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Genealogy Websites Were Key To Big Break In Golden State Killer Case (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from The New York Times: The Golden State Killer raped and murdered victims all across the state of California in an era before Google searches and social media, a time when the police relied on shoe leather, not cellphone records or big data. But it was technology that got him. The suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was arrested by the police on Tuesday. Investigators accuse him of committing more than 50 rapes and 12 murders. Investigators used DNA from crime scenes and plugged that genetic profile into a commercial online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo's and traced their DNA to him.
"We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area -- and that was Mr. DeAngelo," said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief in the Sacramento district attorney's office. Investigators then obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, called "abandoned" DNA samples from Mr. DeAngelo. "You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain," she said. The test result confirmed the match to more than 10 murders in California. Ms. Schubert's office then obtained a second sample and came back with the same positive result, matching the full DNA profile. Representatives at 23andMe and other gene testing services denied on Thursday that they had been involved in identifying the killer.
"We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area -- and that was Mr. DeAngelo," said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief in the Sacramento district attorney's office. Investigators then obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, called "abandoned" DNA samples from Mr. DeAngelo. "You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain," she said. The test result confirmed the match to more than 10 murders in California. Ms. Schubert's office then obtained a second sample and came back with the same positive result, matching the full DNA profile. Representatives at 23andMe and other gene testing services denied on Thursday that they had been involved in identifying the killer.
This is the good side of DNA databases. This data can also be abused. It's an awesome power and power is very corrupting. This needs serious regulation...ironclad. But of course that wont happen.
So geneology websites are secretely feeding their data to the government? They make it sound like they simply put his data into a 'DNA search engine' on the internet and got a match.
How distant was the 'distant relative' that they got the original DNA hit from I wonder?
They did at least compare his actual DNA with crime scene DNA. The guy is a loner, prone to sudden outbursts to neighbors. At least he fits some sort of profile rather than being taken in on DNA matching alone. That doesn't mean that other cases will fare so well, but there is a lot of evidence to comb through on this guy so it's likely we'll see some sort of successful proof one way or the other.
Yea, still not a good thing, look at how society reacts to just being a suspect, you are now mostly guilty until proven innocent. Wives will divorce husbands, working fathers will be fired from good jobs, people that know them will ostracize and avoid them, they could lose access to their own children.
People are so hell bent on getting the bad guy they will happily grind up innocent people along the way with little remorse. This is not even considering things like this...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u...
20,000 convictions dropped. Heck people have gone to jail over donuts!
https://www.npr.org/sections/t...
Lets face it... law enforcement and quality testing are just not friends. They happily rely on shoddy results and questionable evidence to go full assault on someone in their pursuits to apprehend "the innocent criminals."
You're looking at this the wrong way.
There is certainly a problem with false arrest and conviction, and a culture that treats an arrest as though it were a conviction.
None of that gets worse because there's a new vector that might point at someone. Sure, now there are people that may not have previously been brought in, and there will certainly be some people who are arrested, even convicted, on poor quality DNA 'evidence', but if the system is broken, it's going to find a scapegoat, regardless of what it relies on.
This is one more tool to differentiate between the three different suspects you are holding. This is a way to exculpate the poor bastard held for 20 years.
More information, more accurate information means a greater possibility for more accurate results.
Demand more of your police. Hold them to higher standards. Denying them better tools for fear that they won't use them well, or may abuse them leads nowhere.
Yes, it's pretty nice they finally nabbed a guy whom they think is the killer. Still have to give him a fair trial, as is due.
But no, this is already very, very disturbing. To wit: "You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain" the goverment official says. Yes you do, everywhere, involuntary. Meaning that to have any privacy left you can't go to any public place. In fact, if you want to have any privacy left, you can't have any relative, even a distant one, go to any public place, ever. This "a public place" starts right at your door. Hey, even your airco's exhaust is public, and it will contain your dna, so... etc.
So while I don't disagree it's nice to have finally found a very likely suspect in the case (but still only a suspect, not convicted yet!), to do it they had to destroy all privacy forever. "Only for murder cases" you say. I have seen in other cases and fully expect to see here that it won't stay that way. Soon it'll be for everything, down to getting loans, or even China style, for getting on the bus. So no.
I don't think destroying all privacy forever to nab a suspect is such a good idea.
DNA tests not being absolutely 100% accurate has been known since law enforcement started using it as a tool to solve crimes. Anyone raising alarm right now is either decades late or just trying to stir up manufactured controversy.
The reason why DNA testing is so popular is that a false positive is a literally a one-in-a-million type scenario, which makes it several orders of magnitude more accurate and less likely to provide a false positive than any other investigative tool law enforcement has at it's disposal. There's a reason why a large part of the people who have been convicted and then found innocent in cases from before the use of DNA evidence became widespread have been done so using DNA testing.
In other words, like any of the investigative tools available to law enforcement, DNA testing is not absolutely 100% accurate, but it is several orders of magnitude more accurate than any other tool available to law enforcement meaning that if you're going to raise alarm over it's accuracy, you ought to raise an even bigger alarm over every other tool they have at their disposal.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
The Innocence Project exonerated thousands of men unjustly imprisoned. The #1 crime they were falsely accused of? Rape.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
They're the genetic counterpart of Facebook. Even when you explicitly don't sign on for that crap, you're still swept up in it. It's good that they caught the guy and all; but it's going to be bad when insurance companies and potential employers use genealogy databases to deny coverage and jobs to blood relatives of those who have 'undesirable' or 'risky' something-something-somethings.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.