is nothing special about DNA evidence that makes it worse or better in that regard.

You dont have a warrant to find those peoples things.

Get a warrant before searching for each persons DNA, not search each persons DNA then get a warrant

Why wouldn't they be allowed to be used? Anything that guides an investigation is supposed to be admissable evidence or else you get into fruit of the poisonous tree territory, which is illegal. Not saying it wouldn't happen still, but they wouldn't be talking about using it in that case. It'd be like with stingrays where they publicly claim that they got a tip from a confidential informant and drop cases on anyone who gets close to the truth so the never actually get a judge to tell them they can't do it.

> Anything that guides an investigation is supposed to be admissable evidence or else you get into fruit of the poisonous tree territory, which is illegal.

Slight correction here.

The FPT doctrine makes it so most[0] evidence obtained illegally cannot be admitted. It doesn't work in reverse, it does not imply that all inadmissible evidence is illegal.

For example, the first half of many investigations is full of inadmissible hearsay, before you narrow in on what happened and find the people who actually saw something and can testify. There's nothing wrong with talking to people to figure out who knows things, and see how stories changed when they were told to different people, so you can more fully understand what happened.

How this applies to your main question --

It might be very difficult to use a DNA database company results in a US court because you might have to involve a ton of witnesses to vouch for every part of the process. Suppose the defense asked, "But how do we know the post office didn't mix up different samples that day!?" You would be forced to either (a) have the USPS provide testimony establishing a full chain of custody, or (b) just test the defendant now to verify the match. It will always be easier to do (b), so I'd guess[1] everyone just skips to that step.

[0] Even FPT has exceptions...

[1] Maybe there are other procedural ways to approach this that are more common now, I haven't been involved in cases like these or researched it specifically, my criminal procedure knowledge is getting really dated so I might be wrong here.

> > Anything that guides an investigation is supposed to be admissable evidence or else you get into fruit of the poisonous tree territory, which is illegal.

> Slight correction here.

> The FPT doctrine makes it so most[0] evidence obtained illegally cannot be admitted. It doesn't work in reverse, it does not imply that all inadmissible evidence is illegal.

> For example, the first half of many investigations is full of inadmissible hearsay, before you narrow in on what happened and find the people who actually saw something and can testify. There's nothing wrong with talking to people to figure out who knows things, and see how stories changed when they were told to different people, so you can more fully understand what happened.

> How this applies to your main question --

> It might be very difficult to use a DNA database company results in a US court because you might have to involve a ton of witnesses to vouch for every part of the process. Suppose the defense asked, "But how do we know the post office didn't mix up different samples that day!?" You would be forced to either (a) have the USPS provide testimony establishing a full chain of custody, or (b) just test the defendant now to verify the match. It will always be easier to do (b), so I'd guess[1] everyone just skips to that step.

I never thought of this but it would be surprising if the USPS _didn't_ maintain some sort of chain of custody of mail items, at least at the bag level or whatever unit they use.

I would be super surprised if they _did_ that seems like a massive amount of work for not much gain.

Maybe something like logistics (i.e., bag went out for delivery on truck FOO) but I doubt they track everyone that has had access to it.

USPS has been scanning all mail going through sorting facilities with cameras for years now. All mail is photographed, image goes into a database, image is OCR processed, etc. This is only in recent years, but still. Interesting stuff: https://www.newsweek.com/postal-service-photographs-every-pi...

> I never thought of this but it would be surprising if the USPS _didn't_ maintain some sort of chain of custody of mail items, at least at the bag level or whatever unit they use.

Probably so. And in civil contract law we almost presume the USPS works more or less like a black box and always functions correctly. I mean, more specifically here, you might not have to question the USPS but might have to question the lab techs, or some company representative, and open up debates about what safeguards they use to prevent samples from getting mixed up. Lots of openings you could avoid by just testing on site, so that will always be easier. You generally just do whatever you can to remove extraneous witnesses to simplify your argument.

The subtle trick with US criminal law is that it is still a "testimonial" system. You have to have someone vouch for every piece of evidence. If you take photos of the crime scene you technically have to ask someone questions like, "do these represent the scene of the crime?" ("How would you even know? What makes you an expert on what this place looks like?") Some of this stuff can get waived but in contentious cases you dot your is and cross your ts.

Physical evidence is a bit like a hacked on extension of an old oral only court system. You originally just asked a bunch of villagers what happened and hoped they were sufficiently scared of swearing oaths to not lie.

Unless they use parallel construction after the fact...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Which is the illegal part.

But also a hard to discover part and a hard to fight part.

That does not seem to be enough to stop it from happening.

The whole second half of my original comment is on how even if it was illegal, we still wouldn't be seeing them talking about it so publicly, comparing it to their use of stingrays which is pretty much veiled in secrecy.

"unbelievable" on Netflix is a good example of such leads- family tree DNA leads to two brothers

If you have somebody in custody, you can double-check the DNA record with a new cheek swab.

The problem with fishing expeditions on DNA databases is that when you run a 'one in a million false positive' test against a database of 300,000,000 people, you're going to get 300 false positives.

More than one of those suckers just might not have an alibi.

I am curious about the actual false positive rate and how they compound. To use your hypothetical number, if the false positive rate is one in a million per test, if law enforcement tests your DNA sample against 700,000 samples from crime scenes, there is a 50% chance at least one of them will be a match due to false positive [1]. That is much scarier than what one in a million suggests.

[1] (1 - 1e-6) ^ 700,000 = 49.6 % chance of no false positive match

Or you now have 299,999,700 probable negatives, and 300 possible positives to review for motive, method, and opportunity before you start looking at/for alibis.

Unless you've got a cold case, that seems like more potential suspects than a general person may reasonably have.

Oh yeah, lots of American police want to work this hard; there's probably five or six of them at least. What most police will do instead is arrest the first name on the list. When she or he documents an alibi, they'll arrest the second name on the list. Eventually, some poor bastard who lives in the same state will have gone hiking alone the day of the crime, or stayed home and slept after a week of overtime, or whatever. Unless there is a statistician on the jury, that person is going to prison.

Statisticians probably get excluded in jury selection, along with anybody else whose profession indicates they have a clue.

https://www.quora.com/Are-engineers-usually-excused-from-jur...

That's like saying police shouldn't be allowed to use Google's "similar image" search because there could be false positives among the similar images.

These genetic databases are tools used for investigation to identify suspects. Once the suspect is identified, the investigators still have to build a case against them, including obtaining their DNA directly for testing against the crime scene DNA. Since all the cases I've read about the police got the suspect's DNA samples from the garbage, it doesn't seem like the genetic research itself is even enough to get a warrant for the suspect's DNA.

The hypothesis of this example is that the unfortunate suspect's DNA "matches" the crime scene DNA. Of course it's going to "match" when they test it again. The point is that when the original match is against a huge population, you're going to find a bunch of matches, most or all of whom are innocent. Picking one out of that set and then confirming that one is really in that set doesn't prove anything.

I'm not an expert, but I would guess it would be possible to have an exact match on the genetic fingerprinting, but then do a full genome sequencing to confirm that the two samples are from different people.

The funny thing is that although I have often heard about the police finding an exact DNA match with someone who was provably not at the crime scene, I've never heard about anyone doing a different DNA test afterwards to investigate what happened: did a fragment of skin get carried in the wind from one city to another, did samples get mixed up in a laboratory, or was the match a false one, akin to a hash collision?

These DNA tests do not use full genome sequencing, they use SNPs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNP_genotyping

I agree with your conclusion in general, but you add in some very basic secondary checks and you won't get that many false positives... do they live anywhere near the crime? Do they have any motive or opportunity to commit the crime? Were they in the area at the time?

So now you are fishing with a net with smaller holes. You're going to catch suspects that look bad because you've selected for that but that still may not have anything to do with the crime you are investigating.

God forbid any of them are minorities and the victim a white person, you're 95% on the road to a conviction.

But if you're testing 300Mi most of those are probably not even in you jurisdiction or have no ties to the case

Resampling DNA before conviction would fix the specific issue of the digital record being subject to tampering, I kind of assume this is done already.

The real nightmare is that we might be right around the corner from DNA being writable to the extent that you could make mock DNA to plant at a crime-scene/evidence-locker, and there might be a couple awkward decades where the courts believe the FBI when they claim to have found DNA matches (just like that time they systematically pretended they could identify hairs, and convicted people of murder based on hairs that were literally from dogs in some cases). We'll catch on eventually if they try it, but it would suck for those of us convicted on falsified evidence. I wouldn't be so paranoid about that possibility if they hadn't lied about the dog hairs for decades.

> right around the corner from DNA being writable

Why bother when it's trivial to copy existing DNA? The evildoer just needs to get a tiny sample from someone who'd made a decent frame.

Sure, then you've got the problem of how to create a DNA-bearing artifact that'll fool forensics -- a spilled puddle of pure chromosomes would be weird -- but that'd be true in either case.

I've read a couple books where the opposite was done. Intentionally dump huge amounts of DNA into the area to make any tracing pointless. One amusing and gross way was vacuuming bus seats for the material.

Keyboards are a great source of material. They accumulate no end of crap over time.

I wonder how often public library keyboards are cleaned, or the ones in university computer labs. When I was in college pulling all nighters in the computer lab I regularly saw the lab being cleaned, but I can't remember ever seeing the keyboards getting dusted off, let alone wiped off with disinfectants.

Go to two or three libraries in different corners of town, get what you want from the keyboards, and you should have quite the collection of DNA.

With the ease of travel I'd suggest go to libraries in different states or countries. Libraries close to major airports so that many people are likely to travel between them. (ie don't pick a city in the middle of nowhere just large enough to have a private airport)

Fun activity: turn the keyboard upside down over a sheet of newsprint or butcher paper, and tap the front corner gently on a hard surface.

The word for this type of accumulation of mixed biological material, crumbs, dandruff, eyelashes, and such is "kroonch".

Reminds me of a scene in The Town - they were going to rob a bank, and they collected whole bags of hair from a barbershop floor, and spread it during the robbery.

Wouldn't that be quite useful for police?

They may be able to pinpoint a location - the barber where all the DNA matches go to have a haircut, and a time - soon after all those with majority DNA in the pile of hair went to the Barber's. Then they can analyse who was in the area around the time and find a person involved.

My thoughts exactly. The only true way is to appear to have never been there forensically, leave no sort of evidence. Security through obscurity only works in some instances.

There was a murder in Nebraska where crime scene was liberally cleaned with bleach to obliterate DNA evidence. Still no conviction despite a lot of circumstantial evidence. This was partially compounded by older DNA technology that destroyed the sample while processing it.

> This was partially compounded by older DNA technology that destroyed the sample while processing it.

Can you point to current DNA tech which doesn't destroy the sample while processing it?

For PCR you only need a super-tiny bit, then you can amplify it as much as you want. I guess you're still technically destroying that tiny bit, but it hardly makes a difference when you only need a few molecules.

That wouldn't actually do anything for DNA, cut hair doesn't actually contain any DNA at all the only way to get DNA from hair is if the follicle is still attached which wouldn't be true generally in a barber shop.

Not true anymore.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/hair-dna-murder.h...

The Unabomber retrieved pubic hair from a public restroom to plant as a false clue in one of his bombs[0].

0: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1998-05-05-980505...

Sometimes the best way to hide is in plain sight.

Indeed! We did Polymerase Chain Reaction experiments when I was in senior biology in high school almost 20 years ago.

$150 for 10 groups: Edvotek 330 Amplification of DNA by PCR, For 10 Lab Groups https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004W7ZAYI

Because if you make an oligo from someone's digital data it's harder to link you - you may never have been on the same continent together.

It's like snatching handbags vs online credit card fraud - the reach of criminals to victims got a lot bigger.

This is already here: https://www.forensicmag.com/news/2015/02/dna-evidence-can-be...

DNA has long lost its aura of invincibility.

A partial or even complete match is not enough to convict anyone.

And with technology like CRISPR, you kinda wonder how that will impact forensic science.

Not at all, probably.

From what I know about CRISPR, and forensic DNA testing, it should be extremely difficult or impossible to, for example, change your "genetic fingerprint" as it is called.

If I remember correctly, those methods primarily use repetitive patterns, which should be hard to modify with CRISPR. And you'd need to modify hundreds of them, and in billions of cells of your body (even if you try to only get white blood cells and their progenitors).

That sounds like something nation states would be able to do well before it's acknowledged.

Another nightmare, it's already possible to create convincing audio samples of someone else's voice that can be used for framing. I'm sure believable, fake video footage is around the corner too. Then what? You can create fake audio/video of anyone committing crimes. Or it can be used to fabricate an alibi for someone who is actually guilty. Not sure where we go after that. Maybe back to the time before audio/video technology was invented and rely solely on witness testimony.

Deepfaked videos are here already, I could see one passing as believable evidence (especially if it's shrunk down to a lower resolution, as in a high quality deepfake pretending to be a cellphone video).

We had this brief period of history where good records of actual events were cheap to capture and expensive/impossible to fake (governments have been airbrushing photos for most of this period, but videos seem to have been tougher). We're at the end of that now, but the public hasn't quite caught on. I think it'll take at least one high profile case getting overturned before society at large stops believing in videos. Then we're essentially back to trusting people at their word/digital-signature, and we'll probably have "trusted" security camera companies that install tamper-proof cameras at multiple angles that cryptographically sign videos while streaming them to remote servers. Before that, and probably after it as well, some of us will rot behind bars based on state-forged evidence.

People said the same thing when photo-editing software was new. How is this any different?

> rely solely on witness testimony.

Bad part about that - even today - is that we know for a fact that what people remember/recall isn't necessarily what actually occurred. Also, as time goes on, those recollections can become more unreliable.

We know that the mind confabulates, making things up to fill in gaps - both at the time something occurs, and after the fact to "fill in the story".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183265/

https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/starklab/false-memory-eyewitne...

Unfortunately, the legal system has been slow in acknowledging this - on top of so many other things found and/or known to be false or bias - two big ones are so-called "lie detector" systems, and "blood spatter analysis".

Fortunately, lie detector "evidence" is generally not admissible in the United States (at least I think for criminal cases?) - but blood spatter analysis is still considered to be a "real science", when it may be anything but:

https://features.propublica.org/blood-spatter/blood-spatter-...

It seems like any competent defense attorney would insist on resampling, or alternatively insist this evidence thrown out duebto lack of chain of custody.

Signed, not a lawyer.

Insisting on resampling would be stupid, it will match twice that is not the problem. But if you insist on resampling then you are giving the evidence more weight than it can bear, much better to show that statistically it does not have much weight at all even if it matches (once, twice or more is not relevant).

The cold cases broken open are the ones that are left after all the other methods have already been exhausted. Sure, some of those might have remained unsolved if not for this method. But that does nothing to show the method by itself works better than all the other police work, for that to be concluded you'd have to compare with all the cases that were solved with ordinary police work and then to conclude that if all of them were first attempted to be solved with this method that the total outcome would be an improvement.

That seems unlikely. So for a very small fraction of extra cases solved a very large change in evidence gathering methods and dragnet style fishing for suspects does not seem to be worth it to me.

Stupid if your client is guilty and you trust the database, not so stupid if your client insists they are innocent and the database governance processes are suspect.

That test will run the same way twice unless it has been tampered with, you'd have to be pretty sure before taking a gamble on that. The chances of a false positive are >> the chances of database tampering, why attack the harder target?

Law enforcement in the US could build a pretty powerful genetic genealogy database just using their own DNA.

I know that members of the military already have been entered into DNA databases, and there are reasons to do this with police officers and firefighters. Mostly to identify them postmortem.

I don't subscribe to DNA information being a secret. It tends to be "secret" in the sense that it is non-trivial to obtain. But you leave behind a trail of DNA everywhere. Ultimately, it cannot be held secret.

Therefor it is more important to regulate the use of such information, for example to prevent discrimination.

i suspect the military/leo databases are not the ones being searched in criminal cases

In fact when your DNA is taken for the military database it is explicitly stated that it will not be used for criminal cases. If anyone managed to search the database, that would certainly get thrown out by a court.

> In fact when your DNA is taken for the military database it is explicitly stated that it will not be used for criminal cases. If anyone managed to search the database, that would certainly get thrown out by a court.

I wouldn't be so sure. Evidence observed during the execution of a warrant against the incorrect property is still valid and admissable, for example. Not saying this kind of thing applies in this specific case but thought the idea worth mentioning.

Aren't there exceptions when there is a reasonable cause to suspect a member of the military?

>The value of these websites for law enforcement was highlighted last year when Joseph DeAngelo was charged with a series of rapes and murders that had occurred decades earlier. Investigators tracked down the suspect, dubbed the Golden State Killer, by uploading a DNA profile from a crime scene to a public ancestry website, identifying distant relatives, then using traditional genealogy and other information to narrow their search. The approach has led to arrests in at least 60 cold cases around the country.

It seems like a pretty big loss if these types of cases cannot be solved in the future.

As distasteful as it might be, you have to draw the line somewhere. Warrantless searches of every home and vehicle in the country would probably solve a lot of crimes too. Do you want to shred the USC to make that happen?

The database that police use is GEDMatch, it's an opt-in database run by volunteers that people upload their DNA to for the sole purpose of being findable by their DNA.

GEDMatch doesn't even do the DNA testing themselves.

There has been quite a bit of thought and writing about "you made your choice, now we choose the consequences" over the years, though, admittedly, few probably predicted the stacking of new consequences upon those previously assessed. Well, outside of the Black Mirror writer's room, anyway.

Okay... So if they decide not to be findable by DNA anymore they can just go delete their info from GEDMatch.

https://www.gedmatch.com/tos.htm

>You understand that future genealogical and non-genealogical uses may be developed, including uses that GEDmatch cannot predict or foresee. If you find any of these current or future uses unacceptable, do not provide Raw Data to GEDmatch, and remove any of your Raw Data already provided to this Site.

I fail to see what this has to do with suspending the US Constitution.

f you find any of these current or future uses unacceptable, do not provide Raw Data to GEDmatch

Hah, this reminds me of those drug commercials with disclaimers not to take the drug being advertised if you're allergic to the drug being advertised.

It's more like--- compromises made about privacy and legality based on present technology don't always look so good carried forward.

Most of our rules about what police can do to gather evidence is based on 19th century America.

So we came up with compromises like...

If a suspect is holding a piece of documentation personally, a search warrant is required; but if a business holds the records, a subpoena is enough. But suddenly almost all of our correspondence, personal photos, etc, is in cloud providers' hands, and ditto for basically all of our financial transactions. The rules stayed the same, but as the world changed privacy evaporated.

Or, the police can record where anyone out in public is going. Because they can hardly follow everyone, right? There's an inherent bound on that power. But then you get things like license plate cameras and facial recognition recording the movement of nearly all humans.

Effectively, the police became much more powerful compared to the past with no changes in laws to do it.

The problem is that if your sibling or cousin submits DNA to GEDmatch, they've in effect submitted the entire extended family's DNA. You cannot go take down the DNA your cousin submitted to GEDmatch, even though it affects your privacy. You cannot even take down the DNA your identical twin submitted to GEDmatch, even though it really is the _same_ as yours. The laws simply have not yet caught up to the new tech.

> people upload their DNA to for the sole purpose of being findable by their DNA

They are not making just themselves findable by DNA. They are making their extended family findable by DNA, and I don't imagine they have gotten the whole family's consent before doing so.

Why would you need your family's consent to submit your DNA? The law doesn't work like that, just because they info can be used against someone else.

I can post on Facebook that I was with you at a certain time and a certain place; I don't need your permission even though law enforcement might use that to find you. Or if I post a picture of us at a baseball game, I don't need your permission just because it could be used to find out you were somewhere.

Analogies break down here - this isn't even remotely comparable to posting on Facebook.

Because it affects them

A lot of things effect other people, doesn't mean you need their permission.

If I thought a relative of mine was a criminal, and went to the police, and said "I think my cousin committed a crime, check my blood"

Would that be ok?

Depends on the culture.

Some suffer from strong taboos against snitching on family members.

Some suffer from an overabundance of civic duty.

With GDPR, you actually do need permission to post personal information about someone online.

Yes, and I can choose to not involve you in the political demonstration I'll take part in. Worst case I can cut of contact with you entirely, if I don't trust you. But removing shared DNA is not possible. I'd have no recourse against you giving an uprising authoritarian government the means to identify me.

Because it is also your family's DNA. It is an action that affects not only yourself. You are infringing on the rights of all your relatives to NOT be included in a public database when you do this. Honestly, you _should_ need my permission to post a photo of me on Facebook. You are selling my face to an exploitative company in exchange for access to their platform. You are giving Facebook worldwide non-exclusive license to do anything they want with my face, from using it in advertisements to using it to train facial recognition algorithms, all without my consent. It is pretty terrible how ignorant most people are of the potential harm they do to others this way.

Federal evidentiary standards are that any data you provide to a third party for commercial purposes forfeits a presumption of privacy, and can be accessed with an administrative subpoena (not even a warrant). Same thing they use to dragnet cellphone records.

Anything you (or your relatives) submit to, let's say, 23andme, is fair game and you should assume the feds have it and can search it.

> people upload their DNA to for the sole purpose of being findable by their DNA.

It's for the sole purpose of being findable by people with similar DNA to you. Its purpose is not to allow anyone to look you up by your DNA like you are implying here.

And family tree dna since the owner kindly consented to assist law enforcement without asking his customers first. This is a patent misuse of data shared only to benefit customers in their genealogy searches, not law enforcement.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/family-tree-dna-sharing-...

> The database that police use is GEDMatch, it's an opt-in database run by volunteers that people upload their DNA to for the sole purpose of being findable by their DNA.

Law enforcement also uses CODIS and your profile is not deletable there (unless your comment was narrowly tailored to the specifics of this article, in which case my comment is a non sequitur).

Yes, and I think that line is between this and warrantless searches. That's just my opinion though but I don't see what's so controversial about that.

The flip-side would be that we allow crimes to go unpunished to protect civil liberties and yet erode civil liberties by allowing crime to be perpetuated.

It's a fine line and from personal experience - can be more devastating when criminals can abuse and game the system to use such liberties to evade capture and punishment. Alas I can not elaborate as ongoing, but dam. Criminals sure know how to play the system better than the system I have found out the hard way.

The flip sides are not equal. The government has far more capacity for harm than criminals do, and there are other levers for reducing crime than destroying civil liberties anyway.

Imagine having hard evidence against a criminal and that evidence can not be used as it would violate the criminals civil liberties and that same criminal has used this approach to destroy an entire neighborhood, and destroyed peoples livelihoods, well-being.... Maybe it's just a minority edge-case, and I'm just looking at it from personal experience edge-case - the flip-side. Sorry, I just wished I could elaborate, but I may end-up violating a heroin/crack dealers civil rights :cry:.

This is straight up FUD. Any case where someone is a menace to a whole neighborhood over a period of time could clearly be solved within the bounds of constitutional law with conventional policing.

Commercial DNA databanks are a problem for a lot of reason. You shed small amounts of DNA absolutely everywhere, and it can absolutely be transported on shoes, coats, and the like. Modern testing can pick up these trace amounts in place where you haven't been. The Innocence Project has already overturned a few convictions based on tiny DNA traces of this variety. The commercial databases just give cops the opportunity to perform dragnet searches for any and everyone whose DNA shows up in an area of interest, it's scary and sloppy.

I'll also point out that at least i the US, the constitution is the backstop for EVERYONE's civil rights. If cops are allowed to trample on the rights of the accused in the name of "safety" then there will be no protection for anyone.

It's not FUD when you have experienced it, things like anybody trying to stop them or getting in their way, they use the police to harass the people with false reports, many other forms of abuse and excel at playing the victim card. Example, dealer attacks person and then reports that the person attacked them and evidence that proves otherwise is dismissed as it violated their rights.

But shall leave it at that. Just please don't blindly dismiss a person's experience as FUD.

How would the ability to go fishing in a commercial DNA database do anything to fix that situation? I can't imagine any situation in which the ability for police to rummage around in the trash and test spit on coffee cups against 23andME would stop your problem.

You're just scaremongering. You have a policing problem for sure, but simple video or eyewitness reports would solve your problem. There's no additional need for the power to perform dragnet searches that can and do drag innocent people into the justice system.

Authoritarianism isn't the answer to petty crime.

>You have a policing problem for sure

Oh yes, more so when 37% of the police in my area haven't been veteted and leak information to criminals more than we have rain. But this is London.

Sorry, i'm running on a tangent and slightly off-topic and respect and acknowledge what your saying. I'm just more aware of the aspect that those 10 people that get away with crime can impact more than one innocent found guilty. What with all the privacy and civil protection laws, criminals do know how to game and play the system better than those who control and run the systems.

As for DNA - it should be default no, but equally allow those who want to opt-in and allow their DNA to be used to help maybe identify some genetic relative of a crime. But like most things - no clear cut solution and when it swings so far one direction, you end up with a powerless system that struggles to fulfill it's remit due to being buried in red-tape.

I think I may not be clearly explaining my key concern, which is the inherent peril of this type of policing.

Your DNA and mine are basically everywhere we go, and many places we've never been due to transfer. Forensic DNA tests can now easily identify these traces of you from places you have never been. Commercial DNA databases now allow police to target people who weren't previously identified as suspects by conventional means. The combination of the two can and has led to innocent people being swept up in the grinding gears of the justice system.

There is little to no oversight, and courts/juries aren't aware of this problem. This issue also creates perverse incentives within the system that will allow bad cops and prosecutors to pin crimes on people they don't like, and use DNA databases to back into the appearance of scientific evidence. There is immense moral hazard here.

SO a good example would be - you go into a shop and pick up a bottle and examine the label and then change your mind for whatever reason and place it back. Sombody else comes in, buys that bottle and let's say for ease of argument they have gloves and so does the cashier. That bottle then gets used in a crime to hurt somebody and tada. Your in the frame for a crime you did not commit and the onus laid upon you that you was not there or did it.

That kinda thing?

No, it's more like you sit on a bench or on the subway and shed a bunch of skin cells. Someone else comes along and particles of those cells cling to their coat or shoes. That person walks along and some of your cell fragments fall off of them in an alley. Later a serious crime happens in that alley and your DNA is recovered along with samples from a let's say 3 other people. The police run each sample through a commercial database and get hits from you and two of the other 3 people.

Let's assume the other two have solid allabies with recites and witnesses. You were at home alone during the crime and have no solid alibi. What do you as an innocent person do in that situation? You have to hire a lawyer, and possibly face a trial where you could serve time in prison for a crime you did not commit. If you are convicted, you go to jail, the case is closed, and the real criminal goes free to perhaps continue committing crimes. Your life is ruined, and anyone who knows and believes you will lose all faith in the system. The tax payers money is wasted jailing you, the victim receives no real justice, and all of society loses.

Courts just aren't prepared for this. Judges and the general public all believe that DNA evidence is basically magic. This is a real problem.

Your situation gets more complex if you have CCTV to proves your not there or somewhere else. Crux though would be that if they don't find you soon, laws in play dictate how long that CCTV can be held.

So imagine in your fine example that you later in life end up with the police taking your DNA for something else, even if to eliminate your DNA from forensics upon an aggravated burglary at your partners flat as an example. The police computer then pings about the previous alleyway crime and this is years later. You now find that proving were you actually was back then, harder than more recently. CCTV from a bar you was at - all gone due to data protection retention laws that curtail how long it can be held. Google - nope as some law came in that stops them keeping that info.

You kinda get down to the situation that your only assured safety from past and future crimes is to self monitor and track. Heck - I literally bug my own house and carry a tracking monitor due to tangent issues, to protect me from such mistakes/abuse etc.

ALso having done Jury duty, it's not just the evidence and opinion of guilty or not, but how that evidence is presented and the impact of the dominant alpha's in that jury. Whilst that should not be a factor for the most enlightened (general makeup of posters upon these forums), the population has few discriminators upon the makeup of juries - age, not below average IQ and criminal record or mostly - lack of.

So privacy laws are great and have many upshots, they can equally have some downsides. Why I feel that choice should be down to individuals and sure, opt-out by default. But you can start to see why opt-in also helps, so you can clear things up in a timely manner and not suddenly 15 odd years later get arrested for a crime you did not commit and the quick simple proof has long gone, making innocence much harder to play out.

You can't opt out of your relatives using a DNA service, and your 2nd cousin using the service is sufficient to make you findable by traces of DNA tracked to a place you've never been. This isn't about privacy, it's about civil liberties, and protection from overreach by the state.

Your right of course and apologies that I'm just getting that aspect - thank you.

Yes, I suppose from what I'm saying, I'd be effectively violating the choice of relative. A fair and valid point and does raise many avenues of individuals opting in exposing others thru their choices. I guess shopping loyalty cards - the person who does the family shopping is revealing what the entire household likes in many ways.

But equally a tough choice, with many aspects - pro and con to weigh in. With that, I'll concede as without all the options fully outlines, the forced opt-out approach as this is the case, does make much more sense.

Thank you for a wonderful debate and I certainly learned something from it.

The very same civil liberties that protect that heroin dealer from prosecution also protect innocent people from prosecution (maybe even you). Individual rights and strong limitations on government are a Chesterton's fence to many people, it is easy to see the immediate utility of doing away with them in edge cases where they present an obstacle but it is harder to see the systematic protections they afford and the culture of freedom they support.

And again, rampant heroin isn't an inevitable consequence of freedom. We don't have to destroy civil rights to get rid of heroin, it's just that the actual root cause social solutions are a lot more nuanced than sending men with guns to use force. But more force is an easy story to sell to the public, and it happens to be convenient to the people at the top.

Oh agree, about the demonising aspect - but if you've ever lived above a crackhouse, you would appreciate the finer aspects of how it has an impact. Let alone the ways addicts procure money and drugs. Then apathetic support for addicts, many avenues of guilt. But then all addicts are victims is a mentality that plays out, one in which I've seen abused by some addicts. But then, generalisation of a whole group has never really pans well in society.

But the real issue as you touch upon is the underlying issues, the drivers for going into addiction and such drugs, that's where support is needed and more so, cheaper for prevention than support later on. Yet both area's are seriously lacking and the whole mentality of fighting the fires instead of fighting the sources keeps playout out.

I think it’s more devastating when an innocent person goes to jail for years.

For instance, 25% of death row prisoners in Florida were found innocent.

Criminals know how to play the game but so do prosecutors who withhold evidence, corrupt policemen, judges who give harsher sentences to poor and minorities, the state governments who underfund the public defenders office but give the prosecution unlimited funds for experts, etc.

I would much rather the guilty go free than innocent people be wrongfully convicted.

https://www.floridaphoenix.com/2019/06/04/more-prisoners-are...

Long, long established principle we've often forgotten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_ratio

It's important to keep a sense of perspective. The US has several hundred murders per year. Cars kill 40,000 people in the US every year. A system like the Russian GULAG would kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. Trading off the non-punishment of 3–6 murderers per year against an increased risk of systemic government oppression—it seems like that risk would have to be on the order of 0.1% before that could plausibly be a reasonable tradeoff.

>The US has several hundred murders per year.

I agree with what you're saying but the US usually has more than 15,000 murders per year not several hundred.

I have no reason to doubt either of you, but let's suppose that we take your numbers as correct.

Doesn't that still mean that more people are dying in car accidents than in homicides? It looks like a minimum of twice as many. (Might be a little fuzzy though because if someone is killed by someone who used a car as the murder weapon, does that get categorized as only a homicide? Only a motor vehicle fatality? Or both? I don't really know.)

15,000 people are murdered in USA every year with guns alone. Other violent weapons increase this number. A small number are murdered by vehicles. Most vehicle deaths are just accidents.

Many others die from opioid overdose and medical issues. Indeed, 2.8m people die yearly in USA.

Why does it matter how many have died in car accidents? Are we saying that we don’t want to solve murders until their numbers match car deaths?

>Why does it matter how many have died in car accidents?

Perspective.

How many people do you know. How many people do you know who died in car accidents. For most people that number is zero or one, maybe two. The average person gets in a car accident like once every 17yr (forget where I heard that) and fatal accidents are a tiny, tiny subset of that. They really are rare compared to how many people are in the US and how much driving those people do.

Murders are far, far more rare than car accidents, practically nonexistent for people who don't make their living in the drug trade.

The point is that they are statistically very rare events overall so increasing the risk of a big problem in the long term (by throwing away our restrictions on what government can and can't do to "find criminals") in order so solve a really tiny one doesn't seem wise.

By contrast, I know a number of people who have been raped by the police or whose family members have been murdered by the police. People in the US think that can't happen there. They are delusional.

Why do you compare accidents to homicides in the first place? You might as well include tobacco victims or people who die of old age

Both accidents and homicide often kill people with significant life expectancy left. This has more impact than causes that kill people late in life.

And it's worth thinking about what causes loss of life expectancy in our culture, to consider what problems deserve the most attention. Both homicide and car accidents are rather significant.

The people who specialize in preventing mortality on car accidents and those who specialize in finding criminals don't overlap that much. There are many people in America - we don't need to just focus just on one thing.

The reason to doubt one user is because the number is clearly incorrect with 10 seconds of research.

Thank you very much for the correction!

And most of those murders are committed by people they know. In other words, DNA evidence wouldn’t help since of course their DNA would be in the vicinity of the victim.

If there was a credible risk of "increased risk of systemic government oppression", I might agree with you.

So far I haven't heard any remotely convincing argument.

Yes. Someone needs to flesh out a candidate sort of government oppression that could be stopped by this sort of law. I think the opposite -- inaccurate police work is an oppression all its own, leads to the incarceration of the innocent, and that more and better DNA testing is a great thing.

It's one thing when the better police work is purely being used to catch murderers and rapists.

When it moves down the ladder to omniscience about citizen activities in general, it gets scarier.

No one doubts that license plate camera databases of citizen movements, Stringray devices, etc, can help solve a whole bunch of crimes. But they can also be used to crush civil liberties in the hands of an authoritarian state. They can also be used for petty abuses of power. So it is with this, of being able to attribute any genetic information left behind to the particular person it's from.

We have a whole lot of laws, and almost everyone breaks some every day. Very efficient law enforcement able to "solve these crimes" easily can be wielded against anyone.

Yes, clearly when you develop nightmare scenarios, they are scary. The point is is there any reason to believe those nightmare scenarios have any realistic chance of coming true?

> The point is is there any reason to believe those nightmare scenarios have any realistic chance of coming true

Let's look at Trump. Like or loathe him, reasonable people will agree if there was a skeleton or three in his past it would be used to attempt to unseat him. He, however, lived most his life before tech existed. So what will happen to a President 50 years from now? I'm not knocking Monks here--but who among us has emulated their legendary behavior throughout their entire lives?

So I for one do believe those nightmare scenarios will come true.

Sure. We saw Hoover, Nixon, and others in the past use FBI and IRS records to harass opposition figures. We've seen some current police departments retaliate against citizens who have made internal affairs complaints and other critics in various ways.

It's part of our past, and part of our present to some degree. Not to mention what we see happening in some other places in the world. Why would we not believe abuses would be part of our future, especially if they become easier?

Hobbyists are already making license plate readers to monitor the traffic around them, for fun and security.

The tech is so simple and cheap that this surveillance will be part of life whether the state participates or not.

The example I always give: in the Netherlands in the 30's there was a census. Everyone gently filled in the number of people in their family, their ages, and their religion. Because, surely there was no harm in helping the state better organise the country?

Unfortunately the Germans found those same records very useful a couple of years later, and they tracked down the families that had filled in "jewish" as religion.

In France such a central register did not exist, for cultural and political reasons. Even today the French state state has explicitly chosen not to keep per-race statistics on crime etc.

  WW II stats:
  ------------

Jews dead in France: 25%

Jews dead in the Netherlands : 95%

Just because you trust your current government, and because you are currently not a minority, does not mean that you run the what-ifs.

A most excellent example that highlights what should and should not be captured and stored. Though sadly even today we have forms from doctors/governments that ask for race (I always out of principle scrub that out and write "human"). But then they say these metrics are captured to help prevent discrimination kinda argument! As your wonderful example shows, that can be abused.

Really gets down to DNA being useful and abusable in many ways. The real onus should as always with such personal data - be in the hands of the individual and with that, the ability to opt-in/out choice needs to be there. I'd have no problem of my DNA to be used to help identify a crime perpetrated by some genetic relative, some on the other hand would not. But the choice should be with the individual and a complete ban, removes that right from those who would want to aid justice.

When things can be used for good and bad, blanket bans do not work out as well and it should be down to a default position of no, but the ability for individuals to opt-in.

I think that argument "proves too much", as the saying goes.

Something wildly unlikely can always happen that turns your good intentioned idea into a genocidal nightmare or other disaster.

So an honest application of this principle would result in never doing anything. That would of course be impossible.

But usually proponents only apply this "you never know what might go wrong!" kind of thinking for things they already dislike.

So in practice it boils down to "we shouldn't do things I have a bad feeling about, because you never know etc". And that is possible to argue for!

In reality, there are always risks, and you have to weigh them realistically against the reward, and accept that occasionally things go bad.

Police and prosecutors abusing their power is not "wildly unlikely"; it happens every day. The government of a country being replaced by one with newly terrible human rights policies that go far beyond the usual abuses isn't "wildly unlikely" either; it typically happens in several countries every year. In the last five years it's happened in Yemen, parts of Iraq and Syria, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, China, Crimea, and Hungary, and, according to many human rights organizations, the United States of America.

"The US has several hundred murders per year"

Canada has several hundred murders per year. Baltimore alone has several hundreds.

Thank you for the correction!

You know what would solve 100% of crimes? Putting every single person in jail.

Privacy is a human right, just as important as freedom. You cannot just take that away from everybody. This is putting the whole populace under general suspicion in each case.

For every person who "gets closure" there's another who had moved on and didn't want that crap dredged back up. Solving cold cases for the sake of solving cold cases does not have enough benefit to society to be worth the invasion of privacy.

With the statue of limitations applying to crime, the only crimes that would be dredged up are "heinous crimes" such as first-degree murder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_limitations#Heinous...

I'm not surprised that a murderer wouldn't want that "crap dredged up", but maybe the family might feel differently?

I still don't think they should be dragnetting DNA databases for relatives, however.

New Hampshire Public Radio put out an amazing podcast about a murder that went unsolved for decades. A lot of effort by a lot of people went into unraveling the stories and identifying the victims, but genetic genealogy was pretty key. In the later episodes they also talk a bit about the question of unrestricted access and the consent of people in the databases.

If you're interested in how powerful the techniques are (or are simply interested in how a very cold case was finally broken open), I'd highly encourage you to check out Bear Brook:

https://www.bearbrookpodcast.com/

I hope I've kept this vague enough to avoid giving anything away for anybody who wants to go listen. It really is worth your time.

I second this. One of my favorite podcasts.

How powerful is the tech is good to know.

What is the rate of false positives, and how do we know it, is of vital importance.

The question of false positives isn't something they covered, but I wonder the same thing. I'd love to hear more about it.

I don't understand the privacy concerns and most of the comments here. I see these DNA database searches as an amazing tool to find criminals and not in any way privacy infringing. And I wish it was more widespread, ideally everyone being required to submit their DNA.

Some arguments I'm seeing:

* "Privacy": I don't see this more private than the information contained on a driver's license. It also does not expose anything that's not otherwise already available to the police. I don't see the difference (when it comes to privacy) between DNA and a fingerprint that you have to provide when getting ID/drivers license.

* "False positives": Yes, they'll probably happen. But even if we go with that assumption there are additional ways to exclude most of them. And those that can't be excluded get tested for an exact match and/or additional evidence. This is no different than being a suspect in any other way.

* "False convictions": As far as I understood it this will just be used to narrow down potential suspects, not to get a conviction.

* "Police will lie do anything to convict the person just based off of this evidence": That's a separate topic that needs to be addressed, but not by reducing tools and forbidding technology that can narrow down and find suspects.

Under worst case scenario is being a false positive result and maybe talking to the police (if you were in the same city, your age was correct, you were around/close to area of the crime) and providing exact DNA sample so much worse than the fact that "The approach has led to arrests in at least 60 cold cases around the country."? I say it's not.

> * "Privacy": I don't see this more private than the information contained on a driver's license.

Your DNA tells a lot more about you than the driver's licence.

Think about the next step: this time it's the police submitting false profiles. Next time it's your insurance agent checking for hereditary preconditions you may not even be aware about. Or your bank trying to assess if you'll live beyond 50 before they grant you the mortgage.

Without a proper regulatory framework all of that can happen without your knowledge and without your consent.

Does this not change the goalposts in privacy?

> I see these DNA database searches as an amazing tool to find criminals and not in any way privacy infringing. And I wish it was more widespread, ideally everyone being required to submit their DNA.

I think I can at least understand the viewpoint of those who favor DNA database searches. But, I don't understand how DNA database searches are not obviously in tension with privacy. Can you explain why you think that DNA database searches are "not in any way privacy infringing"?

This is a bit of a strawman. Law enforcement already uses databases of DNA and fingerprints of offenders and tries to match new cases to them. These are highly effective measures since many criminals are repeat offenders. So of course a DNA genetic database is privacy infringing to a degree. Its not required for every citizen to register their DNA, and its an extremely useful tool that helped put extremely violent offenders in jail.

It’s not a strawman; it’s a request for clarification from the GP.

I see them more as a fingerprint, which yes is unique, but I don't consider providing it when getting my ID to be privacy invading. If that makes sense.

Because what the police is really doing in these cases is that they're trying to identify potential suspects, not find people who have a high chance of some disease to sell them insurances and make money. Because of that I do not find this to be in any way privacy infringing. Just because something _can_ be used in a privacy invading context, doesn't mean that it is in the context being discussed.

Re: privacy – DNA contains a tremendous amount of information about a person. Although it is true we leave DNA everywhere we go, up until very recently that information was not recoverable. For the average person this is still the case and will remain so until the point that $20 DNA sequencers are available at CVS.

Logically, it should not be surprising that people consider this information to be private. On a more visceral level, it “feels” like a violation; but I think that’s something you either grok or don’t.

One thing I realized now after thinking about the impact of DNA databases is the long-term impact. We already live in a world where law enforcement and the criminal justice system as a whole can be biased for or against different kinds of people depending on race, gender, background, sexual orientation, sexual identity, and wealth. If law enforcement is able to collect DNA samples and store the DNA of those who are convicted, then they could do statistical analysis on the genetic make-up of criminals by crime. Some people already have concerns about insurance companies getting access to their DNA and discriminating against them using increased prices or refusing to insure them all together. Similar analysis could be used by law enforcement and governments to monitor and apprehend people they suspect might have a higher probability commit a crime. Again, law enforcement already pulls over certain groups of people while they are out driving more often than others without repercussions.

Improper use of both DNA databases and statistical analysis can realistically be used to bring about the rise of something that I’ve only ever read about: pre-crime. That we live in a time where big data gets bigger, mass surveillance becomes evermore inescapable, politics more divisive, and government more powerful yet less accountable just makes this one possible but extremely powerful tool of oppression.

I would think that police would need a warrant from every person that hits on the the database, not just the targets, but every person whose DNA is included in such a database. If there are 50 million records of DNA included in the database, they would need 50 million warrants and show cause, otherwise its a violation of the fourth amendment.

You would be wrong about that. The police don't need a warrant to collect evidence left out in plain site. If you upload your DNA profile for people to match DNA profile's with, then the police are legally allowed to match DNA against it.

Requiring a warrant for this would be like requiring the police to get a warrant to look at the photos people upload to facebook.

Whether it's in plain sight depends on whether subjects consented to the search.

What? Plain sight means they could see it without even performing a search at all.

Unless you are just saying that they only claim something was in plain sight as a lie when the person doesn't consent and they do the search anyway?

It does not show the profile "in plain sight". It only shows it to users who are potential relatives, and the TOS indicates that you may not submit others' DNA as your own when applying.

pretty soon when the technology exists to read minds remotely, police will have an equally efficient and less intrusive way to find suspects, similar to this... if we treat our DNA like public photographs, its only a matter of time before we treat our mind like public photographs...

> Requiring a warrant for this would be like requiring the police to get a warrant to look at the photos people upload to facebook.

That’s actually not a bad idea

In general, you don't upload your DNA to provide it to everyone else to match with; you upload it to a broker who seeks to connect you with other relevant people who have provided their DNA according to site policy. And you certainly don't upload it for other users to download it willy-nilly after a match.

While it hasn't gone through court, I doubt most judges would see submitting DNA to some company to potentially get matches back as being "in plain sight". There is an intended limit on who can see it. Ancestry.com let's you fully disable matches if you want.

> One study found that 60% of white Americans can now be tracked down using such searches.

Woah, this is a goldmine for law enforcement.

I'm curious what the false positive rate is currently. We've already seen the police, or more accurately their prosecution teams, overstate the scientific value of touch DNA [1][2]. This type of database, which some agencies are already building themselves [3][4], is only going to keep growing. Even for minor crimes.

Their ability to collect DNA properly as well as in a legitimate fashion connected to a crime should come under heavier scrutiny (if it hasn't already) and no private database should just be handed to them.

For example: can we trust the DNA companies to have an appropriate chain of evidence?

We really need to avoid the beginning arrest scene in Brazil type of stuff... if they are going to do it at all, they better do it properly. Legal constraints are highly welcome.

1. https://www.propublica.org/article/thousands-of-criminal-cas...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/us/labs-errors-force-revi...

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/nyregion/newyorktoday/nyp...

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/nyregion/nypd-dna-databas...

A different point: most murders are committed by people who are known by the victim, while DNA can reveal connections from strangers.

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=941

> "Stranger" is a classification of the victim's relationship to the offender for crimes involving direct contact between the two. Incidents are classified as involving strangers if the victim identifies the offender as a stranger, did not see or recognize the offender, or knew the offender only by sight.

Interestingly, there was a brief period in the US 1990's where over 50% of murders were committed by strangers.

If anyone is interested in a list of perpetrators of crimes identified through genealogy databases [0]. Most famously the Golden State Killer, who likely would have remained unidentified [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suspected_perpetrators... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Killer

A consideration I didn't yet see mentioned in the comments: announcing rules like this might allay concerns some people have about submitting their DNA to databases, thereby increasing participation (and business).

The resulting increased participation is then subject to a number of major pros and cons for the individual and society -- now, and in the future.

I doubt law enforcement is going to just let this go, and I imagine legislation is being designed right now to ease the warrant process for this purpose, exclude law enforcement from some protections, or to carve-out allowances within (scant) existing protections.

If a DNA is found on a felony crime site, I think all searches should be possible. If possible restrict it with a need for a warrant.

I’m trying to think but so far there seems no way to justify limiting searches.

Felony crimes—such as lying to a federal government employee, like Martha Stewart, or possession of marijuana?

Why not? Are there laws relating to "these investigative techniques are acceptable for these crimes, but not these"?

Doesn't it just come down to law enforcement discretion? As in, maybe they might not use a dna database to find a buyer of .125oz of pot, but might use it when investigating a crime syndicate dealing in thousands of pounds of pot?

> Doesn't it just come down to law enforcement discretion?

Maybe giving police that much discretionary power is a bad idea.

Police in the US (and the prosecuting attorneys) have incredible amounts of discretionary power.

They do; my friend Aaron died from it.

Your DNA is similar enough to your family that you could be implicated in a crime committed by a family member. A strong implication, that would take a very strong argument against to overcome.

Has that ever happened before?

Fun fact: Family tree DNA search skews towards white people, balancing out some of the disproportionately black federal criminal DNA databases.

This should be a law, not a rule. How do we push this into law, so there are consequences when the databases are abused?

Does it limit the DNA database companies from simply forwarding the data? Otherwise you just get the dumb "police officer has lunch with exec 'it sure would be nice if we had dna data for X'" and other approaches they've taken to circumvent the law.

It looks like they're only supposed to look for murderers and rapists.

> Otherwise you just get the dumb "police officer has lunch with exec 'it sure would be nice if we had dna data for X'" and other approaches they've taken to circumvent the law.

How would you prevent that here when the argument could be applied to any regulation?

No, because

>The policy permits broader use if the ancestry database’s policy allows such searches

But the database that police use is GEDMatch, which doesn't have an "exec," because it's a not-for-profit operation - it's run by volunteers and has no staff.

I get why our behavior should be protected with privacy, to prevent bad actors from exploiting us. But DNA matching seems to be a reliable way to find criminals without impacting anyone’s standard of living.

Can someone explain why it’s bad to solve crimes with this data?

I don't know if anyone else will say it, but I think part of the reason is because not every crime deserves a prosecution.

Most murders probably do, but if you have this database you might as well use it for automatic paternity tests too.

Ever spit gum somewhere you shouldn't have? If I was a cop that stepped in gum, with an instant DNA scanner in my pocket, I'd be tempted to scan it and pay the offender a visit.

Laws change very slowly, and things are going to get weird very fast when anyone can run a global DNA scan from their iPhone.

The policy should also require the FBI — prior to utilizing private genealogy sites — add the case details to Justice’s NamUs database and network. The FBI pretends it doesn’t exist, because the bureau doesn’t get to control it. Poor FBI.

What about mothers searching for unknown fathers? The civil law applications of DNA database searches could be considerable.

This would also have a criminal element: every pregnant underage mother is a potential statutory rape case.

I'm having a hard time finding privacy issues with such searches. When those databases are used to search for suspects in legitimate crime cases using legitimate DNA evidence, I fail to see where either the suspect or the culprit have a reasonable right or expectation to privacy.

There is an argument around not giving a government such power to abuse. But if a government is already inclined to use such databases illegally and to circumvent due process, they won't really care about such legislation either.

Can we get a constitutional amendment to codify this right?

I agree with these "new rules" but isn't it odd how unelected DOJ officials get to effectively make new law out of whole cloth like this? I don't recall seeing anything in the constitution about the law making powers of the DOJ.

It's not a law, its guidelines. Basically meaningless.

I have read that 26 million Americans have taken these genetic tests, now encompassing 8% of the population. Not all of these are generally searchable. But approaching a critical mass for forensic genealogy.

So majority of HN don’t like idea when private company censoring information from “right to be forgotten” claims, yet would love law enforcement solve less crime by using public data?

Great. To me the more interesting question will be how this evidence is handled at trial. DNA matching is a stochastic process. There is no line of logic involved. Therefore, when using it in court it can only be used in the context of probability of a match. Humans are notoriously bad at assessing probability, and there are some great TED talks out there on how bad we really are and how it’s already affected our non-genetically enhanced justice system. My greatest hope is not that DNA searches are banned, but that we treat DNA matches as circumstantial evidence that may help indicate a suspect but is inadmissible as evidence of guilt.

Forensic genealogy being a very new tool has resulted in dozens of arrests, but only one finishing a trial.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-murder-case-to-use-fam...

Like any new forensic method, it will undergo years of legal scrutiny.

Have I misunderstood or are you saying all DNA evidence should be inadmissible? Like normal matching of samples?

Similar to other questionable methods of data collection, how likely is it that a form of parallel construction is used even with these laws in place?

So the only people searching these databases will be the security agencies of every country that can break in?

Not making a point, just stating that this method was how they got the golden state killer.

Thank goodness! This whole situation has been crazy.

Ok, great. I get it, privacy. But there are murderers that could be caught, that would likely reoffend...

So where is your line? I'm sure there are murderers who could be caught by suspicion-less, warrantless home searches, too.

Theres a difference between a warrantless home aearch and the police investigating your house based on probable cause established via a picture of illegal activity published by your cousin in the newspaper

I'm a huge privacy advocate, but I don't think DNA should be private. DNA database tech is a game changer and I absolutely support it being used to solve crimes.

* DNA is immutable, comparable, heritable, and searchable in a tree. It's an ideal lookup key. Unlike fingerprints or face data you don't even need direct DNA evidence. A relative will do.

* It doesn't invade privacy to look this up in a database. No homes were entered into, no phone conversations were tapped. Private lives weren't snooped. No relatives were harmed.

* If you commit a violent crime, bad on you. If you leave DNA behind, you're stupid. The first deserves punishment; taken together doubly so.

* DNA evidence alone may not be enough to convict, but it can be the basis for an investigation.

* We already use video footage and artist sketches. Right now we rely on the "database" of collective human consciousness to find matches, which is unreliable and imperfect. When matches are found it's simply luck or chance -- cases shouldn't have to depend upon that when it's the same class of evidentiary data.

I'd be in favor of the government having all of our DNA on file so long as it isn't used for discriminatory purposes (health insurance, job, organ transplant denial, ...) or for advertising to us.

We're only scratching the surface of what's possible, though. Imagine when we extract higher dimensional features, such as gender, race, hair color, and ultimately facial structure from the DNA. Feed that into a photo database...

Your phenotype and genotype != your private life. Even if we aren't happy with what we got, these are the most concrete representations of our own selves. It's our code and (usually) unique addressing label, independent of any database. We should view it as such.

You're shedding DNA right now through exfoliation, waste elimination, and breathing. You can almost be guaranteed that corporate interests will start tapping into these sources in the next few decades. The law enforcement use case at least seems legitimate.

I just don't want them reading my email. :)

>If you commit a violent crime, bad on you. If you leave DNA behind, you're stupid. The first deserves punishment; taken together doubly so.

You aren't more deserving of punishment for being stupid. What kind of insane moral system do you follow?

>You're shedding DNA right now through exfoliation,

And I'd prefer that law enforcement not be able to track me everywhere I go because the risk of getting caught up in an investigation is too high.

The criminal justice system has serious flaws and I'd rather not be wrongly implicated just because I happened to shed DNA near where a crime happened.

> You aren't more deserving of punishment for being stupid.

I was being tongue in cheek. Punishments should fit crimes and those accused should not be judged on the basis of intelligence, race, wealth, or any other factor but the facts of their case. That said, it's easy to prosecute cases with abundant evidence available. Such crimes tend not to be premeditated, and easy convictions serve as social reenforcement to deter similar crimes.

> The criminal justice system has serious flaws and I'd rather not be wrongly implicated just because I happened to shed DNA near where a crime happened.

Fair point.

DNA should be used to place persons at crime scenes and not be used in absence of additional evidence. Unless said DNA was found on the victim of a sex crime, under fingernails, etc.

> DNA is immutable https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/10710/does-our-d...

> DNA is immutable,

Well, no, it's absolutely not. Nor is it necessarily consistent within an individual.

Yes, once you get into the particulars of molecular biology you're correct.

I made a comment about V(D)J recombination just the other day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053657

There's barr bodies, chimerism, all kinds of mutation - missense, nonsense, point deletes, repeats -, there's somatic recombination, slipping of strands, transposomes, polyploidy... you name it.

But I think talking at this level ignores the science and overwhelming statistics of SNP databases. You're not going to move around within the database over time.

Forget privacy. What about unlawful search and seizure? Or how about habeas corpus? Presumption of innocence? The entirety of Western jurisprudence rests on these pillars.

Warrantlessly perusing DNA databases (of non-LEO entities) is at the very least a grey area, if not blatantly unlawful.

How? Do the police need a warrant to look at the pictures you upload to Facebook? What about if you put your DNA profile up on a giant billboard (GCAGC....), do they need a warrant to look at the billboard? It's illegal for them to come and take your DNA out of your body, but if you just upload it to some website for freely compare against and/or download, you are giving everyone permission to compare against it or download it.

I would never upload my DNA profile, but I have relatives who do. So I am not broadcasting the info, but other family members may.

I am generally alright with law enforcement using public information like this, but it could be used against me without me ever making said data public. So I find your argument invalid.

So lets say the police see your brother, and realize he looks suspiciously like a criminal they are looking for, so they come find you.

Your argument is that your brother's appearance can be used against you without you ever going outside, so it should be illegal for the police to look at people.

It is more of a question of resources. Why do they spend time ( and tax money ) trolling the internet?

In this case, if my cousin uploads her DNA, I am not giving it away and yet.. it is up for grabs.

Have you ever heard the statistic that there are over 200,000 unsolved murders in the past 40 or so years? In the U.S.? This means that there are a lot of serial killers out there -- one page estimates 2,000 -- not to mention the relatively-banal one-and-done murderers.

Police already rarely run DNA tests on existing convicts, so I'm fairly sure they would not view it as a prestigious apppointment to work all day every day to grind through several tens of thousands of new DNA tests just to upload them to GEDMatch...for a chance at a hit on someone who hasn't already been convicted, who isn't already scheduled to be executed, or who has already been executed.

Long story short: you're talking about something that is easy to ask, but is a massive undertaking.

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