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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to consider a future where crimes like this will be nearly impossible to "get away with".

To be sure there will always be human ineptitude and bungling of cases but it does seem that DNA forensics, security cameras, the prevalence of cell phones, digital messaging surveillance, etc. have brought to justice many killers very quickly that might have gone on to kill again were this 50 years ago.

While there are a lot of nuances to privacy in the 21s Century, I am not so stalwart of a privacy advocate to disregard the utility of finding killers by means that are somewhat privacy invasive.

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While I tend to agree, I hope we don't get lazy with the law and prosecute on DNA alone. DNA matching is not 100% accurate, and juries aren't the best at appreciating the nuance of statistics.

When I was a stats major, Peter Donnelly's TED Talk was required viewing on the matter: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_how_juries_are_fool...

What got me was, if it's not 100% accurate, how do you explain their ability to hunt down the golden state killer using his family tree? They narrowed the possibilities to 1,000 or so, then checked all 1,000. Straightforward police work. Then a final DNA match confirmed their hypothesis that they'd found him, which turned out to be true.

I don't know. I'm vividly aware that if the matching isn't accurate, innocents will go to prison. But the truth seems less simple than that.

I'm assuming the "police work" you mention would yield more material to prosecute on, so they won't gi by "DNA alone", which GP was concerned about.

It's the same thing with IAFIS. If you think you're going to trial and winning with just a fingerprint match in the database you're gonna be sorely disappointed. These tools are better understood as "lead generation" than any kind of proof.

It is also a problem when the DNA isn’t obvious that it is connected to the perpetrator of the crime. Semen found inside a victim is very different than DNA found inside a room where a crime occurred, which is different than DNA found at a crime scene in a public or semi-public place. If you can just collect up a bunch of DNA and run it against everyone, with no initial justification of probable cause, you can get innocent people that are guilty of no more than leaving their DNA somewhere and not having an alibi being victims themselves of lazy police investigations.

The pessimistic side of me would like to point out that in this kind of future, criminals will know how to leave sufficient fake DNA at the crime scene, and random people will suddenly be thrown in jail, because some criminal deliberately used their DNA to cover their tracks...

I feel like this would be way more involved and many individuals have better more verifiable alibis with the things listed. Like I'm sure there will be drawback cases but it is seems in aggregate that this stuff is generally positive.

Thoughts?

I think you are too optimistic WRT how forensic "science" is generally applied in the US [1] (one prominent example is e.g. [2]). Now imagine this is you standing in front of a scientifically untrained jury trying to argue against junk-science presented by a "forensic expert" testimonial. Not sure an alibi is going to help you much in that case.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/why-forensic-science-...

[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2009-08-25-chi-09...

That's why you keep Google location history on at all times, and also post photos to Instagram/Facebook as much as you can so you have timestamped records of photos of what you were doing at all times.

That sure sounds like a dystopia to me, reads like a Black Mirror episode.

Also with the advent of deep fakes [1] I'm not so sure that this is going to be a winning strategy for long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake

That’s exactly why you would need Facebook or Google or your mobile network operator or all of them to serve as proof of your alibi.

If the finger is pointed at you with a deep fake, you can then counter with proof from large corporations which presumably haven’t all been compromised.

You might also be able to use proof of your location in other settings, such as civil suits or domestic disputes.

Lots of people are using dash cams in a similar fashion. Proof to protect themselves from being named the liable party in a collision.

Same with forcing communications over email so you can prove what was actually communicated in the event a legal or public relations matter arises.

To make you a suspect?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

No, to defend yourself just like the guy in your article did:

> Even then, Kenyon wanted to make sure police didn’t have lingering doubts about McCoy, whom they still knew only as “John Doe.” So he met with the detective again and showed him screenshots of his client’s Google location history, including data recorded by RunKeeper. The maps showed months of bike rides past the burglarized home.

I’m posting kind of tongue in cheek, because it’s almost a foregone conclusion that people have their mobile device on them, which means the mobile networks know where you are at all times. In that event, it’s more advantageous for you to have access to your location history (via Google/Facebook/Instagram) when the full force or the law starts coming down on you.

It's horrible, but it's true, thankfully you can't forge phone history, or time posts to happen at a future time. Right?

I’m assuming a very, very small number of people worldwide can edit a time stamp on Facebook or google’s computers.

But everybody can give his/her smartphone to a 3rd party to carry around, right? Your Google location history only proves where your phone was, it doen't prove where you were.

That’s why you have to combine it with selfies and whatnot on Instagram and/or Twitter, preferably in front of identifiable landmarks or storefronts.

You mean you're using online services to provide you with trusted timestamp? [1]. But you need to consider how a trusted timestamp merely proves that some photo was definitely taking at or before the attested time. It does not prove that a photo was not actually taken a day earlier and then merely submitted at the attested time. To prove something was not recorded earlier is a little trickier. Need something like a newspaper headline that would not have been available earlier. And then how do you defend against claims that you took the photo early, but photoshopped the newspaper headline at the time it was attested?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping

True, maybe Instagram can roll out a feature where it grabs the GPS data to verify location on the photo, or signals that the photo was not uploaded but rather taken.

Each item isn’t meant to be foolproof, just to assist in creating third party verifiable data when combined with things like credit card transaction data or road toll timestamps to make it improbably for anything else to have happened.

There's a far easier alternative kingpins are using as we speak: they compartmentalize the criminal organization with the lowest in the hierarchy taking the highest risk. No DNA of kingpin in crime scene as they had their humble servant do the dirty work.

Do random people get thrown in jail because of fake finger prints today?

Privacy should always be first and foremost protection from government. However we must acknowledge just how stupid easy it is to find a judge to rubber stamp warrants and in some countries they don't even need that.

Privacy laws tend to focus on corporation's being tasked with protecting it but as stated before they already are handcuffed by the sheer fact government can get the records when it wants them. Worse sycophants within government and these companies will turn it over to prying eyes for financial and political benefit or just self determined moral justification

So in the end only protection we have is making it too costly for anyone to use the information they obtain illegally. This means going not just after the people who leaked/stole/etc the data but anyone with it.

People vastly over estimate how much privacy they have when in fact anything you do outside your home pretty much can be observed and any government agency will be able to get that information through the courts

As a counterpoint, the suspected murderer of Abigail Williams and Liberty German in Delphi ("The Delphi Murders") was captured on video by his victims[1] and remains at large three years later.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0snT740jhtw

Is it a counterpoint if the video doesn't show sufficient identifying features?

I was expecting the same thing, it got me searching to see how much clearance rates have responded to new technologies already.

It's not the relationship I expected, clearance rates are steadily dropping despite these advancements.

The following piece considers a few possible reasons why:

https://digitalcommons.newhaven.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Some of this may be a corrective effect, DNA is more likely to exonerate and prevent false arrests than it is to identify criminals. Other situations, well, new technology doesn't guarantee that you have enough detectives to clear crimes, or that those detectives are well trained.

Then there's the whole class of violent crimes that happen on high traffic streets where DNA is not likely to be abundant or well preserved.

It would be very interesting to know what impact this will have on these preventing these types of violent rapes and murders in the first place. On one hand, if you've seen the progress made in the last few decades you'd have to think that if you leave even a trace of DNA around you stand an increasing chance of being caught in the future. On the other hand, does someone who is willing to commit a crime like that have enough sense to realize that at the point where they can avoid the crime?

Probably not much of an impact given that anything that makes law enforcement more efficient in the US gets labeled either racist or orwellian by advocacy groups since equity is all that matters now.

Why are you using a throwaway? Worried about your privacy?

If the first time you take cocaine you roll over and die, then that’s the end of the abuse of your body. It’s only when you don’t die that you fulfill the meaning of abuse.

We may not able to stop the first murder, but we can stop the abuse on the first hit.

Had the GSK been caught after his first rape/murder, there wouldn't have been any subsequent ones, simply because he'd be behind bars. So maybe he'd be a killer/rapist, but he'd have had way less victims, and every victim is one too many.

That world may also be a place where it will be nearly impossible to get away with homosexuality, Judaism, or sympathy for the Chinese, though.

If you're really reading the writing on the wall, it will be impossible to get away with kneejerk negative opinions about the Chinese.

I censor myself on Wechat and expect to be able to go to the next pool party in Wuhan. Not everything is about whats happening on the other side of the Gobi desert, also obligatory "Chinese territorial sovereignty and unity shall not be questioned". You'll catch on (or be indefinitely detained, or at least unable to board a plane lol.) I find this tolerable.

What does sympathy for the Chinese even mean?

The people or the likely-genocidal government?

It looks like they got a confession out of a wheelchair-bound 75 year-old without a trial. I wonder about his mental state, and if it was even the right person.

Besides that, the two ancestry database sites said it was a breach of privacy.

So you tell me if justice was served.

Of course it was a breach of privacy, but that is a requirement of any chance at prosecution. This isn't like what the NSA get up to.

The killer is definitely not wheelchair-bound – Sacramento County's DA's office released a video of him exercising in his cell and climbing all over the furniture on the same day as his sentence was handed to him. The use of a wheelchair was a cynical attempt to evoke sympathy.

He also has form for faking medical issues. He was caught shoplifting while still a police officer and tried to fake a heart attack in the hope that they would let him go/it would enable him to escape.

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