Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a crime
wired.com
wired.com
Why are these DNS sample stored for so long? The U.S. really needs some data protection and privacy laws.
Conservatives will support it because law and order.
It's the perfect storm of governmental invasiveness.
To detect these, you need to have a baseline - the longer the better.
For one such study, The Project Baseline Health Study: a step towards a broader mission to map human health --- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-020-0290-y
> Further, while some participants’ samples have been assayed with a broad array of tests (Tables 2–4), participant samples will be stored for in depth testing at a later time when current assays are pertinent or new assays are available or new understanding of a disease process make performing a standard assay, not originally done, to be done on all or a sub-group of participants because of this new knowledge.
https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=cord-b...
Edit: about half way through the article, it appears to be a sample from newborn screening, but another thing to think about.
Now, if you had a blood sample from before the patient had leukemia, that would be invaluable data. You can yield high fidelity genetic material without much blood sample. Because of this, most states have laws saying this newborn screening material is available for various research purposes. The parent or the individual may also request their newborn sample, should new screening methods come out in the future that may not be on that panel when you were born for example.
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/CDPH%20Document%20...
That could still be done if the data/samples were anonymized and the ID were only given to the patient. For general research, anonymized would also work perfectly fine.
> As it should.
Not in this case. These screenings detect serious diseases, and skipping them will have serious health consequences for many people:
https://www.chop.edu/conditions-diseases/newborn-screening-t...: here's just one of the things they test for:
> Phenylketonuria (PKU). PKU is an inherited disease in which the body cannot metabolize a protein called phenylalanine. It is estimated that one in every 10,000 to 15,000 babies is born with PKU in the U.S. Without treatment, PKU can cause intellectual disability. Newborn screening for PKU is required in all 50 states.
IIRC, babies with that condition need to be put on a special formula ASAP, or they'll have problems.
> So far, data collection rarely benefits the people the data are collected from.
That may be true, but it's lazy and incorrect to assume that it's correct to proceed like it never benefits anyone.
What the heck is that supposed to mean?
Hospitals are businesses optimizing for their bottom line, not for patient benefit. Law-enforcement has a lot of funding. Sharing data (obtained from humans without a fully developed consciousness) with law enforcement (for whatever purposes they want) is a massive overreach and has nothing to do with providing care for the patient. So, their best interest is not your best interest, but we should trust them implicitly?
Today, a crime would happen, you leave DNA, the police attempt to match it with a DNA sample in their databases you might have submitted for a health screening. 4th amendment violation because DNA is scary to the lay person it seems. This is not from logical reasoning but from emotional reasoning, because for all intents and purposes DNA databases are being used exactly like fingerprint databases that are normalized in our society today, and shouldn't actually have this scrutiny (or maybe fingerprints should have more scrutiny if you are against DNA screening for crimes, because the logical arguments would be the same). Then again these articles generate clicks while I'm sure most would eyeroll a fingerprinting article.
The difference with DNA is that the genetic data has a ton of info associated with it, and that in this case it was collected for healthcare purposes. Fingerprints don't carry sensitive health data. The arguments are different.
There are some other differences too though: you're much more in control over where you leave your fingerprints than where you leave your DNA and fingerprints are not connected to your relatives. Not leaving any traces of your DNA is essentially almost impossible.
What concerns me that is people might be hesitant to do this blood screening for their newborns if they were ever involved in a crime, even a minor one, which would negatively impact their (innocent) newborns. With fingerprints you can be reasonably sure you didn't leave them with pretty basic precautions, and you don't need to fear your children's fingerprints fingering you in the first place. With DNA that's quite different.
So I'm not so sure the trade-off is worth it here, except for some of the most serious crimes.
The parents may no longer be criminals; they may have done a few stupid things when they were 18 or whatnot. Not excusing it, but also don't need to go above and beyond any lengths to solve these comparatively minor crimes: literally no one is served by that: not the victims of the crime, not society, and certainly not their children. In more serious crimes, it may be worth the trade-off – that I why I used the qualifier "except for some of the most serious crimes".
> make this sort of screening mandatory, much like how its a good idea to mandate vaccinations even if it steps on the toes of the poorly informed in the process.
It's not realistic this will be enacted any time soon, if ever, and any proposal needs to take this political reality in to account.
Also applying for a license means you are at or approaching the age of majority. Either you are applying for a license knowing that you once did a crime, or you're doing a crime knowing you once submitted a fingerprint for a license. That's very different from having your blood sampled as a newborn, and most people assume their health information had privacy protection.
Apples and oranges are both fruits, but they're not interchangeable.
In this case it sounds like they used it for verification, since the sought a comparison of a suspect with a specific baby's DNA. From a science perspective this seems quite reasonable. From a privacy PoV IDK.
Where is this required? Because I've never heard of such a thing in the US.
It's about a kind of perfidy. It's the reason you in war don't masquerade as someone who is wounded and to try to get at your enemy, and don't use fake medical stuff in ruses, &c (this of course happened once in Pakistan, but I count it as those responsible lacking in understanding and being short-sighted).
You don't ever do anything that will in any way affect people's trust in the medical system, even indirectly. This has been understood for a long time, and is part of the reason why the Hippocratic oath (i.e. the actual Hippocratic oath) involves swearing to never do any harm.
I know you were attempting to draw a parallel, but the difference is that the DMV is a government organization (part of the DOT), and your medical provider is not. There are different expectations of privacy. Which is close to the heart of the issue.
There is also the CSI effect to take into account and once again, the bloody fact we don't need to be preserving this data in perpetuity.
This is why Third Party Doctrine is a complete and total deconstruction of the 4th Amendment in practice.
I'd hate to become a suspect in a crime because of some profile worked up by a behavioral analyst at the FBI and something in my DNA suggests I could fit the profile.
I might be on board if you could make the stronger claim that they can’t look for behavioral features nor will they be able to in the future. A good hash provides that guarantee.
That being said, these data are being used for actually legally actionable things: first order pattern recognition using the same legal frameworks as fingerprints. Not second order "what do these patterns actually do in the body" or third order "what do these functions in the body do for the individual", each of which would probably take a PhD project to work out.
They're looking at a dozen or more locations. The number of repeats at any location is unrelated to the number of repeats at another location.
So, if you've got a number between 2 and 10 or 20, you've got 10% to 5% of the population that has that particular number of repeats. 1/(0.1 ^ 13) is 10 trillion which is the ballpark for the number of variations for STRs possible on a 13 location test.
The data that is stored looks like [6 4 12 16 2 15 19 18 14 5 3 7 8]
There's probably a curve where it gets scary again as you know more about it.
DNA isn't just identification. It is a lot more than just a unique identifier, it is a whole history and a lot of future probabilities.
My list of SNPs is a lot less "if you have nothing to hide" about it.
Imagine a government which looks at SCN1/SCN2 before issuing a drivers license.
Society as a whole would probably be a lot better off if we stopped pretending driving around 4,000-lb hunks of metal at 80mph/130kph was some sort of inalienable right and actually showed some discretion in who was allowed to do it and who wasn't. But it's not realistic, especially if you live outside of a city.
Second, DNA matching is a matter of chance. While comparing a sample to a single potential match is extremely reliable, comparing a sample to a population is not. You're basically running into a birthday paradox here: given a large enough dataset, false matches are guaranteed to happen.
If you use biometrics databases like this, you basically end up reverting the burden of proof: your DNA was at the crime scene, can you explain how it got there if you are indeed innocent?
But broadly the big utility is in matching distant relatives versus strangers from the lot, and seeing if there is agreement with those putative matches with actual records and other hard evidence. You share half your DNA with either parent, 1/8 with your first cousin, and so on and so fourth for the rest of the human race. Using that information coupled with other pieces of evidence can yield a pretty reliable hit and is how they managed to catch the Golden State killer using DNA and genealogy.
I'm not sure how these two things are issues when comparing fingerprinting to DNA matching. They seem to be applicable to both.
The link you cite with "1 in billions" odds is exactly the sort of misrepresentation I'm talking about. Combine smaller-than-pretended probabilities with big database trawling and it becomes a bit like the "birthday problem": it provides really good odds of finding someone to pin the crime on, but very little confidence that it was really them.
On top of that, merely being a dna match does not mean you are going to jail. You need corroborating evidence just like how finger prints are used. The odds of a false positive that 1) is a dna match and 2) was in the right place at the right time and lacks and alibi and has a potential motive for the crime must be a trillion to one.
People think it is a magical incarnation, that they can wield in any vaguely relevant discussion.
Whereas I'd argue that HIPAA is a very weak law with poor enforcement. It is a "better than nothing" law and nothing more[0]. It isn't some kind of medical data super weapon like people believe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_a...
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Information_Technology_...
That said, it may be time to actually demand some basic protections in that sphere.
Do you mean plaintiffs not defendants? My understanding is Alex Jones was being sued, not doing the suing.
I'm not aware of the details of that case, but could those records be something his lawyer legitimately demanded during discovery? My understanding is that HIPAA only controls the disclosure of medical records by the medical provider and related parties, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't a carve out for court orders. If the records leave the provider's custody for any reason, HIPAA is irrelevant for any dissemination after that point.
As for the second part, maybe? Unfortunately, that part is very much unclear with everyone having a reason to spin it to their advantage. I could not find the actual origin at this time. Maybe we will be able to learn it eventually.
Since search warrants were issued, rather than healthcare data volunteered by healthcare providers, HIPAA doesn't apply at all.
> Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, a fugitive, a material witness, or a missing person.
> police in California had issued five search warrants to access such samples, and that at least one cold case there was solved with the help of newborn blood.
Then goes on to reference the cold case. So I assume they somehow got a warrant for this DNA even though they couldn't from an adult suspect which is odd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Bieber#National_and_...
Family Search first used in California in 2010. The "Grim Sleeper" serial murderer. They first tried in 2008 but no match. Trying again 2010 yeilded a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Sleeper#Arrest_and_furthe...
"Police had found no exact match between DNA found at the crime scenes and any of the profiles in California's DNA profile database, so they searched the database for stored profiles that demonstrated sufficient similarity to allow police to infer a familial relationship. They found similar DNA belonging to Franklin's son, Christopher, who had been convicted of a felony weapons charge in 2008. Christopher was too young to have committed the murders, but the familial DNA match led investigators to look at his father, Lonnie, as the likely perpetrator."
its a little fraught, because some states take DNA from those who have committed crimes..
"I understand that there are numerous benefits to public health in retaining residual NBS samples. Residual NBS samples are the only available opportunity for a complete population study to be conducted since there is a sample received on virtually every baby born. In addition to this, the NBS sample is sometimes the only remaining evidence available to the family from their child if their child becomes missing. The main benefits to NBS sample storage are: • Quality assurance and improvement for the NBS laboratory. • Research for new technologies and for detecting new disorders. • Research for new treatments and cures for major childhood diseases. • Population incidence research on disorders and environmental contaminant exposures. • Parents can recall the specimens to help determine the cause of an unexplained death of their child (SIDS). • Parents can recall the specimens to aid law enforcement in identifying their missing child. "
https://texaslawreview.org/americas-hidden-national-dna-data...
(See the paragraph around cite 180)
It will make the world much safer as the chances of getting away with a crime are heavily reduced.
There's still due process and the presumption of innocence.
It was only after the state lab gave them the baby's DNA sample that they were able to establish probable cause and get a warrant for the father.
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/CDPH%20Document%20...
Per the article, state polices on sample retention and access are wildly inconsistent. I really don't think a form that outlines a complex topic handed to people right after they've had a baby delivered is adequate notice that cops might treat it as evidence years or even decades later.
Informed consent is the bar, if personal liberty ranks anywhere on your list of human rights.
DNA and other factors available in blood would seem to fall under "individually identifiable health information" by any definition: a blood sample confers the most unambiguous identification of a biological organism.
Do blood samples nonetheless fall under "permitted disclosures"? Why? It goes completely against the stated purpose of laws like HIPAA re: PII to transmit DNA or other identification data.
But I was really commenting that private data is certainly somethign the government can obtain and use against you in court.