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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
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.
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
I think we'd feel much better about it if we used this tool to remove suspicion from people, rather than to add suspicion. For example, this tool could probably rule out that the suspect is black or asian, that it's not a woman, it's not someone over 5'9, etc. Using the tool to generate a crappy portrait is the real bad move, because if you look like that, people will think that's evidence for your guilt. If this tool were only used to exonerate people and to remove them from the suspect list, who could object?
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.