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Are there any good discussions on the ethics of using public genealogy databases to catch criminals? The idea of using a 23andMe or Ancestry.com database to test against DNA left at a crime scene went mainstream a few years ago when police used a public database to find and track the Golden State Killer. Now, police from Moscow, Idaho have done it again in tracking Bryan Kohberger, who is accused of killing four University of Idaho students:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/idaho-murder-suspect-arrest-genealogy-b2254498.html
I am a bit conflicted on how I feel about this. On the one hand, obviously the police should do everything in their power to catch murderers. But there is a certain amount of dystopian doom in being able to access such a database. The problem is you don't even need to have your DNA uploaded to the database for the cops to find you. A fourth or fifth cousin's DNA gives the police enough information to create a family tree and zero in on a particular suspect.
I have a couple problems with this, the first of which is that it doesn't seem like it should be legal that the government essentially can track me by my DNA without any sort of consent. The second problem I have is that DNA evidence is not nearly as reliable as people seem to think. Hair and touch DNA are constantly contaminating crime scenes. Hairs can be picked up anywhere, from the police who investigate the scene, to techs, to medical examiners, to the bodies of the victims themselves. Granted this is not as applicable if the suspect's blood is at the scene, but nevertheless, DNA evidence is not foolproof, yet juries seem to convict as if it is.
I tend to lean a bit more anti-authoritarian, so perhaps this is my own personal bias, but it seems we need to regulate this type of DNA testing.
I think that it might be helpful to consider how we would respond to the development of a different high-tech tool: A time machine. Suppose several people commit a crime, and one is arrested. The police don't know who is accomplices were. So, they jump in their time machine and go get a warrant to tap the arrestee's phone in the days before the event, so they can see who his accomplices are. Then, they go back to the present and arrest the accomplices. That does not seem to be problematic, from a privacy point of view.
Yet, if police effectively go back in the past by getting a warrant to read the accomplice's past texts, people get very upset. Why? They seem to me to be functionally identical.
It seems to me that people are conflating collecting data with *looking at *data. Collecting data about me -- whether that be my texts or my DNA or whatever -- does not harm me. The harm only comes if someone examines that data to learn something private about me, such as my risk for cancer, or what have you (similarly, the government collects my garbage every week. But it they start searching my garbage to find out details about my private life, I have a problem with that, the Supreme Court notwithstanding.
So, do I have a problem with the govt creating a DNA database? Not really. Do I have a problem if the govt examines my DNA to discover private facts about me? Yes. But using 23andMe to find suspects is not the govt trying to find private facts about me; it is about the govt trying to find out who left a particular piece of evidence at the scene. Years ago, when a friend got married, he gave the best man and groomsmen custom baseball bats with the wedding date, etc, on them. If one was used to murder a victim, and the police asked my friend for a list of all of the groomsmen, would that be an outrage? It would not. How is it different if the perpetrator leaves DNA, rather than a distinctive baseball bat, at the scene? It isn't. As long as the police 1) get a warrant; and 2) do not use the DNA to snoop into whatever intimate info that DNA might reveal about the people involved, there is no problem.
If one's DNA is public information (and I'd argue it almost always is. People leave it everywhere), then I don't think it makes sense to classify any inferred facts from it as intimate/private. Saying that analysis of public information crosses a line into an invasion of privacy rubs me the wrong way, though it's difficult to articulate why.
Like, if Sherlock Holmes makes brilliant, true deductions about someone based on the smallest details, he has not really violated their privacy, even if they'd preferred to keep those facts to themselves.
Unlike Sherlock's deductions, "Mr. Smith has dna associated with having a micropenis" is a fact, not a deduction. And, Sherlock famously made his deduction based on evidence that everyone else can see. In contrast, though I can get a sample of your dna from your coffee cup or whatever, can't analyze it. In that sense the information in your DNA isnot publicly available.
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I think this is actually a big part of the issue. Private companies can be sent DNA from your relatives, and may turn that information over to LE without a warrant. Moreover, if there is no real obstacle to getting this information, then what is to stop the government from just snooping by requesting large chunks of data and combing through it looking for anything they can find?
Well, what do you mean by snooping looking for anything they can find? Running a DNA sample left at a crime scene through a database looking for hits seems no different than running fingerprints through a fingerprint database. Why is that problematic?
Depends on the agency (why would it need to be limited to law enforcement?) and what they're doing with it. AFAIK only law enforcement has access to fingerprint databases, and the government can't get your fingerprints from your relatives; they can only get information on you if you volunteer it or are arrested. Also, a fingerprint on its own contains no useful information. You have to compare it to a fingerprint found somewhere, which is different from DNA.
As one example, could a health or scientific agency access your relatives' DNA for "research purposes" but then accidentally release information indicating you likely have some genetic disease? The IRS already did something like that. If the government wants to try to discredit someone, could they look specifically for evidence of, I don't know, that person having a child with someone who isn't their spouse?
There are other much more speculative uses, but in the immediate future, this are the sorts of things that are definitely possible.
Yes, but all tools can be misused. Police can use binoculars to watch women get undressed, and can use cars to run people over. They can accidentally release your financial information if they get it during an investigation. Etc, etc. So, merely saying that it is possible to misuse DNA
Right, but what benefit is there to allowing the government to access this information (at any time, for any purpose) just by asking a company? I get the utility in investigating crime, but that can still require a warrant, and can be limited to that specific purpose, like how you have to give the IRS financial information but not the CDC.
Who said anything about "for any purpose"? I thought your entire argument was that it could be acquired for a proper purpose, but misused for an improper one. The examples you gave were all of that sort. That is why I asked initially, "what do you mean by snooping"?
Maybe what I thought was the point has gotten lost. I think that police should be required to get a warrant to get DNA data from a company, even if the company would be willing to let them compare evidence gathered from a crime scene without one. This also means that access to such data would be restricted to law enforcement and that it can only be used to identify a suspect in a specific crime, each investigation requiring its own warrant. Currently, this is not the case.
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Your right to privacy was created to prevent fishing expeditions - aka the government can't look freely in your stuff to find something you are guilty of then put you in jail. It was not intended to make government's job harder in the other direction - when we have crime to find the guilty party. The same way that government has right to ask for surveillance camera of the area - although it obviously diminishes the privacy on all people that are caught on camera. Aka - government totally can use databases to create lists of suspects.
If you really want to protect privacy - start with rubber stamping judges.
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Not sure why DNA should be categorically protected compared to, say, your likeness or your writings. As you point out, it gets left everywhere by default, and asking the police not to pick this $5 bill off the sidewalk is a little perverse. Maybe there's a 5th Amendment angle?
Source? I'd assume a competent defense would be able to cast doubt if appropriate.
Ah, the classic anti-authoritarian rallying cry. I tend to agree with @screye in assuming that regulation would start from the bottom, restricting local police rather than the FBI.
I mean this would be pretty easy to regulate. It’s either legal to run a persons DNA through a public database or it isn’t. Not a lot of nuance or downstream effects here.
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I'm a bit out of the loop. Are warrants required in the US, or is there absolutely no oversight?
Where this gets very interesting is when the database gets dense enough and DNA testing gets good enough to identify anyone, even people whose not at all in the database. "The state of Pennsylvania is looking for a male suspect age 20-25, height 5'10" to 6', with blue eyes, blond hair, sharp nose, and small ears, in the Amish community."
Also, give the population 10 years to acclimatize to this, and people will start asking why we don't do DNA testing for nonviolent crimes.
Ah, that's Aaron Stoltzfus, son of Aaron Stoltzfus. Are you looking for a particular young Aaron Stolzfus, though?
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You may enjoy this story. Photo is at the bottom
https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/edmonton/2022/10/4/1_6095328.amp.html
People on twitter were not happy lol
this was a hilarious story. the cops gassing this technology up when all it really tells you is "it was a black guy", which they already knew from the suspect description by the victim, was hilarious. the outraged reaction was interesting, though - would they have been as mad if the police just said 'it was a black guy'? perhaps it's just how generic that face looks.
But it doesn't look generic. In fact, it looks a bit like one of my former students, but not at all like the vast majority of my (African American) students. That image provides vastly more information than does "it was a black guy."
My very strong prior is that the added information is fictitious. If I use DNA to isolate the region of the world you were born in, and then I grab 100,000 passport photos from that region and average them out into a composite face, the result is not actually going to be a likeness of you, beyond basic stuff like race. Assuming this is roughly what the cops did, the picture they put out is probably significantly less useful than a simple description of "black male, such and such a height..."
And yet, after teaching at a heavily Asian-American school for many years, I could fairly reliability distinguish among people from China, Vietnam, and Korea (that's an easy one). And I am certainly able to distinguish people from East Africa from people from West Africa. So maybe your prior is not as strong as you think it is.
I am not claiming that chinese do not look different from vietnamese or koreans. I am claiming that chinese men do not look similar enough to each other that an average of all chinese male faces gives more accurate data about a particular male chinese face than the text string "chinese male". the picture contains more detail, but that detail is not accurate to the actual face in question, and may in fact be notably inaccurate. In short, my prior is that members of a race do not, in fact, all look alike.
But my point is not that a picture of a generic Chinese male gives more information than the text string "Chinese male." My point is that a picture of a generic Chinese male gives more information than the text string, "Asian male." Because that is the analogy to the initial claim, which was that the picture, which is a generic picture of a guy whose DNA indicates ancestry from a specific part of Africa, is no better than the text string, "a black guy." That is what OP said: "all it really tells you is 'it was a black guy.'"
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hmm. possibly true? I'd like to see a demonstration of effectiveness before I put any faith in it. Police have been caught using pseudoscientific statistical approximations in place of a positive ID before.
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The image does, but I didn't really see anything in the story indicating that the technology could reliably determine specific facial features, just that the composite was a "scientific approximation", whatever that means. I'd like to see them run the DNA of people whom we already have photographs for before I determine whether this is actually useful.
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A famous DNA testing contamination story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
Good luck though convincing a jury that is what happened in your case.
With modern sequencing technology stuff like that just wouldn't happen. High quality whole genome DNA sequencing is cheap. They would be able to tell that your DNA didn't match the contaminated samples. The only way your DNA would match would be if you worked at one of these factories or in another job that could contaminate the pipeline. Something any competent defense lawyer could argue to the jury.
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The way I see it, more evidence is always a good thing. But, just like all forensic science, should be used to complete a hypothesis, not lead it.
I find fears about the legality of surveillance to be overblown. Not because it isn't happening, but because it will happen whether you like it or not. The NSA didn't wait for internet surveillance to be legal before widely deploying it.
In 2022, we live in a world where there is no real power balance between the state and the citizen. If the state wants to fuck you over, they will be able to. Your consent, safety and privacy are illusions that the state maintains so you can sleep at night, and that's that.
At the same time, to keep up appearances, public society has their hands tied. They can't use this technology to solve issues that are technologically tractable but are legally blocked off. If the NSA is going to spy on every camera in America irrespective of legality, then I want to see who was robbing my house.
In the same way, these geneology databases are going to happen whether you like it or not. If it's going to be at the disposal of 3-letter agencies, then I would want for it to be used when a loved one gets killed.
The USA gets the worst of both worlds. It allows overt violence in terms of what law-enforcement can do, but takes away all peaceful tools for conflict resolution from the same law enforcement.
It makes the immigration process painfully difficult, while allowing weird loopholes that encourage illegal immigrants to be 'at large' in the country.
It has an incredibly harsh sentencing system, but does not allow law enforcement to actually be sure of who the criminal is.
I am more uncomfortable with an innocent man going to prison or a serial killer being at large, than having my DNA be public. I am more uncomfortable with safety & sexual assault concerns due to street criminals, than being IDed using a country wide face recognition system. I am more uncomfortable with cities decaying due to people with mental health problems slowly dying due to fentanyl abuse, than non-consensual detaining of these people a homeless-shelter with stringent sobriety rules.
It is not that I trust the Govt. It is that I'm sure the Govt. WILL violate my rights if they really want to get me. (see Assange, Snowden or dozens other cases where the national guard gets called in). If those rights will be violated anyway, I'd rather also reap the benefits of this intrusive technology.
This assumes that the Gov't is interested in using that advanced technology to actually provide you benefits, or to stop certain kinds of criminals/nuisance-individuals. The problem now is not resourcing. It is will.
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The government doesn’t need my consent to ask people about where I was on the night of the murder, I don’t really see why they should need my consent to check the sample DNA against my relatives. Even in that case, wouldn’t it be your relatives’ consent that matters, not yours?
How is this different from a suspect being described as 6’5” and blonde with a peg leg, and the police rounding up all such guys in town to interview? The trace DNA left at the scene is effectively just a witness description (fallible, but substantially less-so than eyewitness reports), and the testing is just a way of finding people that are close matches to that description. It seems like a strict improvement over the previous scenario I described. I just really fail to see what is wrong here
Your second objection regarding potential contamination really has no relevance here. Because a test is occasionally wrong we should ban the test? Do we have anything better? Are eyewitness reports more reliable? No. Even these days confessions are viewed as frequently coerced and unreliable, so what do we have left? Sometimes it feels like anti-authoritarian types just want all forms of investigation to be banned snd have no suggestions of how it should actually be done
The government is not able to create a database showing where 50% of the people in the town were on the night of every murder in existence. The fact that evidence collecting is hard discourages the government from 1) slipping from murder to much less serious crimes and 2) going on fishing expeditions with a high chance of false positives simply because so many people are being looked up.
You already have two such databases. The cell phone tower database and the traffic camera ones.
You're correct, and I'd object to use of those as well.
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What is wrong with either of those things? Why would using familial DNA to solve theft be a bad thing? And what makes it a “fishing expedition” as opposed to just an “investigation”. Would canvassing an area for witnesses be considered a fishing expedition? If witnesses to a murder described the perpetrator as having a specific highly distinctive facial tattoo and then police tried to reference mugshots and ask around tattoo shops to find men with such a tattoo, would that be a fishing expedition? That just sounds like a typical investigative procedure to me, and surely a witness description of a specific tattoo is far more prone to false positives than familial DNA.
For everyone that had a problem with familial DNA, please tell me what kinds of investigative techniques you are okay with
It's capable of slipping far past theft.
In this context, a fishing expedition is an investigation which considers a very large number of people each of whom have a very small chance of having committed the crime.
If the area contained a million people, and canvassing involved individually looking at each of those million people and comparing them to a witness description, I'd count it as one. Of course, this is impractical if you're canvassing manually.
If there were a million tattoo shops....
You didn’t explain the actual harm of either of those things. Say it slips past theft to vandalism, why would solving vandalism with familial DNA be bad? You keep hinting without spelling out any actual harm.
The same goes for the “fishing” part. Why does it suddenly become bad if there are a million tattoo shops?What is the actual harm, and what evidence is better or less error-prone than familial DNA? Every critic here is dodging this question
There are lots of laws which people routinely violate and are rarely punished, and in a just society shouldn't usually be punished, but which are still on the books. If the effort in catching and punishing them is nearly zero, they can all be punished.
They can also be selectively punished. If someone didn't give your department a big enough bribe, do a search to see if their DNA is associated with any trespassing or littering, and selectively prosecute them.
First of all, instantly being able to search them leds to the problem with routinely violated laws. Second, checking such a large number of people increases the chance of false positives.
These aren’t problems with familial DNA any more than they are problems for a number of existing technologies decades older. Has the fingerprint database led to this issue? Has the normal CODIS led to this problem?
My parents’ condo was broken into. A DNA database already exists. Despite this, the totalitarian police state had no interest in swabbing the doorknob for touch DNA and running it. I really see no evidence this will lead to any of the problems you enumerate. All these same arguments could be applied equally to use of fingerprints (which are surely even more prone to false positives). Why didn’t fingerprints destroy society?
I honestly feel like “anti-authoritarian” is just a personality type or inclination like “contrarian”. And anti-authoritarians in this thread just seem dispositionally opposed to the gov’t acquiring any new tool or capability, just on principle even if they can’t articulate any harm that would come from it. Consistency should dictate opposition to the use of fingerprints as well, but given their use is over 100 years old, and no dystopia resulted they are given a pass.
Familial DNA is already being used. I see the benefits of decades-old cold cases being solved, but where are the costs? Has their been a marked increase in wrongful convictions attributable to the technology?
That's anarcho-tyranny. The government can use its police powers nefariously while being lax on actual crime.
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I agree with much of what you said, but I nevertheless can't shake the feeling of dystopian doom in giving this power to a local government agency with limited oversight. This seems in much the same vein as the surveillance powers of the CCP. They have the ability to watch and monitor anyone they want regardless of his criminal (or lack thereof) history. I can imagine scenarios where they collect hairs from a protest or anti-government group and run that through a DNA databank to gather up all of those who were at that protest. This is clearly not something we should want to happen. Perhaps this is not a good argument, but I'm just saying that this is the sort of thing that will happen, just maybe not in the US.
My tentative immediate solution would be to require a warrant to run this sort of genealogical test. That at least adds one additional layer of privacy protection to the equation rather than allowing local law enforcement free reign.
Another thought. If we are ok with this sort of testing, what's to stop the government from requiring DNA collection from all newborns? After all, this would significantly aid law enforcement in catching criminals. Would this sort of mass collection be acceptable to you?
It's pretty pointless to worry about. Genetic databases are going to be sufficiently populated by voluntarily-offered genomes that you're bound to have a near family member in one. After that, it's just a matter of finding e.g. all the biological sons of a match's brothers and they've got you.
At least with a universal collection of genomes we will get more beneficial effects (greater scientific and clinical knowledge).
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What's the downside ?
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I could see a carve out for not allowing this sort of policing. It seems a lot like Priest not being able to testify or psychologists. I think it’s quite easy to make arguments that their are large positive externalities to databases of dna and for people to test themselves for all sorts of genetic diseases. Removing a fear of future prosecution because your in a gene bank would greatly enable this technology.
That being said I don’t think we have any laws on the books right now against it or that theirs an obvious unethical issue with police using dna banks.
The USA will, of course, go to the worst of both worlds- just enough use of this technology to deter people from using such genetic testing, but not nearly enough to actually affect catching criminals.
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Yes. There have been some state court rulings on this (and other privacy rules like getting people's search history). But the US constitution is not well equipped for 3rd parties having massive troves of potentially incriminating information on people, and having essentially no incentive to keep it private from law enforcement. Some, like Apple, have resisted and implemented their own standards that require LE to issue subpoenas or warrants to get certain types of information, but generally this is not standard practice. And it seems that it should probably be. There have been various privacy bills that have circulated over the years, but none has gotten traction. This Law Review article is what really explained most of the issues to me.
In almost every crime there are people adjacent to the criminal who have massive troves of potentially incriminating information on people; yet, we let them testify as witnesses and provide incriminating documents and objects as evidence in court. You are grossly misinterpreting the 4th amendment.
No I'm not. I'm saying exactly what the 4th Amendment is, what the 3rd party doctrine is, and how it is not going to (nor was it intended to) apply to situations like DNA banks and internet data.
The difference between the situation in the past, and the situation in the present day is used to be very costly for the police to get potentially incriminating information on everyone for every crime. So they'd have to narrow down potential suspects before they could invest their time into getting documents and testimony from everyone in town.
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I mean, the Constitution is just not well-equipped to handle the concept of DNA. We now know that your DNA is an incredibly important and detailed piece of information about you, and even shedding those cells at a high rate, and a bunch of of other people are walking around with most of that information in every cell of their body.
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