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California Expands DNA Identification Policies
The Los Angeles Times is reporting on a new California policy to match the DNA of suspected criminals to the criminal's family members in order to use them as investigative leads. Use of partial DNA matching is drawing fire over privacy concerns from citizens and law experts. FBI officials are hesitating as well, though their concern is that the courts will not accept such techniques. Quoting:
"The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state's crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California's offender database and closely resemble, but do not match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the state refused to tell police about these partial matches.) When such partial matches do not surface or fail to produce a lead, a more customized familial search can be done in which computer software scans the database proactively for possible relatives. The software measures the chance of two people being related based on the rarity of the markers they share."
They might as well mandate collection of DNA from everyone at birth. With the web of connections between people chances are at least one of your relatives will have their DNA on file which under this program will lead to you. This is the "slippery slope" part of it, if they went full bore and demanded DNA from everyone there would be figurative riots in the streets but a little step at a time...
Shh.
A little background: In November 2004, a frightened California public passed proposition 69, which allowed the state to maintain a DNA database of its citizens. The DNA samples are taken when you are arrested at the booking along with fingerprints and mug shots.
This means that you don't ever have to be convicted- hell, you don't even have to be charged- to have your DNA added to this database. People who are wrongly accused do NOT automatically have their DNA expunged from the database.
When do the DNA-sequence-hashed social security numbers come out again?
What the hell do fingerprints have to do with this? You can't find a persons relatives via a finger print. You can't say "hey- think fingerprints looks almost like this other guys, so it much be a relatives!"
With DNA, you're using a DNA sample from a crime scene and matching it to a known criminals DNA to find a relative.
What you're suggesting is using a fingerprint from a crime scene, matching it to a known criminal, and then using that to find the persons relatives. That doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. If the fingerprint matches, you know your criminal. If it doesn't, you've got to keep investigating. Who they're related to isn't exactly important.
In this case we're talking about casting suspicion over people simply because their DNA is close to someone else's- that's frightening.
What they're doing here is when they have only DNA evidence, and can find a close match, then the basic idea is that they want to make any of those close matches "suspects". Not suspect of committing the crime, but suspect of being related to the actual perp.
How would you like a detective knocking on your door and wanting to discuss your immediate relatives, looking for leads on a case he's working on?
"we have reason to believe that one of your relatives committed a crime, care to answer a few questions?"
Now lets say it was a really close match and now they would like to DNA test your kid to see if he's a 100% match? (with no other evidence than this close match) If you allow that, then where do we draw the line? Not so close? Can we DNA test all your cousins? We're sure one of them's the one we're looking for!
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"You can have my DNA when you extract it from my cold, dead hand!"
Oh, wait...
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
As it is, the current system is grossly unfair to those related to people who have been sampled.
If everyone is sampled at least it's fair.
Grossly anti-civil-liberties, but fair.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
to your personal freedom because regardless of what a law says today it can become a whole different thing tomorrow. Suddenly all that information on you that was supposed secure is now available to parties who have a need to know, all in the vein of "its for the children", "terrorist are lurking", "for increased safety"... and so on.
Never believe anything in the government vaults is safe because leaders change and so do laws
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well, this was the result of a referendum, so I think the "government trying to control us" is a little innacurate. It would have been more appropriate to say that the sheeps are looking forward for the opportunity to sell more of their rights to broaden the illusion of safety.
I do worry about what will happen when genomic sequencing and analysis becomes so cheap and easy that it will be standard practice to fully sequence your genome if and when you are arrested or apply for a job. DNA fingerprinting, while bad enough, does not tell the government what genes you have. If and when they get that capability, you can bet someone is going to find a set of genes that are correlated with criminal behavior.
It will be very controversial and all of course, but as long as that process doesn't highlight too many people, the public will be okay with treating those individuals as destined to be criminals. I wonder if we'll have them electronically monitored or maybe wear an identifying badge?
This is more than a 21st century equivalent of fingerprint matching because DNA contains so much more information than fingerprints.
Law enforcement will try to use a familial DNA match found at a crime scene as probable cause for a search warrant. It will happen. There are several scenarios. Imagine you have two brothers and you live in the same town, and brother 1 has been convicted of armed robbery. DNA at the crime scene of another robbery with a similar location to brother 1's first armed robbery is found that has a familial match to his DNA. A DA or detective would love to be able to use that as probable cause for a search warrant of your house and brother 2's house as well. Whether it would be granted depends on many factors. If you and brother 2 were suspected of being accomplices in the first armed robbery (say, letting him keep money, etc at your house) but never charged b/c of lack of evidence, you can be sure that would increase the chance of the warrant being granted.
The potential for abuse of this is off the chart.
Another question, how reliable are these markers for familial relationships in DNA anyway? Who is making sure that these DNA 'markers' are viable? Seems like the public is willing to swallow anything that involves DNA when it comes to law enforcement.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Some of the "family" members won't be. They'll uncover the fact that there is no biological link to one or the other parent and/or siblings, even when divorce and remarriage is not involved. They'll find that some births occur outside the relationship otherwise thought to be what's general considered "legitimate". Bringing this fact to light will be a violation of the privacy of the suspect and/or family members, particularly since this fact will have nothing to do with the investigation. In order to pursue the case based on this evidence, they'll have to conduct this violation. If not prevented, it will provide precedent for similar violations that are not directly related to otherwise valid investigations.
Worse still is when the fact of "legitimacy" is then used to judge the person(s) in entirely separate venues, such as job related security background checks conducted on the otherwise innocent family members. Although society may change and the "legitimacy" question cease to matter as much as it used to, others will hang on longer and tighter, such as in this example, where the employers will view it more negatively than the population because they'll be looking for the potential problems, and pursue them on this basis "just in case".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
OK, why does this sound like genetic profiling to find 'people with criminal genes' to me?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
My concern is localized optima in what the public thinks of as nearly 'random' data. Consider a community of 20-40 thousand that is economically and culturally semi-isolated. Like a farming town - or a city ghetto. Yes, a ghetto in the middle of a city of millions can be semi-isolated genetically. How many people who can afford to live elsewhere will go to the poorest part of town to find a mate? How many people living there are able to get their "genes" out of the ghetto? After 100 years, just how 'rare' are the genetic markers found inside that community? (Some of these places have been that way since the civil war!)
Any sort of study to find the answer would have very loud political repercussions, thus is unlikely to ever be done (or been done - we'dve heard about it).
The odds may be millions when compared to the entire polpulation of a region, but can not be known without mapping the genetic clustering. The numbers may be much, much lower inside genetic clusters.
Without knowing how to account for genetic clustering and localized optima, the actual rarity of genetic markers in a specific case can not be known. And the difference will always favor the police by producing false positives.
After a few years of collecting DNA from the poorest, the police may be able to link any crime with someone in that community if 'familial' relationships are used as indicators. I've never seen *any* comment in articles about forensic DNA testing that discusses this. Which is why, if on a jury, I will almost certainly disregard any DNA evidence.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.