Should the police be able to investigate your genetic family tree for any crime?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/opinion/police-dna-warrant.html

by tysone • 7 years ago

106 90 7 years ago

I'm reminded of parallels between cell phone location privacy and genetic tracking. The average person does not understand that they are creating a record of everywhere they go when they have their cell phone on. The same is true with your DNA - while it's true that you do in fact leave a literal trace of your genes, you don't expect that you could be identified later on simply by the fact that you had lunch.

What we really need is a legislative solution, but unfortunately I have low expectations for Congress, seeing that Carpenter v. United States even had to happen.

redm• 7 years ago

I like your analogy, I'd add that DNA search/collection is akin to scanning cell phone records to see who was in the area at the time of the crime. Which typically requires a warrant.

decoyworker• 7 years ago

What would you legislate?

Your location is not private information and never has been. Not sure how you could even legislate to make your DNA protected private information- under HIPPA for instance, considering you leave it everywhere you go. Your fingerprint is not private, your face is not private, and your DNA is not private. I'm not sure how they could be.

village-idiot5• 7 years ago

Your location isn’t private if you’re observed in a location where you have no expectation of privacy, i.e. outside. But if I’m at a friends house, I absolutely have an expectation that my presence in their home is private to the world at large.

The problem is that dragnet surveillance does not:

1. Handle the subtleties of how we expect privacy to work.

2. Require direct observation of someone in a context where there is no expectation of privacy.

It just works all the time, and contains the ability to unmask private events in the past.

nradov• 7 years ago

The average person knows that cell phone location tracking can be used as evidence in criminal investigations. It shows up all the time in TV and movies.

ryanmcbride• 7 years ago

I agree with you but there's still this weird disconnect where people believe they can be tracked realtime by their phone, but not historically. They know their phone can be 'triangulated' when the cops are actively looking at them, but everyone I show their phone's location history to freaks out about it.

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

I think this is going to be beyond one country legislators in the vein of GDPR (becoming de facto across the "Western" region).

I am hoping for something think a presumption of data ownership for anything the individual "creates" like digital footprints

gingabriska• 7 years ago

Imagine if some spy on espionage mission has sex with you and police/intelligence finds your dna in her bedroom or inside her, and now you'll be under investigation and maybe torchered too to reveal something you've no idea about.

I am not sure if it's possible in first world countries but many countries where these companies will soon offer such investigative service to local intelligence/police department have very high chance to do exactly that.

castis• 7 years ago

If an actor were to go through that much effort to get DNA from someone, I doubt they would be concerned with the legalities of it.

maxerickson• 7 years ago

I think in general, people who are aware of DNA used as evidence don't understand that it isn't perfect, that most matches are (somewhat) loose statistical matches.

Lots of people probably aren't aware of it though.

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

Genetic data affects not just an individual but their family tree as well. Maybe a warrant should have to be issued for all of them to get access to this data.

enriquto5• 7 years ago

But wouldn't this conflict to the (natural?) right of an individual to publish their own data? Do I need a permission from all my family tree to be allowed to publish the contents of my DNA?

LeifCarrotson• 7 years ago

If, outside of our control, your password and mine matched except for one character and that near match was public knowledge, would you object to me publishing my password here in cleartext?

There's a big difference between publishing your own thoughts - which may have nothing to do with what your family thinks - and publishing your DNA, which is inextricably tied to that of your family. It's my data, which I have a "natural" right to share as I see fit, but it's also very similar to yours, which you have a right to keep private. These rights are incompatible, one has to give.

bloak4• 7 years ago

What makes you think there is such a right, and what does the expression "their own data" mean, exactly?

A person's genomic sequence isn't something that that person created (it existed before the person did!) so there's no obvious analogy with a poem the person wrote or a set of temperature measurements the person made or anything like that.

Arguably you should not be allowed to publish your genomic sequence if you have any identifiable living close relatives because you would be publishing other people's confidential medical data.

BlackFly• 7 years ago

Some of the oldest professions have a notion of "privilege" with sensitive information. Client-attorney privilege, Physician–patient privilege. While some of these have been eroded at various times, there was a reason for their creation.

These services probably need those levels of privileges as well. Even a warrant shouldn't necessarily compel the yielding of information. Instead a request can go through the organization which immediately responds in the negative, but then behind the scenes asks a client if they want to voluntarily testify against some unknown relative of theirs (I think put in these terms, a lot of people will say no).

The rationale being the same: if the police have easy access to this information, people won't trust the services enough to make optimal use.

dade_2• 7 years ago

DNA should only be used to prove innocence and to corroborate other evidence. Just because someone's DNA is there, doesn't mean they did something. It is too easy to start planting DNA. If there is other evidence and their DNA is there, then yeah. Book 'em Danno!

jacquesm• 7 years ago

That's a pretty good starting point. DNA will be falsifiable soon enough too which will render the whole idea of DNA as evidence of anything moot.

e40• 7 years ago

But there are some cases where there is only DNA. There is a double murder going to trial soon where DNA found via GEDmatch is the only evidence.

My fear is that planting DNA isn't something individuals are likely to do (thought it's not impossible), but something the state or large organizations are likely to have the resources to do properly. Corrupt LEOs. Corrupt politicians. It seems a lot easier than many alternative corrupt practices.

cm21872• 7 years ago

Mixing/pollution of DNA samples in DNA testing labs (or faked DNA tests by unscrupulous labs) can also have some pretty bad consequences and have in the past.

village-idiot5• 7 years ago

DNA also just ends up all over the place for innocent reasons. If someone gets murdered in a rental car that I rented last month, chances are my dna will be there. DNA evidence often struggles when it comes to temporality, as it can tell you who and where, but it can’t tell you when the evidence was placed there.

Historically there have been some pretty bad abuses in court over the accuracy and reliability of dna evidence, with some convictions that had to later get overturned.

DocTomoe• 7 years ago

Who needs corruption when you can have sheer incompetence?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

nezzor• 7 years ago

Would you feel differently if your child’s murerer was on trial?

Not trying to be gross, just trying to shine light on the idea that judges are in a difficult situation. They have to consider fairness for all parties involved.

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

Would you feel differently if your child’s murerer was on trial?

Why would someone be less concerned with the reliability of the criminal justice system in that case? A low standard means it is easier for the government to let the guilty go free while making a show of punishing someone convenient.

rtkwe2• 7 years ago

That question is one of the pit falls we have to avoid to preserve any chance of avoiding a police surveillance state. "What would you allow if you were maximally emotionally impacted by a crime" is basically a blank check for 100% surveillance because inevitably any restriction on methods will eventually allow some crime to go unsolved.

dade_2• 7 years ago

What if you were accused of a child's murder that you didn't commit? Perhaps it was particularly horrific and the police really want to catch the killer quickly to look good in the media. Your DNA matches the DNA the weapon, but match isn't the correct word - a better word is that it aligns / doesn't conflict. The situation gets worse once bigotry is added to the mix. I stand by my opinion.

EliRivers• 7 years ago

Surely the parent of a murdered child is massively compromised in judgement. Considering what they would think to be fair is like asking a madman what's fair, or rolling a die.

TheLuddite• 7 years ago

Isn't this Would you feel differently argument goes both ways? Would you feel differently if you killed someone and the police found you only thanks to such dubious from privacy standpoint practice.

tbyehl• 7 years ago

DNA plants itself.

https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/

mikkom• 7 years ago

If the police felt free to use it in an assault case, why not shoplifting, trespassing or littering?

For the same reason dna tests are not already used for shoplifting, trespassing or littering?

MichaelApproved• 7 years ago

And that reason is...?

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

DNA has almost no probative value in those cases, since they almost never involve a sample which can be genotyped that has a high probability of being linked to a particular crime.

JulianMorrison• 7 years ago

Cost, which is falling. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlson_curve )

buro9• 7 years ago

I've heard it argued that the police and other authorities have the right to know who you are.

Is this really the case? Does a representative of a government have the right to your identity?

If so... is there an extent to which they can know who are you are? The difference here between a vague answer, a trust based assertion, or even a deep proof.

dangerface2• 7 years ago

There is a distinction between your identity(who you are) and your legal identity(who the governments papers say you are). Your legal identity is created with your birth certificate and ends with your death certificate.

Legaly you agreed to act under this legal identity when your birth certificate was created but since you where too young to give consent its not legaly binding.

Thats the argument but it would need to go through a judge who wont care about technicality of law as the law itself is a technicality to justify government.

DanBC• 7 years ago

This is direct from Freeman on the land conspiracy theory, and it's a legal nonsense.

hash872• 7 years ago

A sovereign citizen on HN!! Wow, I never thought I'd see the day.

If anyone is bored, please feel free to kill 30 minutes on https://www.reddit.com/r/Sovereigncitizen/

sysbin• 7 years ago

I think the justice system needs to be reformed to a rehabilitation modal and before it's able to investigate one's genetic family tree for any crime. I've studied neuro science and the philosophy of determinism to realize people don't have any real control for their actions. So right now I think we're failing when it comes to humanity.

whack2• 7 years ago

Many of the comments here seem to assume that the use of DNA tests without the accused's consent is a bad thing. I fail to see why. We use facial features and eyewitness-testimony to ID criminal dependents all the time. No one argues that consent/warrant is needed in order to ID someone using their facial features. More generally speaking, I fail to see the harm that can arise from using DNA to identify suspects, whereas the benefits are so much more compelling.

rocqua2• 7 years ago

DNA is only circumstantial. Being a suspect is harmful. Hence DNA testing could make innocent people suspects and thus harm them.

Since harming innocents is bad, there is a downside to wide usage of DNA tests. Whether tgat downside weighs up against the upside is a debate. But we need to acknowledge there is a debate to be had.

whack2• 7 years ago

Sure, but I think it's also worth acknowledging that suspects get identified all the time on the basis of circumstantial evidence far flimsier than DNA traces. The "burden of proof" needed for the police to investigate someone as a suspect is extremely low, for good reasons.

cm21872• 7 years ago

That's the case in France where DNA samples are taken on any person arrested, whether they committed a crime or not, including demonstrators (or bystanders) in a political march.

The national DNA database now includes over 5 percent of the population and it is a great tool for the police since the authors of serious crimes typically have almost always committed petty crimes before. It also means that you can solve small crimes like burglaries with DNA.

It is a bit worrying from a privacy protection point of view though. And I barely see this database ever questioned by the French press.

masklinn2• 7 years ago

That's the case in France where DNA samples are taken on any person arrested, whether they committed a crime or not, including demonstrators (or bystanders) in a political march.

FWIW ~20 US states do the same, this was ruled legal in 2013 (Maryland v. King, DNA collection is part of police booking procedure).

CODIS (the FBI's DNA database) contains more than 17 million non-forensic profiles[0], that's also >5% of the population.

But wait, there's more!

The Department of Defense's own DNA database (DoDSR) has more than 50 million records (collection started in the 80s and every applicant to a uniformed service gets included), and since the 2003 National Defense Authorization Act can be accessed by federal or military investigations for "the purpose of an investigation or prosecution of a felony, or any sexual offense, for which no other source of DNA information is reasonably available". So it can't currently be searched / "wild matched" against an unknown sample but if there's a suspect, a sample and no other DNA source then it's an option.

[0] https://www.fbi.gov/services/laboratory/biometric-analysis/c...

searine• 7 years ago

The Department of Defense's own DNA database (DoDSR)

The reality of this is that it's just a big ass warehouse deep in the farmland of Virginia which houses unprocessed tubes of DNA. Its like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sounds nefarious but it is actually a goldmine for genetics research.

MaysonL• 7 years ago

Serious crimes with DNA evidence can also triangulate suspects via finding their relatives in the database. Finding two second cousins from different sides of a suspect's family have a guy currently on trial for murder who had never been arrested, but whose DNA was found on a dead woman's body and clothes.

rgrieselhuber• 7 years ago

This seems like it would, if the trend continues, have some interesting ramifications for France's law forbidding parentage tests for men who suspect they may not be the father of a woman's child. The government may end up knowing more than the people in cases like these.

Balgair• 7 years ago

The issue of false positives and false negatives is glaring in data sets of these sizes.

5% of France is about 3.3 million unique records.

From what I could see online, the false positive rates of various DNA tests are between 0.01%[0] and 40% [1]. Lets call it somewhere inbetween and say 20% are false positives, or 1 of 5 people.

This is just a lead in a case, sure, but that means that 1 out of 5 cases have false leads, wasting a lot of time and resources. I've no idea what the false positive rate for a 'normal' case is like, it could very easily be higher.

Granted, this is today's false positive rate, it should get a lot better over time. But to what percentage, and how long will that take?

Then you have the much more pressing issue of the false negative rate. I did not look too hard, but trying to find that rate wasn't simple. I've no idea what it is. In terms of DNA cases, you could then have a lot of potentially dangerous people falling through cracks in the system. Lets pull a number straight out of nowhere and say that the false negative and false postive rates are the same, about 20%. That would then mean that your odds of getting the 'right' criminal (specificity[2])are at about 80% and your odds of not getting the 'right' criminal (aka clearing people that are actually innocent, aka sensitivity ) are also 80%. Meaning that for any random crinimal case using the DNA database as a lead, you only have about a 64% chance of getting useful information out of the DNA database [3].

[0]https://www.ptclabs.com/relationship-dna/more-information/fa...

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/gim201838)

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

[3]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

zebraflask• 7 years ago

Interestingly enough, I recently received a bulk email from GEDMatch.com about exactly this subject.

They changed their TOS so that now users need to explicitly opt in to sharing their data with law enforcement. That's good for user privacy, but it does make me wonder what they were doing before this change.

Real_S2• 7 years ago

The Daily did a podcast interviewing the founder of GEDmatch.

Part1: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/dna-ge...

Part2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/podcasts/the-daily/geneal...

randaouser• 7 years ago

I built a prototype of a Private Set Intersetion using elliptic curve homomorphic encryption method for this very use case: The scenario goes 1) FBI indexes the dna using MASH algorithm (minhash like locality sensitive hashing of genomic sequences) of the person they are searching for. They then use homomorphic encryption and post this encrypted data online with a bounty for anyone to claim. 2)Now, individuals and corporations can try to claim the bounty; they also run MASH on their dna databases and encrypt each mash index using the same homomorphic strategy and submit it back to the FBI. 3)The FBI can now complete the private set intersection algorithm on the encrypted data and will only reveal information iff an assailants genealogy is found. The remaining sequences appear cryptographically random and thus protect the privacy of those persons.

I am currently working in blockchain space. If you want to know more feel free to message me.

angersock• 7 years ago

Why would you help the police state?

Real_S2• 7 years ago

Excellent application of homomorphic encryption! Did you design your prototype for SNP data, like that used in GED match? Or for CODIS Core STR data, used by the Rapid DNA identification systems?

PS: Your profile does not contain contact info. Message me if you would like to converse privately.

gloflo• 7 years ago

Please stop making the world a worse place to live in.

rhcom2• 7 years ago

It sounds like you're suggesting the FBI outsource their Fourth Amendment violations.

mikece• 7 years ago

Seems to me the legal question is whether it's a reasonable search. If a court rules in the affirmative that poses a second question: search what, and does that imply that right for police to collect DNA evidence in order to conduct a thorough search?

opwieurposiu• 7 years ago

Sure, but we need to publish the DNA and contact info of anyone who becomes a police officer. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

basicplus2• 7 years ago

All those DNA tests with ancestry.com are also free fodder for the five eyes and law enforcement

atoav• 7 years ago

I think whether you find this useful or dangerous hinges entirely on your perspective on governments and history.

If you are sure governments are mostly a force for good and democracy is suited to keep it that way indefinitly, overpowered permissions like these have no real downside.

As engineers we certainly also ask ourselves how systems fail when something goes wrong, even if all we do is to prevent this. This kind of power is not only a possibility for a state to become more powerful, it is also the perfect ethnic genocide toolkit and therefore something that makes it substancially more dangerous for a state to fail.

Separation of powers, the oversight of the press, limited power and information for the state over the individual without good reason – all these mechanisms are there for a systemic reason. These reasons are sometimes only to make it harder for governments to drift into unlawful and unjust behaviour. Any change to the balance of power between executive, juridicative, legislative ans public should be carefully considered before executed.

So this must really pay off in order to be useful enough to justify the risk that comes with it, including the (in?)effectiveness of punishments and the cost of prevention through other means than harsh punishment.

haxorito• 7 years ago

In broad sense all investigation techniques are privacy invasion: surveillance, search, detention or arrest. I think we should let law enforcement use DNA sources. But it should be heavily regulated, and under heavy control.

Let’s say anonymous inquiry that just return yes/no and then you need court to reveal identity.

el_cujo• 7 years ago

I'm glad the Original Night Stalker was caught, but I found it very disturbing he was caught based on another family member doing one of those ancestory DNA things.

Also, offtopic, but that dendrogram in the first picture is a very incestual family tree.

xenocyon• 7 years ago

Data scientist here. I'm surprised nobody here has yet mentioned the false-positive issue with trawling a large dataset: even a tiny false positive rate leads to a very high probability of convicting an innocent person if you mine a large enough database.

chopin• 7 years ago

But the only reason for such a database is to get a conviction. Case solved.

Should the police be able to investigate your genetic family tree for any crime?

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