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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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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'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.

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.

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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