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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.
Except that he does not have probable cause to believe that both warrants would yield results. This is comparable to getting search warrants for everyone in the county named John, if one masked bandit in a robbery is referred to by another as "John".
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.