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Scientists Learn To Fabricate DNA Evidence
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that it is possible to fabricate blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor, and even to construct a sample of DNA to match someone's profile without obtaining any tissue from that person — if you have access to their DNA profile in a database. This undermines the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. 'You can just engineer a crime scene,' said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper. 'Any biology undergraduate could perform this.' The scientists fabricated DNA samples in two ways. One requires a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or a drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification. The other technique relies on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person's genome. The scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a phony DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, says the findings were worrisome. 'DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,' says Simoncelli. 'We're creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.'"
Well, fuck.
Company selling test to detect whether this has happened shows off a tech demonstration of why their product is necessary.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ok folks, don't get yourselves in a tizzy over this.
If you read the article (yeah, I know, it's against Slashdot rules, but give a try anyway) you'll see that all this hype originates from a company that has a product to detect faked DNA evidence, that they hope to sell to forensics labs.
The simple fact is that if someone wants to plant your DNA at a crime scene, there are many possible ways for them to obtain *real* DNA to use for that purpose. They aren't going to go through the hassle of creating fake DNA...
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
You'd be surprised how much of this stuff can be done on the cheap if you know what you're doing.
I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to do this stunt when you consider it's been some time since they've created a synthetic duplicate of the genomes in a microbe. (In theory, they could have recreated any microbe they had the complete genome stored for, more or less.) It's only a small conceptual step from doing that stuff to faking DNA evidence.
Oh well, guess we know what surprise twist CSI will have next season.
It means that they didn't need to stitch them into one DNA chain, they "just mixed them".
That's quite important.
Couldn't the defense though just demand that they test something else? Like mitochondrial DNA? It might be slower but if your conviction hangs in the balance then they could splurge on proving it wasn't your DNA. You might come up as a false positive as a suspect but then actually be cleared anyway.
That being said, just because your DNA was present doesn't mean you commited the crime. Especially in a murder trial. After all they could also obain your blood through other means and just directly plant real hair and blood probably easier than manufacturing blood. A little social engineering is probably easier than genetic engineering.
You're missing the point.
By planting evidence in an actual crime, you don't have to arrest them under a controversial Orwellian law about "having the wrong books" or "looking at the wrong websites" where they become the new Leonard Peltier, Nelson Mandela, -- i.e. a political figure for people to wrap their cause around. They're just another rapist/murderer/bomber at that point. Nobody will want to be seen as a supporter of them because of being associated with a criminal, and the dissident will be written off as crackpot.
You can also do it based on in the DNA information for the standard 13-site tests typically kept in databases. That effectively allows you to frame somebody without ever coming close to them. Which could be important if your target is a 250lb outlaw biker or a paranoid schizo with a criminal record. But as someone else pointed out, this isn't a surprise to anybody that has an understanding of how these tests work, as well as understanding the potential usefulness of DNA manipulation for motivation in advancement of the state of the art.
Did you give the police a sample of your kids' DNA in case they ever got lost or kidnapped? If you really are concerned about the extremely long odds that that would happen, you might have been better off taking the sample, freeze drying it in your freezer and putting it in a safety deposit box rather than handing it over so that it can go in a database somewhere. Seriously, if I were growing up now instead of decades ago, and later found my parents had done that when I was a child, I would be seriously angry. Because now that the police have the sample, they can retest it to match whatever increase in gene fragment sites is used to "decrease the chance of an accidental or falsified match". Storage is cheap enough that in the long run they'll probably wind up tracking all the thousands of possible human DNA gene variations since it's only about 20,000 or so genes. At which point someone can just fake up some introns and insert them randomly to make a pretty convincing copy without ever being near the intended target. Sounds ludicrous now, but it will be borderline trivial in another few decades. Five years ago, most people (particularly those in the law enforcement sphere) would have labeled the scenario described in the article as paranoia.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Not until hotshot defense lawyers figure out the best ways to exploit the issue in a real context.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
"This undermines the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. "
It doesn't. The credibility still lies with the lab scientists themselves handling the DNA samples, as the infamous OJ Simpson case showed.
The really scary one to me is the possibility of mastermind criminals framing prior criminals whose DNA is on file. Imagine a bio-hacker pedophile who framed people on those handy state lists, leading the authorities directly to the very people they suspect most in the first place.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Even though DNA evidence can be faked, I don't see any easy way to introduce it into a crime scene. If Alice decides to rob Bob's safe and fix the blame on Charles, would she go in with a plant mister loaded with l'eau du faux Charles and spray it all over Bob's office? I don't think that's going to work.
I think that any use of faux DNA evidence is going to have to be associated with cellular material from the person who is being framed, since the presence of DNA fragments independent of skin cells, hair follicles, blood cells, etc is going to look very much out of place to the forensics technicians. And if Alice has acquired enough samples from Charles to make the fake-Charley-water believable, why doesn't she just plant that? What value does the l'eau du faux Charles add?
Existing good police technique makes fake DNA a non-issue.
Will