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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
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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