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UK-Developed 'DNA Spray' Marks Dutch Thieves With Trackable Water
eldavojohn writes "In Rotterdam, there's a new technology in place that dispenses a barely visible mist over those around it and alerts the police. The purpose? To tag robbers and link them back to the scene of the crime. From the article, 'The mist — visible only under ultraviolet light — carries DNA markers particular to the location, enabling the police to match the burglar with the place burgled. Now, a sign on the front door of the McDonald's prominently warns potential thieves of the spray's presence: "You Steal, You're Marked."' Developed in Britain, it's yet to nab a criminal but it will be interesting to see whether or not synthesized DNA will hold up as sufficient evidence in an actual court of law." So it's not just for copper thieves.
Well, that's the first thing they'll serve with actual DNA in it, then.
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Seriously? I'm no scientist, but it seems like a good scrubbing and you'd make a clean getaway. Har har...
Good joke; but since you are no scientist, perhaps you wouldn't know that they even think about these trivial, blindingly obvious things and test for them.
Nope, mate, what you see here is a bloody clever thing, and not something you can easily find a way out of. DNA sequences can be purpose built nowadays, and soon it will be cheap enough for everybody to buy. The number of variations are practically unlimited, so you could more or less mark every brick in London with their own, individual marker, and you can't just wash it off and be sure not to carry it around with you; plus of course they don't put a big sticker on the outside of marked objects to warn you. If you want to avoid carrying this stuff around with you, you will have to put on a full environment suit, and since you never know where you can come across this stuff, you will have to do it every time you do something you don't want to be nicked for. The problem with environment suits is, they tend to stand out, of course.
"The police acknowledge that they have yet to make an arrest based on the DNA mist, which was developed in Britain by two brothers, one a policeman and the other a chemist. But they credit its presence — and signs posted prominently warning of its use — for what they call a precipitous decline in crime rates (though they could not provide actual figures to back that up).
I don't see any burglars, so it has to be working.
They're spraying their DNA over customers, and it shows up under a blacklight?
Oh, come on! This is just too easy.
Of everything. Because this is a fine mist that will stick to everything, even your hands, shoes, clothes, socks, the bag, the tools, the stolen property. So you'd need to do a job and then ditch everything you have in a forensically secure way. I've used a similar competing product called SmartWater.
The beauty of things like SmartWater is that its a suspension of fine molecules that can be *uniquely* identified to a particular user (i.e. you get a coded bottle with a unique number and a unique solution). The UV is just there to light up when people go through police stations but the chemical itself is, supposedly, uniquely identifiable.
Answering "How did you come to have UV marker solution on your clothes?" is easy. You were security marking your own equipment, you work with the stuff all the time, it must have been on something you picked up, maybe someone was playing a prank. Answering "How did you come to have a UV marker solution on the clothes you wore last night that is ONLY issued to Company X, when there was a burglary at Company X last night, when you claim to have been at home and never near Company X?" is a bit more tricky, especially if it's a fine mist that soaks into anything and everything it touches.
I've used the SmartWater stuff, which is very similar to this, and it's a wonderful deterrent. They claim to have a 100% conviction rate when property / people are found by police with SmartWater on them and given that they are often used in bank security vans, that's quite impressive. I don't know if that was true, or still is, but it's plausible. Basically if the police find the tiniest forensic trace of that stuff on property / people they question, they can take a sample, send it to the company, who will tell them who bought that EXACT pot of tracer ink. I also know from experience that a 50ml pot of SmartWater is enough to chemically mark every PC or electrical item in a school several times a year and last several years.
This stuff isn't just a UV-tracer. It puts you, forensically, at the exact scene of a particular crime. And given that I know of no lawsuits with any of these stuff being in question, they must have a pretty cast-iron chemical description that can satisfy a court of law or, at least, people who are caught with it on their clothes that it wouldn't be worth challenging.
It's also very good for equipment recovery. It basically guarantees identificiation / return of stolen property if it comes into police hands. Before, even if your stuff was security marked, it wasn't guaranteed that you would get it back (the first thing is that people try to file off the security marks - I've had police tell me of cases where they had to return goods with obviously filed-off security marks because they couldn't prove it WASN'T the suspected thieves and couldn't trace the actual owner), but with SmartWater once it's in police possession even the smallest tiny speck of SmartWater (which can be deployed even on hard-to-cleanse areas like across the PCB's of (unpowered) motherboards) or similar will link it to it's owner.
I've seen stickers in buildings 'armed' with this stuff since the early 90s (my old primary school used it, it came in little bottles with a felt applicator, and the stuff dried out almost instantly so opening one resulted in a mad rush to tag everything). Generally, the idea was not to tag burglars, but instead to stick a dab onto valuable equipment. Because vanishingly few burglars would bother to go over stolen goods with a UV lamp looking for a little glowing patch, and even fewer would then go and acquire the solvents required to remove all traces of the stuff, it generally sticks around better than a simple unpeelable sticker or sand-able etched number. If it got stolen and subsequently recovered, it could then be definitively traced back to a crime. Makes prosecution easier, and helps with insurance (and even getting your stuff back if you can definitively prove it's yours).
they will have to change the DNA marker after one use....Also checking for duplicate natural DNA
Smartwater uses various methods to encode a unique signature. No actual DNA is involved.
Thieves wear hoods, motorcycle helmets, stockings... Alarms go off so often that responses are slow, if at all: a burglar can be in and out long before the alarm is responded to,
Since the spray is highly personalized, you can shine an ultra-violet light on a suspect - which they will have difficulty objecting to - and trace them back to a crime for which you may not even have suspected them. If it is the case, as commonly alleged, that the majority of crime is committed by a small number of people, then you may well be able to nab them for crimes for which you have not (yet) suspected them when you question them for a different crime.
That said, I always have my suspicions of such "miracle inventions". It is worth a try - I look forward to seeing how it works out in practice.
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I first heard of this stuff about 10 years ago, under the name "SmartWater" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartWater
IIRC it won some kind of 'Millenium Award' in 1999 or 2000
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So it's even better?
Just as I was reading that story, I was thinking, "WTF, why McDonald?" I mean in retail the majority of thefts are by employees, not some guy charging in to snatch a plastic cup and run.
So now you just need to figure how to trip the spray on some lone guy who came for a burger at 2 AM, pocket a thousand and claim he robbed you. Or you can get even more creative if the miracle bottle that the PHB marks everything with is easily accessible by just, say, opening his desk drawer.
Thanks to idiot juries who, thanks to what now is called the "CSI effect" will blindly convict if there's some high-tech shit they don't understand as evidence -- and just as sadly occasionally won't convict even with six witnesses if you don't also some techno-magic involved to finger the culprit -- you're almost guaranteed to have the scheme work unless you overdo it and become the store that's robbed at 2AM every night.
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It does. To an extent. Not enough though.
The PCR techniques used to amplify it for detection purposes are so sensitive that enough remains can be picked up by crimelab.
The only way to reliably "clean" clothing that has come into contact with this is to dip it in DNAases (enzymes that specifically hydrolise DNA). These are actually quite easy to come by in Holland. Holland is one of the world capitals of developing "pumped up" chicken meat. That used to be "pumped up" with crude pork and beef proteins extracts, however labs started picking up pork or beef based on DNA (very similar to this detection method). So now the extracts are treated with DNAase so that the tests do not work. As a result DNAase is actually not that difficult to come by. Just talk to your "halal" (quotes intended as it is stuffed with pork to the hilt) cheap chicken supplier.
Not that it would matter anyway as this is mostly against petty criminals.
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Actually I'd expect it to be even worse, thanks to the CSI effect. Basically the same blind belief that if it's some hi-tech shit, then it's more infallible than the Pope and those scientists 100% thought of and prevented every possible problem or false positive, that you can see in the GP post.
Someone _will_ get sent to jail by some idiot jury because the real burglar -- who, for example, is an employee and didn't even need to synthetise anything: he just nicked the bottle that the PHB cleverly hid in his desk drawer -- sprayed them with it.
That's actually the important part: often when it looks like there's some impossible hurdle like synthetising DNA, there are often _much_ simpler ways to plant it, _and_ you can rely on some idiots still thinking that only the really complicated way exists. E.g., people have already planted DNA at a crime scene by just taking a cigarette butt from a bus station and dropping it there. Here you don't even have to do that.
Or as an even more trivial example, if a co-worker you really don't like leaves his coat behind and his wallet in it, spray the coat and banknotes in the wallet, steal the same amount from the cash register, tip someone off that you saw them stealing again. Double profit. You got the money, and got rid of that guy or gal you don't like.
Yeah, they'll end up having to convince a jury that those scientists and their hi-tech solution are fallible after all. Good luck with that in a world being told the opposite by PR. And where they saw on TV every week that you can take a hair you found on a carpet and know exactly that it belongs to the killer (and not, say, to one of the guests the victim had two days before that, or some guy in the bus leaving hair on her coat) and run a DNA analysis to tell you exactly what the killer looks like. Or that you can take a two by two pixel image of the back of someone's head from a security camera, enhance it to a clear 1600x1200 image and, with a couple more mouse clicks, turn it around to see the culprit's face.
Seriously, we're already at the point where some juries acquit because you didn't do that, or conversely people who spent time on the death row because some pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo must be 100% correct and accurate like on CSI.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And as long as you didn't fit the CCTV footage, have a record for that type of crime, find it hard to show evidence of the spraying, had a remotely plausible alibi, leave any DNA or fingerprint evidence at the site etc I'm sure you might have a chance with that defence.
I'm very sceptical about DNA evidence being used to convict. I'm a lot less sceptical about evidence like this being used to build a compelling case alongside other evidence, or to narrow enquiries. You can, never, ever, 100% prove someone committed a crime even if they admit it, did it in public and on CCTV. You can however be confident the odds of a false conviction are vanishingly small, requiring any more that isn't plausible.
Whew! And here I was afraid the spray was just cat pee.
Nothing gets that stuff off.
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Why not just buy some of this spray, covertly spray some around a jewellery shop and then report them to the police for handling your stolen property?
Most thieves either get caught at the scene or they get away and the police eventually track them down much later. After multiple showers and scrubbing I doubt that there would be enough of this stuff left to get a positive DNA match. Don't forget that the police have lied about the accuracy and reliability of DNA. The Omagh bombing trial collapsed because the DNA "amplification" technique was shown to be unreliable and because it threw up two matches from the database anyway which implies that the odds of a match are much lower than the 1 in 100,000,000 they were claiming.
You could probably just buy some of this stuff and then apply it to yourself. There would be little chance of getting a reliable clean sample.
Sounds like snakeoil to me.
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" ... plus of course they don't put a big sticker on the outside of marked objects to warn you ... ".
Err, yes the do. RTFA and see the big orange sign.
Also, DNA can degrade fairly quickly if it is not part of a living cell and there are many chemicals that can break DNA down.
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My chief concern is, if this is deployed as a "mist", how easy is it for others to get wrongly tagged. Can it get into aircon units and spread around the building? Can it escape the building and tag people in the street? Depending how blunt an instrument this is, it might not be enough to show a few drops, we might expect that only people who are literally drenched in the stuff are likely to be found guilty (and even then, who's to say the real criminal didn't lift a bottle of the stuff and toss it over the most likely suspect). If this is used purely for detection, fair enough; if it's used for conviction I'd be pretty worried.
""How did you come to have a UV marker solution on the clothes you wore last night that is ONLY issued to Company X"
Are you sure it was only issued to company X? Show my evidence that no other bottle could possibly contain the same solution. See, with humans this process occurs naturally, everyone has different DNA (with extremely high probability) because of how biology works. Once you start making your own, you've shown that it's possible to duplicate DNA, thus the solution is NOT necessarily unique.
"I also know from experience that a 50ml pot of SmartWater is enough to chemically mark every PC or electrical item in a school several times a year and last several years."
So, you have now just told us that you have the ability to put the SAME SOLUTION on multiple DIFFERENT ENTITIES MULTIPLE TIMES PER YER for years on end. Thus, anyone could, with only a tiny amount of this stuff, frame any number of different people with extreme ease.
"but with SmartWater once it's in police possession even the smallest tiny speck of SmartWater (which can be deployed even on hard-to-cleanse areas like across the PCB's of (unpowered) motherboards) or similar will link it to it's owner."
No, it will link it to whoever managed to get their hands on one of these bottles and spray it on whatever the fuck they felt like. I could go mark every computer at my local university with this stuff and then claim that the entire computer lab belonged to me because only I have this bottle of magic property-identifying liquid.
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This is an elaborate scheme to finally stop the Hamburglar, the masked hamburger stealer, who the company strangely uses as a commercial icon.
If we can spray this on corporate lobbyists, we can finally identify who is stealing money from our citizen taxpayers.
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Maybe we're overestimating the intelligence of people who'll walk past a big orange sign in broad daylight and rob a McDonalds.
No sig today...
That's a pretty massive 'if'.
I think you overestimate the sort of person who robs McDonalds, if they had a second brain cell to keep the first one company they wouldn't be doing it.
Masterminding some sort of DNA-resequencing plan? Not so much.
No sig today...
As far as I can tell, it's not only not new, but it also has nothing to do with DNA. The marker is either a unique proportion of certain non-evaporating particles, or small engraved chips with a number on them.
DNA has nothing to do with this, even in an abstract sense -- it is not self-replicating, and certainly not biological.
I would guess, the product in question is http://smartwater.com/
Living in the UK a few years back, I had started using it to mark belongings of mine, after a friend working for the police recommended it.
The stuff is almost transparent - but, when I applied it to a grey camera lens - it's still easily visible on it -- on black or white lenses it's not much of a problem.
On the greyish lens, I tried to wash it off - and have found that I couldn't (wet wipes, ...).
The stuff sticks fairly well - I can't even say I managed to get a noticable amount of it off.
As far as marking belongings goes - you literally only need a very small spot of it; and you can pick some place where it isn't too obvious. On my Nikon lenses, I sometimes put the spot on the 'o' in the Nikon logo. Trying to get this off would probably seriously (cosmetically) harm the lens; scratch off part of the logo - and the resale value will drop massively: No point trying to call it 'near mint condition' afterwards.
Under UV light, the spot is easily visible - under normal light, it's near invisible.
From another friend who works as a shop fitter for jewellers, he's tried it in alarm systems, and he told me, that it will take a few days/weeks before you get all of it off (i.e. small amounts still lodged in skin pores are almost impossible to get out easily).
This shit doesn't contain "DNA," it contains a chemical sequence that's sufficiently unique. They say "DNA" because DNA is so variant no two people who aren't clones (such as twins) have the same DNA. But it catches idiots with buzzwords.
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I usually just pee on everything I own.
I mean, why pay some company for synthetic markers, when you already have your own custom-tailored ones for free?
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Just think of it as a marker that contains a guaranteed unique identifier. backed up by a system that records which company is associated with that uniique identifier, and records to prove that they were the only company who has access to that identifier.
Many people have already pointed this out here, but since apparently it is too hard for you to understand I'll point it out again: no system of identification is more secure than its weakest link. In the case of SmartWater and other similar systems, the weakest link is the end user. Unless you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that no one in the shop in question has had any access to the source bottle, and you can further prove that no one who has been sprayed has ever transfered any of the material to anyone else, ever, you have a very poor identification system.
The number of people in this discussion who are telling us it is possible to amplify minute traces of this stuff for forensic purposes as if that was a good thing--rather than an open door to false conviction due to accidental transfer of minute traces of this stuff--is depressing.
This is just another insane scheme by ignorant people who think that "zero" is a tolerance, and it will fail for the same reasons. Every American $100 bill purportedly has non-zero traces of cocaine on it. In a few years of widespread use every person will have a few dozen DNA traces on them, including many from places they have never been due to accidental transfer.
This isn't that hard to understand, surely?
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