What Will We Do With Innocent People's DNA?

NevDull writes "As creepy as it may be to deal with identity theft from corporate databases, imagine being swabbed for DNA samples as a suspect in a crime, being vindicated by that sample, and never even being told why you were suspected. This article discusses a man, Roger Valadez, who's fighting both to have his DNA sample and its profile purged from government records, and to find out why he and his DNA were searched in the BTK case. DA Nola Foulston said, 'I think some people are overwrought about their concerns.' -- convenient as she wasn't the one probed without explanation. The article then mentions that 'In California, police will be able in 2008 to take DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony, whether the person is convicted or not, under a law approved by voters in November.' What will be the disposition of the DNA of the innocent?"

Comments

Nothing to Fear

[ackthpt]

DA Nola Foulston said, 'I think some people are overwrought about their concerns.'

In a country where the federal government has been concentrating power in the capital, I can't see where she gets such bizarre ideas.

We're heading for a country where everyone is a potential suspect, eventually. And when the congress pulls and late nighter and the president flies back to the capital to quickly sign a bill allowing the government to barge past states rights and personal descisions it's discomforting. It would probably be a small matter to bury into a large bill some little thing that allows the transportation of all DNA evidence to be conveniently sent to the Foggy Bottom and squirreled away somewhere, where it could be called upon the next time someone needs a roundup of the usual suspects and a filing error could easily send anyone off to Gitmo.

Re:Nothing to Fear

[Mistlefoot]

everyone is always a potential suspect.

What of the poor sap who has an affair with someone who happens to get raped/murdered on her way home.

That his sperm has been found in her body and definitly matches means he's guilty?

How do you prove you had consentual sex with a now dead women. There are many such instances were the DNA found at the scene does not mean guilt. It seems to be the rule of thumb these days. If the DNA is there you are deemed guilty.

Re:Nothing to Fear

[BWJones]

You should also know that every individual that serves in the armed forces is required to submit a blood sample for DNA isolation and data warehousing. Of course these databases are supposed to be used principally for identification of remains, there are other more insidious plans that some individuals have proposed and acted upon with these data. i.e. using the data to test database systems and index them to criminal records. The problem of course like I have said before is that once these databases are created, it is very difficult to put the djinni back in the bottle. People will access them and include them in other projects.

Re:Nothing to Fear

[mankey wanker]

Oh, I laugh...

While I understand where you are coming from, I think you may be naive to the point of stupidity.

You would come forward as a good person, as a good citizen, as someone who seeks the truth.

The police have no such agenda. Their agenda is to provide society with a sense of law and order. That they regularly pin crimes on the most likely suspect is proof of the fact. No one knows the truth, the truth is rarely "outed" during a trial. We solve crimes by pinning them on the most likely person. It gives the appearance of law and order. The most likely suspect is often merely the last person to a see a victim alive, a close family member, a husband, a good friend. God help you if you fail to have an alibi, if you were sitting at home alone watching TV.

Now I could give a shit about Scott Peterson, but take the example anyhow. Scott Peterson had a pregnant wife, Laci. Many couples become estranged during a wife's pregnancy. Scott took a lover, Amber Frey. Juries don't like cheaters. Cheaters are liars and untrustworthy. FWIW, a very large number of people cheat all the time and we all know that fact. Laci was eventually found in the San Francisco bay, a place where Scott Peterson went boating on Xmas eve. Now, I don't know about you - but many people made much of the fact that Scott went boating on that day - as if it were beyond belief that someone would do such a thing just because he needed to get away or to think for a while. To wrap up, Scott Peterson was convicted because he was cheating on his wife, and was seen boating on the vast body of water in which Laci's body was later discovered. I am not saying that there aren't more details, but those are the main details.

They pinned it on him and gave him the thumbs down routine. The man will die largely based on mere speculation. There's not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence in the whole case. There's an alternate defense explanation for everything the prosecution claims.

A culture of spectacle and sacrifice doesn't care about the truth, it cares about appearances. We pin crimes on the most likely to be guilty, not those that are truly guilty. And there may be a universe of difference between those two categories. Is Scott Peterson "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"? Hell no, but society hates to imagine that there is a murderer loose somewhere. Society likes to nail someone so that the collective can rest easy at night.

Now it turns out that one of my old professors at law school is one of the point men for the whole DNA as evidence movement, his name is Larry Marshall. His big break for DNA evidence came in the Rolando Cruz case. Read about it here: http://www.innocenceproject.org/case/display_profi le.php?id=07

The salient bits are: "...under pressure from the community and in the midst of an election year..." and "...a sheriff's department lieutenant recanted testimony he had given in previous trials." Wow, do I mean it's often just politics and cops that lie? Hell yeah...

I quit law school because Larry Marshall gave a speech in which he informed all of us idiot law school students that the most important thing about the practice of law was how the judge was feeling, what kind of day the judge was having. Did the judge just have a fight with his wife? Is he feeling poorly? Does his stomach roil because of the steak sandwich he had at lunch? That's the guy that will decide all of your motions. He probably won't even read your motions except for during the five minutes before he must render a decision while he trembles on the toilet seat before entering the courtroom. If anyone read anything, it was some poor fuck law clerk that rendered an opinion via post-it note on how the judge should decide the issue.

You know how you play 3D shooters instead of doing your homework? Judges are just like you...

So, would I come forward and admit I was the last person to see some now dead chick alive? I would like to say yes, but the real answer is no. In the adversarial process, you are a suspect until you are excluded as a suspect by the evidence. Does that sound like "guilty until proven innocent"? Yes, it does sound a lot like that.

What do to with innocent people's DNA

[pHatidic]

We keep their DNA sample, and then plant some at the crime scene the next time we kill someone. Wow that was the easiest ask slashdot ever.

I shall use it to create

[darth_MALL]

A Grand Army Of the Republic!

No bad can come of that...right?

It's just data...

[zecg]

I don't think it's really about samples - the man hardly needs his skinflakes or his hair bits back and he sheds it all around anyway. As for the data it represents? Why, "we" keep it forever, of course. He is just the first in line, I'm willing to bet that within 20 years "we" will have a database of DNA samples from all "our" citizens - or whoever accepts my bet wins my slightly weathered tinfoil hat.

Why not one-way hash for DNA DB?

[DoctoRoR]

It seems like much of the angst over a national DNA database is the potential misuse of the sequences, e.g. raising insurance rates or selecting against carriers of X. If the goal of criminal DNA databases is to match samples from crime scenes, why not use a one-way hash of each DNA fragment? That way, the actual DNA sequence wouldn't be kept. The hash could be constructed after removing common sequences, but I'm probably missing something aside from sequencing issues (which should be more automated in future). And this doesn't address larger issues on DNA matches...

Re:Been doing it for awhile

[Florian Weimer]

Usually just being arrested means that you will be fingerprinted and your picture taken. Isn't this pretty much the same thing?

It depends. A regular DNA fingerprint doesn't really reveal anything about your genetic disposition, so it's not such a big problem. However, it's not clear if DNA fingerprinting is as resistant to collisions as it is generally perceived to be. It's fine if you match one sample against a few hundred suspects connected with the case; it's very unlikely that there is a false positive. But if you match thousands of samples a day against a database of millions of completely unrelated DNA fingerprinters, the odds of a false positive increase significantly.

DNA is largely similar for close relatives

[aralin]

Here is a big difference. While your kids are going to have totally different fingerprints and even pictures, their DNA to you will be largely similar. So by taking your DNA, you are putting your kids and your relatives in the database as well. If there is a partial match with someone in the database, they will just go after all his relatives and eventually find the right one. They just got a recent mass murder case solved when a daughter of a suspect volunteered to give a DNA sample, when he refused.

It's going to be a long time...

[Jack Johnson]

"If you're innocent, you have nothing to worry about." That line has become thouroughly entrenched in our society. Any and everything can be justified to the average american with that phrase.

Data never goes away

[billstewart]

Data never goes away once it's collected. (That doesn't count Murphy's Law of course - data you really want goes away quite easily.) Computer storage is cheap, and keeps becoming radically cheaper. Software and system administration / management costs aren't cheap, and don't get cheaper, and systems that weren't explicitly designed to get rid of data mean that expunging data is typically an expensive unreliable manual process. And that's just the costs of expunging the data in the active database - that doesn't count hunting through backup tapes, etc. New software and applications, on the other hand, can often import data from existing systems (again, minus the Murphy's Law issues), and when they do so, they usually aren't very good about maintaining any constraints on usage of the data, and usually aren't very good about backtracking if you want to find out who's had access to the data or get them to erase it.

All of this means that any law or policy that increases data collection is not only dangerous, but the data usually gets used for other things beyond the original purpose - information *does* want to be free. Anything that hangs an unique identifier on data, such as a National ID Card Number (or SSN, or SIN, or driver's license number), makes it easy for data to be imported into other systems and aggregated together. Anything that hangs a non-unique ID onto something, like a firstname+lastname, increases the chances that data will be imported into other systems incorrectly, combining your data with known criminal SameFirstInitial+DifferentMiddleInitial+SimilarLas tname who lives in a different city. In both cases, you'll never get the data expunged.

On the other hand, Moore's Law also means that applications that used to be unthinkable are now routine. When mainframes costs tens of millions of dollars and needed to be fed punchcards and stored stuff on magtape, writing database applications took a couple of years and a large budget, so only critical applications that could be used by lots of people got written. These days, a cheap desktop computer can hold lots more data, and any random civil servant can run a Spreadsheet query or simple fill-out-the-form database application for anything they feel like, such as tracking their ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend's phone bills. And most of that data could really fit in a pocket-computer as well, so next year that same civil servant or telemarketer can take a picture of your face or license plate using their camera-phone and look it up for some arbitrary reason (currently it takes a laptop for the license-plate lookup, and it's being done to nail parking ticket non-payers.)

This is going to be a big issue FAST

[hotspotbloc]

In January 2005 the Truro, MA Police Department announced that they wanted to collect DNA samples from 800 men, the vast majority of the town's male population, in hopes of solving a woman's murder who's solution have alluded the local authorities for three years. The recommendation originated with FBI Investigators assisting with the case. The chilling comment came from Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe who said that investigators "will be compelled to look at why people won't" submit a DNA sample.

What happens if mass testing becomes "routine" throughout the US? The fair and proper terms for the disposal of DNA samples of vindicated people is going to become a big, big thing. And please, don't give me "if you're innocent you have nothing to fear". DNA evidence can easily be altered or corrupted within the first few hours of collection. Especially if you have a sample already in hand. A very uncommon thing today but who can say about tomorrow.

We all know the answer to these questions:

Will the DNA sample of a vindicated person be disposed of after the trial, after all appeals or never? Never

Will the refusal to voluntarily give a DNA sample subject you to further scrutiny than a similar person who willingly submits? Yes

Will employers someday within the next ten years require a DNA sample for employment, similar to how most major retail chains require a test for legel and illegal drug use (Like Wal-Mart or Home Depot)? Yes

Will the US Congress do anything to protect the rights of the individual into this intrusion into one's privacy? No

Welcome to the New Amerika. Please leave your quaint notions of personal freedom at the border.

Here and Now : Truro DNA Case - 1/12/2005
Boston.com / News / Local / DNA testing troubles some in Truro
CBS News ACLU Slams Mass DNA Collection
USATODAY.com - ACLU seeks end to Mass. DNA collections
Cape Cod Times article: "New England town abuzz over DNA dragnet"