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Police Use DNA To Generate a Suspect's Face
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times has a pair of articles about a technology now being used in police investigations: computer generation of a suspect's face from only their DNA. Law enforcement in South Carolina had no pictures or descriptions of a man who murdered a mother and her daughter, but they had some of his DNA. From this, a company named Parabon NanoLabs used a technique called DNA phenotyping to create a rough portrait of the suspect's facial features, which the police then shared with the public.
The accuracy of these portraits is still an area of hot debate — most of them look rather generic. The NY Times staff tested it with a couple of their employees, circulating the DNA-inspired portraits and seeing if people could guess who it was supposed to be. None of the ~50 employees were able to identify reporter John Markoff, and only about 10 were able to identify video journalist Catherine Spangler. But even though the accuracy for a person's entire face is low, techniques for specific attributes, like eye color, have improved greatly. Of course, the whole situation raises a slew of civil liberties questions: "What traits are off limits? Should the authorities be able to test whether a suspect has a medical condition or is prone to violence should such testing be possible?"
The accuracy of these portraits is still an area of hot debate — most of them look rather generic. The NY Times staff tested it with a couple of their employees, circulating the DNA-inspired portraits and seeing if people could guess who it was supposed to be. None of the ~50 employees were able to identify reporter John Markoff, and only about 10 were able to identify video journalist Catherine Spangler. But even though the accuracy for a person's entire face is low, techniques for specific attributes, like eye color, have improved greatly. Of course, the whole situation raises a slew of civil liberties questions: "What traits are off limits? Should the authorities be able to test whether a suspect has a medical condition or is prone to violence should such testing be possible?"
"What traits are off limits? Should the authorities be able to test whether a suspect...is prone to violence should such testing be possible?"
Because it's hard to tell if someone who killed 2 people is violent....
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
When that technology will have evolved enough, it'll be able to show what you were supposed to be from your DNA, compared to what you actually are. How your body and face have changed due to your family, education, school, company etc... That technology will contribute to settle the debate "genetics vs environment".
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Sounds more like a case of Parallel_construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... to me. Its not like the technique is unknown to law enforcement. With all the additional pressure around Stingray (cell site simulator) use, I fully expect these types of techniques to proliferate.
Why is privacy so important? Because you don't know what creepy things governments will do with it in the future. All the condition under which you gave away some of your personal information might not apply in the future. And getting your information back at that time will very likely be no option.
What if your face ends up with this new creepy technology. How can you even possibly defend your self against it? Some, for normal people, impossible to comprehent scientific research apoints you as a suspect. What can you do? This is creepy and scary and not something we should want.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Because it searches for correlation between faces and DNA, and it's getting arguably discernible results already. I'm expecting it to improve as it gets more sample data, more processing power, and more researchers identifying distinguishing facial characteristics for it to attempt a DNA correlation to. Further, when they find out how to show examples at different milestone ages, then that would lead to even more interesting applications. Imagine knowing what your baby will look like before they are born... and the societal questions that that brings.
Even very weak evidence is useful, even if it would be too weak for court. If you know* the perp is African-American, you can't go around suspecting everyone who's African American, but you most certainly can eliminate all your white/asian/hispanic suspects.
*Sadly/amusingly, eyewitness accounts are not sufficient for this.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Soon we'll be able to grow the criminal himself from the DNA and punish him even he's not found.
Handing out multiple life sentences will take on a whole new meaning.