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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.
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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