Data From Open-Source Ancestry Site Leads to More Arrests (fastcompany.com)

schwit1 tipped us off to new arrests made with genealogical evidence -- and growing interest in open source genealogy databases. Fast Company reports: In the last week, police have arrested two suspects in unrelated cold cases thanks to data gleaned from open-source ancestry site GEDMatch, reports the New York Times. That's the same open-source ancestry site that was used to track down the alleged Golden State Killer earlier this year. One of the arrests this week was of a 66-year-old nurse who is suspected of killing a 12-year-old girl in 1986. The other arrest is of a 49-year-old DJ who strangled a schoolteacher in 1992. Thanks to data from GEDMatch, Texas law enforcement also thinks that a man who was executed in 1999 for killing a 9-year-old girl was now also behind the murder of a 40-year-old realtor in 1981.
It all reminds me of that scene in "The Circle" where they demo technology that finds "a randomly-selected fugitive from justice -- a proven menace to our global community" -- within 20 minutes.

Last month DNA-based investigations also led to the arrest of the suspected murderer of two vacationers in 1987, and helped identify a suicide cold case from 2001.

Now an Ohio newspaper reports: Emboldened by that breakthrough, a number of private investigators are spearheading a call for amateur genealogists to help solve other cold cases by contributing their own genetic information to the same public database. They say a larger array of genetic information would widen the pool to find criminals who have eluded capture. The idea is to get people to transfer profiles compiled by commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe onto the smaller, public open-source database created in 2010, called GEDmatch. The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not.

But the push is running up against privacy concerns.

Comments

Beware Leaky DNA

[rtb61]

The threat of excess reliance on DNA evidence, remains the same, it can always be obtained from you and then planted where ever they want it, https://www.quora.com/How-many.... You leak DNA where ever you go, that is what they are relying on to prosecute you but you loose it where ever you go and they want to prosecute your for that. Drop a hair on the actual criminal and they drop it at the scene of the crime, you are fucked. The criminal collects it before hand and leaves it too obscure the crime trail. Use a hooker to collect an undeniable sample. Yeah over reliance on DNA is extremely dangerous to the enemies of a corrupt state. You can be any where they want you to be, well, at least your DNA can.

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[AmiMoJo]

These databases need to be deleted too. The privacy violates are incredible.

What do you do when an insurance company notices that someone in your family has a hereditary disease and decides to jack up your premiums? We need strong laws to protect DNA data and prevent that kind of abuse.

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[Richard_at_work]

These databases need to be deleted too. The privacy violates are incredible.

What do you do when an insurance company notices that someone in your family has a hereditary disease and decides to jack up your premiums? We need strong laws to protect DNA data and prevent that kind of abuse.

How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[inking]

I know you aren’t going to like it, but maybe you SHOULD pay a higher premiums in that case. The point of insurance is to mitigate risk, not to offload it onto others. You wouldn’t expect everyone to have to pay more for their car insurance, because there is this one guy that wrecks his car every week due to no fault of his own and everybody is paying for it because we have completely anonymized all traffic incident for muh privacy, do you? Some countries have social programs that essentially force you to pay for others and I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing for healthcare, but that is not what an insurance is for.

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[Hognoxious]

This is terrible! How can they justify convicting people based on DNA evidence alone!

Oh wait, they don't.

But here's an interesting fact: the first time DNA evidence was used in the UK it exonerated a mentally retarded suspect who'd already confessed.

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[MightyMartian]

Even the Neanderthals looked after sick members of the tribe. For chrissakes, act like a human being.

Re: Beware Leaky DNA

[inking]

That is completely irrelevant. Not how individual insurance works. You want societal insurance, great, but in that case DNA profiles aren’t an issue. That not being place, not giving this data to insurers is literally making others pay for you because you intentionally lied through omission about your family’s medical history.

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[ChatHuant]

What you need is more doctors, but the AMA has taken steps to prevent that. Consequently there is a health care shortage.

The AMA doesn't help, but their contribution to the American medical care shambles is rather small overall. The big problem is the system where insurance and pharmaceutical companies have inserted themselves between the doctors and the patients, and ensconced themselves there via intense lobbying and bribery.

The private insurance industry adds an average overhead of 18% to medical care costs. By comparison, public insurers like Medicare or Medicaid have an overhead of about 3% or less. The savings of replacing private insurance with a public solution have been estimated to over $350 billion annually. That is enough to give medical coverage to every American, and still leave enough over to improve everybody's health care.

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[Aighearach]

The AMA is a lobbying group for conservative doctors. 25% of doctors are members. You seem confused about what their role is.

Re:Beware Leaky DNA

[redlemming]

How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?

How about a better approach where first almost everyone works, contributes to society, and pays taxes so such a system is financially viable? It is hard to have one without the other, especially when there is already a $21 trillion debt which is increasing at over $2 thousand dollars a second.

The debt is certainly a problem, but it doesn't preclude progress on the health care issue.

The USA is ALREADY spending roughly 17-18% of its GDP on health care, including all public and private spending.

European nations with health care programs are spending 9-11% of their GDP on health care - and getting better results in many key statistics. The same applies to the rest of the developed world, such as Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and others.

In short, the USA is spending a lot more than it needs to on health care, and getting generally poorer results. The rich get good health care, of course, but when you look at the health care statistics of the nation as a whole, they are not that impressive compared to the other developed nations. For example, many nations (more than 40), have lower child mortality rates than the USA - that's pretty awful.

Note that these other health care systems are not all single payer systems. Every nation seems to be slightly different in how they do this. Switzerland, for example, does not have a single payer system. As I understand things, they have strict regulation of health insurance companies, and public votes on key issues.

In short, there are many options.

Whatever option is chosen, the USA should be able to drop it's health care spending to say, 11% of GDP, either through a sensible single payer system, or perhaps copying the Swiss system outright and the extra 6-7% of GDP could be used to pay off the debt.

This would require raising taxes, but done properly the tax raise would be no more than what people are already spending on health care, so it wouldn't be a net impact on people's current take-home pay after health care expenses.

You might need to have some reform of the legal system, but's that long overdue and would have happened a long time ago if politicians weren't routinely accepting campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals. This would remove the impact of lawyer-insurance (or the "lawyer tax"), not just from the doctors from the entire supply chains leading the to production of medical goods and services, and hence would remove the compounding effect of overhead applying at each step in the supply chain (like compound interest, this grows quickly).

It's really a low hanging fruit - you have to get past the corruption and vote buying on the part of the few special interest groups (the insurance companies, the lawyers, some of the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies, some of the pharmacies), but there's nothing else government could do as easily that would free up such a huge amount of money to help pay off the debt. Putting things in perspective, ANY cut in government spending or tax raise will face opposition - and in most cases the amount at stake is far less for just as tough of a political battle.

A competent government with integrity could make this happen. A corrupt and unethical government, allied with a largely unethical legal profession, might have trouble doing this - unless the public wakes up and forces the issue. Who knows, it might even be an opportunity to fix a lot of the corruption and ethics problems ... ?

Of course, if you fixed the regressive tax problem in the USA (mostly an issue the state and local level), replacing most or all of these taxes with a progressive income tax, and got rid of most of the tax code (to remove loopholes), and appropriately taxed movement of money overseas (to prevent evasion), you could probably fund the whole system without raising taxes for the poor and the lower middle class - but that would require undoing a huge amount of deeply entrenched corruption, so it's perhaps unlikely.

All that 1960-90's police work

[AHuxley]

How many informants got to walk after a crime in the past as they had more federal and state police work to help with?
All the small town police who got told about people in their own community but never did anything?
Federal, state, city informants who always had a call made for them?
The DNA draws into once powerful groups in a community that never had to consider police results.
That trend of the serial offender 3 states over could cover for many informants and powerful locals crimes. Local 1960's solution rates to homicide dropped as police corruption set in all over the USA.
Now that DNA is back to tell its own local story. Shredders will we working overtime to save reputations of police still working and of now high rank.
Political leaders who cover for well connected locals?
Decades later someone puts in for a DNA test and real police follow the truth back down to a small town.

Imagine if they'd just test what they have

[meglon]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u...

Yeah, right...

[Miles_O'Toole]

"Texas law enforcement also thinks that a man who was executed in 1999 for killing a 9-year-old girl was now also behind the murder of a 40-year-old realtor in 1981."

No doubt this same dead guy was guilty of every unsolved, cold case murder committed in Texas for the last 35 years.

In other news, Texas law enforcement is now boasting about having the highest percentage of solved cases in US history.

But where..

[Daemonik]

..are the exonerations? The truth is The Police and DA's are willing to bend the laws to use DNA evidence against you, but when that DNA evidence proves your innocence, especially if they've broken you down into confessing, they do everything they can to keep you from using it to get out of prison.

Fast to jail, slow to unjail

[Anonymous Coward]

One way justice system.

Already law for genetic discrimination

[blahbooboo]

These databases need to be deleted too. The privacy violates are incredible.

What do you do when an insurance company notices that someone in your family has a hereditary disease and decides to jack up your premiums? We need strong laws to protect DNA data and prevent that kind of abuse.

We already have a law, it's called Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008. The only catch, congress didnt put any protection for life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term care insurance.

https://www.genome.gov/1000232...

Governments change. Data is forever.

[ElizabethGreene]

I see serious issues with this technology, and it's not a subtle one.

Trump jokes aside, today I do not live under an authoritative regime. I don't exactly trust my government, but I do feel free to speak out against their abuses without fearing prison or worse.

The problem is that governments change, and data is forever. Thirty years from now I could be a geriatric freedom fighter or my children could be fighting the war against the machines. If that happens, that DNA data will still exist and be used against us. I won't be a single wrinkly face among billions, I'll be in a tiny well-documented pool of possibly a dozen individuals.

In this case "think of the children" is entirely appropriate. Contributing to these databases today takes away privacy options for future generations permanently.

This is a terrible idea. Abort. Terminate. Halt. Cease.

Alleged

[kackle]

I didn't RTFA, but shouldn't it be "The other arrest is of a 49-year-old DJ who allegedly strangled a schoolteacher in 1992."?