Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a crime

https://www.wired.com/story/police-used-a-babys-dna-to-investigate-its-father-for-a-crime/

by domh • 4 years ago

60 106 4 years ago

Clent• 4 years ago

Dangerous precedence, this will increase the portion of the population that chooses to skip the screening.

As it should. So far, data collection rarely benefits the people the data are collected from. DNA is akin to collecting contact lists of others to create a shadow profile of unknown persons from known ones. No opt-out is possible.

cm2187• 4 years ago

I don't get why they need to store it to screen it.

tablespoon5• 4 years ago

> Dangerous precedence, this will increase the portion of the population that chooses to skip the screening.
As it should.

Not in this case. These screenings detect serious diseases, and skipping them will have serious health consequences for many people:

https://www.chop.edu/conditions-diseases/newborn-screening-t...: here's just one of the things they test for:

Phenylketonuria (PKU). PKU is an inherited disease in which the body cannot metabolize a protein called phenylalanine. It is estimated that one in every 10,000 to 15,000 babies is born with PKU in the U.S. Without treatment, PKU can cause intellectual disability. Newborn screening for PKU is required in all 50 states.

IIRC, babies with that condition need to be put on a special formula ASAP, or they'll have problems.

So far, data collection rarely benefits the people the data are collected from.

That may be true, but it's lazy and incorrect to assume that it's correct to proceed like it never benefits anyone.

mywittyname• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter. Most of my family has submitted samples to those ancestry sites, including my parents. So I'm basically in there whether I want to or not.

V__5• 4 years ago

The New Jersey lawsuit alleges that police obtained the blood sample of a newborn child (who is now elementary-school aged)

Why are these DNS sample stored for so long? The U.S. really needs some data protection and privacy laws.

codereviewed• 4 years ago

They just need to shorten the TTL.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

Liberals will support it because public health.

Conservatives will support it because law and order.

It's the perfect storm of governmental invasiveness.

V__5• 4 years ago

Deleting (destroying) everything after all tests have been done would be the simple solution.

tomjakubowski• 4 years ago

What's the public health benefit to keeping blood samples around for so many years?

radicaldreamer• 4 years ago

Improper caching?

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

Could be a cord blood banked collection that some parents consent to (and pay for).

https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=cord-b...

Edit: about half way through the article, it appears to be a sample from newborn screening, but another thing to think about.

asdff20• 4 years ago

Because its useful to have these data from a scientific perspective. Say for example you have leukemia later in life. A researcher wants to study what it is about your leukemia that makes it different from the rest of your blood. You can't solve that problem by drawing blood from the patient today, all the blood will be contaminated with leukemia. You could try and get DNA from the fingernails, but these are liable to be of poor quality and damaged by environmental factors that fingernails tend to be exposed to. Likewise for most other blood free sources of DNA you could take from a living person.

Now, if you had a blood sample from before the patient had leukemia, that would be invaluable data. You can yield high fidelity genetic material without much blood sample. Because of this, most states have laws saying this newborn screening material is available for various research purposes. The parent or the individual may also request their newborn sample, should new screening methods come out in the future that may not be on that panel when you were born for example.

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/CDPH%20Document%20...

V__5• 4 years ago

Say for example you have leukemia later in life. A researcher wants to study what it is about your leukemia that makes it different from the rest of your blood.

That could still be done if the data/samples were anonymized and the ID were only given to the patient. For general research, anonymized would also work perfectly fine.

arijun• 4 years ago

How is that not a huge HIPPA violation? Shouldn’t this be a slam dunk case?

giantg25• 4 years ago

Because government cares about government rules only when it suits them. The rest of the time they make up excuses for why something should be allowed.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 4 years ago

Tell me what part of HIPAA you think was violated.

hoppyhoppy2• 4 years ago

Tell me why everyone spells HIPAA wrong. (It's the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)

johnbellone• 4 years ago

This is a gray area for sure, but I'd argue that it violates the [HITECH Act][^1] Part D (privacy & disclosure). The rub here is that the patient, newborn in this case, did not consent because they were underage. In many cases this blood sample is taken "by default" and requires an opt-out due to religious objection.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Information_Technology_...

A4ET8a8uTh02• 4 years ago

To be honest, I am not sure HIPAA exists anymore in any way but name these days. In the advent of apps, that information flows way too freely. Case in point, Alex Jones' lawyer was able to obtain medical history of the defendants.

That said, it may be time to actually demand some basic protections in that sphere.

tablespoon5• 4 years ago

Case in point, Alex Jones' lawyer was able to obtain medical history of the defendants.

Do you mean plaintiffs not defendants? My understanding is Alex Jones was being sued, not doing the suing.

I'm not aware of the details of that case, but could those records be something his lawyer legitimately demanded during discovery? My understanding is that HIPAA only controls the disclosure of medical records by the medical provider and related parties, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't a carve out for court orders. If the records leave the provider's custody for any reason, HIPAA is irrelevant for any dissemination after that point.

Someone12343• 4 years ago

HIPAA not HIPPA.

Since search warrants were issued, rather than healthcare data volunteered by healthcare providers, HIPAA doesn't apply at all.

Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, a fugitive, a material witness, or a missing person.

dekhn4• 4 years ago

HIPAA is a wildly misunderstood law. its very existence/purpose is to make transfer of medical data easier, not harder.

ensignavenger• 4 years ago

The article says nothing about a warrant being issued for the babies DNA, only that it was issued for the father's DNA after the babies DNA indicated the father was the likely suspect.

pseudalopex4• 4 years ago

The article said police didn't have probable cause for a search warrant.

asdff20• 4 years ago

So before all of this, a crime would happen, you'd leave a fingerprint, the police attempt to match it with a fingerprint in their databases that you might have had to submit to get a drivers license. All fine because people understand the science of fingerprinting.

Today, a crime would happen, you leave DNA, the police attempt to match it with a DNA sample in their databases you might have submitted for a health screening. 4th amendment violation because DNA is scary to the lay person it seems. This is not from logical reasoning but from emotional reasoning, because for all intents and purposes DNA databases are being used exactly like fingerprint databases that are normalized in our society today, and shouldn't actually have this scrutiny (or maybe fingerprints should have more scrutiny if you are against DNA screening for crimes, because the logical arguments would be the same). Then again these articles generate clicks while I'm sure most would eyeroll a fingerprinting article.

giantg25• 4 years ago

Considering the quality of the labs performing the work, every test deserves scrutiny.

asdff20• 4 years ago

But its not being argued on that angle, its being argued on a 4th amendment angle. If it were being argued on that angle, why not also scrutinize the state fingerprinting labs on that same argument? They don't get that scrutiny though. It's just mainly a fear of DNA technology owing to privacy concerns, not really due to concerns that the sample could be crosscontaminated or that the labs aren't qualified to perform the work. Neither were mentioned in the article anyhow, just the 4th amendment angle.

phkahler• 4 years ago

DNA can be used to verify a suspect, it is not really valid to compare a crime scene sample to a national database because you WILL get a match with high probability even if the perp is not in the database. DNA is not a unique identifier, at least no the way its used.

In this case it sounds like they used it for verification, since the sought a comparison of a suspect with a specific baby's DNA. From a science perspective this seems quite reasonable. From a privacy PoV IDK.

dekhn4• 4 years ago

In the way that it's used, DNA is as close to a unique identifier as you can get. There are many techniques. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_profiling You can tune the stringency but they shouldn't be causing enough false positives that screening will just turn up random people. More likely to get close relatives of people in the room at some point. See "partial matching" on the linked page.

tablespoon5• 4 years ago

police attempt to match it with a fingerprint in their databases that you might have had to submit to get a drivers license

Where is this required? Because I've never heard of such a thing in the US.

asdff20• 4 years ago

They printed me in California at least.

hoistbypetard2• 4 years ago

I've had licenses in NC, MA and VA. None of those required fingerprints.

s1artibartfast• 4 years ago

you need one on file for a drivers license in California. I didnt want to give it due to privacy, but well... I have to drive so here I am

impossiblefork• 4 years ago

It's very much logical reasoning, and it's not about DNA being scary.

It's about a kind of perfidy. It's the reason you in war don't masquerade as someone who is wounded and to try to get at your enemy, and don't use fake medical stuff in ruses, &c (this of course happened once in Pakistan, but I count it as those responsible lacking in understanding and being short-sighted).

You don't ever do anything that will in any way affect people's trust in the medical system, even indirectly. This has been understood for a long time, and is part of the reason why the Hippocratic oath (i.e. the actual Hippocratic oath) involves swearing to never do any harm.

tunesmith• 4 years ago

the police attempt to match it with a DNA sample in their databases you might have submitted for a health screening.

I know you were attempting to draw a parallel, but the difference is that the DMV is a government organization (part of the DOT), and your medical provider is not. There are different expectations of privacy. Which is close to the heart of the issue.

asdff20• 4 years ago

Your medical provider provides plenty of information to the state at their behest as it is. Chances are that started with your birth when your birth certificate was made official. Sensitive medical information is not being used to solve crimes here, they aren't looking for people with certain conditions etc. They are asking if a sample matches another sample in a database and to what proportion they are in agreement. That's it.

salawat• 4 years ago

Law enforcement is using Third Party Doctrine and usage of non LE DNA databases to work around the requirement for probable cause. As I understand it, public health regulations are exacerbating the availability of this data by mandating submittal of DNA for screening, and retaining the data.

There is also the CSI effect to take into account and once again, the bloody fact we don't need to be preserving this data in perpetuity.

This is why Third Party Doctrine is a complete and total deconstruction of the 4th Amendment in practice.

asdff20• 4 years ago

It would be a huge scientific loss to discard collected genetic material. We should be cataloging all DNA that we can, not just from humans but from crops we grow and ecological marker species that proxy ecosystem health. You never know if there will be some test uncovered in the future that you could use against these previously collected samples and make some life saving inferences. When you throw that data away, you've eliminated that possibility forever and damned future scientists.

criddell2• 4 years ago

If you collect my DNA you're getting a whole lot more information about me than you would from a fingerprint. I guess it depends on how the DNA is stored. If it's an opaque hash, then I probably agree with you.

I'd hate to become a suspect in a crime because of some profile worked up by a behavioral analyst at the FBI and something in my DNA suggests I could fit the profile.

asdff20• 4 years ago

Well, that's not how its really used per say. They aren't looking for behavioral features, they are looking for pattern matches not unlike a fingerprint. The advantage of this versus a fingerprint is the heritability aspect. You share half your DNA with either parent and you can proportionally estimate degree of shared dna for relatives in a geneology. That means they don't have to make sure the killer is in the finger print database, a distant relative and some math can in practice expand your database.

shagie2• 4 years ago

The DNA tests are done for what are known as "Short Tandem Repeats". These are spots in the DNA where the same sequence (2-6 base pairs) is repeated several times. Unrelated people have different numbers of repeats.

They're looking at a dozen or more locations. The number of repeats at any location is unrelated to the number of repeats at another location.

So, if you've got a number between 2 and 10 or 20, you've got 10% to 5% of the population that has that particular number of repeats. 1/(0.1 ^ 13) is 10 trillion which is the ballpark for the number of variations for STRs possible on a 13 location test.

The data that is stored looks like [6 4 12 16 2 15 19 18 14 5 3 7 8]

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

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

gopalv• 4 years ago

4th amendment violation because DNA is scary to the lay person it seems.

There's probably a curve where it gets scary again as you know more about it.

DNA isn't just identification. It is a lot more than just a unique identifier, it is a whole history and a lot of future probabilities.

My list of SNPs is a lot less "if you have nothing to hide" about it.

Imagine a government which looks at SCN1/SCN2 before issuing a drivers license.

pc862• 4 years ago

Is there a genetic component to being a skilled and/or safe driver?

Society as a whole would probably be a lot better off if we stopped pretending driving around 4,000-lb hunks of metal at 80mph/130kph was some sort of inalienable right and actually showed some discretion in who was allowed to do it and who wasn't. But it's not realistic, especially if you live outside of a city.

asdff20• 4 years ago

Well the government is not doing that in this case. They don't care about phenotypes for this analysis. The phenotypes are used for other analysis like public health efforts, but for law enforcement they just ask whether one pattern matches another and to what proportion it matches, and then if it matches a psuedorelative they go about to see if there is infact a person who could be this psuedorelative, then they go about and see if the person did commit the crime with other pieces of evidence.

crote• 4 years ago

There are two issues here. First, you constantly leave DNA everywhere. You are literally shedding it, even when you are not committing a crime. It is _guaranteed_ that DNA of innocent people ends up at crime scenes. While it is certainly useful at _confirming_ a suspect, it is way less powerful when trying to _find_ a suspect.

Second, DNA matching is a matter of chance. While comparing a sample to a single potential match is extremely reliable, comparing a sample to a population is not. You're basically running into a birthday paradox here: given a large enough dataset, false matches are guaranteed to happen.

If you use biometrics databases like this, you basically end up reverting the burden of proof: your DNA was at the crime scene, can you explain how it got there if you are indeed innocent?

asdff20• 4 years ago

It's not exactly a birthday paradox because you have way more than 365 potential variants. Some 324 million. Plus its not discrete variants like having a single date of birth, you can have multiple combinations of variants.

But broadly the big utility is in matching distant relatives versus strangers from the lot, and seeing if there is agreement with those putative matches with actual records and other hard evidence. You share half your DNA with either parent, 1/8 with your first cousin, and so on and so fourth for the rest of the human race. Using that information coupled with other pieces of evidence can yield a pretty reliable hit and is how they managed to catch the Golden State killer using DNA and genealogy.

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

Does everything you just said not also apply to fingerprints? You leave them everywhere you touch, and people touch a lot of things. Maybe less so than DNA, since it's effectively a subset (things you touch likely have DNA from your hand skin, but things you don't touch might also have DNA from other things), but it's still just saying "you were likely here". And given a large enough population, wouldn't there also be many partial fingerprint matches?

I'm not sure how these two things are issues when comparing fingerprinting to DNA matching. They seem to be applicable to both.

yetanotherloser3• 4 years ago

Given the surprisingly poor perfection of dna "matching" and the tendency for public and law-court rhetoric to seriously misrepresent the odds of a mistake... at this point anyone who would voluntarily submit dna - or anything other than fight very hard against handing it over - has grotesquely poor judgement.

asdff20• 4 years ago

Can you site a source documenting this poor perfection of DNA matching? I dug into this after reading your comment and I found the opposite was true, that a false positive as an odds on the rate of 1 in 1 billion. When you couple it with the fact you also need more than just DNA evidence to convict (which was done with the golden state killer, DNA was not the only source of evidence), the odds grow even smaller of 1) you having no alibi or potentially being at the place of the crime at the time and more evidence, and 2) you being that 1 in 1 billion match to the real killer.

https://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn258.pdf

uoaei4• 4 years ago

The baby did not consent to sharing its data.

asdff20• 4 years ago

No, but its legal guardians probably did

giantg25• 4 years ago

They probably were not informed of the uses. The nurse probably told them they're using it to screen for defects. I guarantee they made no mention of the retention nor law enforcement uses.

philipwhiuk• 4 years ago

These screenings are mandatory in the US. (Parents don’t have to provide consent, although they may opt out on religious grounds.)

uoaei4• 4 years ago

They consented to that data being collected by the hospital, and shared with anyone who needs access to private health data for the purposes of medical examination or treatment. If they consented to the data being shared, they were probably not informed of the possibility it could be shared to law enforcement.

Informed consent is the bar, if personal liberty ranks anywhere on your list of human rights.

Beltalowda4• 4 years ago

Babies cannot consent to anything, including blood screenings which, according to the article, "have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children".

uoaei4• 4 years ago

It is a cornerstone of modern civilization (with its construction of private property rights) that private data vis a vis health be, in the ideal, entirely divorced from demands made by governments or sanctioned actors thereof.

mikeyouse• 4 years ago

New Jersey has middling rules around accessing this data, some states are far more lax;

https://texaslawreview.org/americas-hidden-national-dna-data...

(See the paragraph around cite 180)

strangattractor• 4 years ago

There are questions as to whether finger prints are unique (https://psmag.com/news/why-fingerprints-arent-proof-47079) so DNA seems better. I am a little conflicted on what I actually think. On the one hand typical police methodology is frightfully subjective and error prone. Having methods that can be validated independently from gov't labs seems more just. On the other hand I can see this having unintended consequences.

acomjean• 4 years ago

I took a genomics class. Guest presenter was someone who did genetic forensics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Bieber#National_and_...

Family Search first used in California in 2010. The "Grim Sleeper" serial murderer. They first tried in 2008 but no match. Trying again 2010 yeilded a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Sleeper#Arrest_and_furthe...

"Police had found no exact match between DNA found at the crime scenes and any of the profiles in California's DNA profile database, so they searched the database for stored profiles that demonstrated sufficient similarity to allow police to infer a familial relationship. They found similar DNA belonging to Franklin's son, Christopher, who had been convicted of a felony weapons charge in 2008. Christopher was too young to have committed the murders, but the familial DNA match led investigators to look at his father, Lonnie, as the likely perpetrator."

its a little fraught, because some states take DNA from those who have committed crimes..

onychomys• 4 years ago

You're all reacting to the wrong part of this. The blood sample part is unimportant, they could have just dug in the garbage and gotten a dirty diaper or whatever. They sent the blood off for DNA typing, which they could have done on any other thing that kid had touched instead. Follow him to McDonalds, collect the straw from his juicebox when it gets thrown away, end result is the same, and no warrant is needed for that either.

cynusx• 4 years ago

I don't see why we don't just DNA fingerprint the entire population.

It will make the world much safer as the chances of getting away with a crime are heavily reduced.

There's still due process and the presumption of innocence.

ClosedPistachio• 4 years ago

This bothered me a lot, so I contacted the department of health and requested the opt-out form. They emailed me back rather quickly with the form, but boy does the text of the form try to dissuade you!

"I understand that there are numerous benefits to public health in retaining residual NBS samples. Residual NBS samples are the only available opportunity for a complete population study to be conducted since there is a sample received on virtually every baby born. In addition to this, the NBS sample is sometimes the only remaining evidence available to the family from their child if their child becomes missing. The main benefits to NBS sample storage are: • Quality assurance and improvement for the NBS laboratory. • Research for new technologies and for detecting new disorders. • Research for new treatments and cures for major childhood diseases. • Population incidence research on disorders and environmental contaminant exposures. • Parents can recall the specimens to help determine the cause of an unexplained death of their child (SIDS). • Parents can recall the specimens to aid law enforcement in identifying their missing child. "

Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a crime

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