We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/human-genomic-bycatch-our-dna-shows-up-in-environmental-samples/

by chinathrow • 3 years ago

82 54 3 years ago

Simulacra• 3 years ago

Wow, it had never occurred to me that the government might establish mass, passive DNA collection. Sort of reminds me of the East Germans and their little scent jars... Would the government have to tell us if they had collected our DNA through passive means in public?

krunck• 3 years ago

No, you'd need something like a nasty pandemic where people willingly give bodily fluid samples. Like that'll ever happen...

Just kidding.

That would require a conspiracy on a scale never seen before that is just not possible considering how poorly coordinated governments are and would be stupid to do because if it were to be found out by the public would end in mass revolt.

freedude2• 3 years ago

Perhaps you underestimate the desire for power over others that some among us possess. Or, perhaps you don't

1827163• 3 years ago

Especially with social media, the anger would spread throughout society like wildfire.

EMCymatics4• 3 years ago

If we want to continue the scare train, the lockdowns probably increased social media use by a lot on private devices.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

Sort of reminds me of the East Germans and their little scent jars

Can you explain that to me? I don't understand the reference.

throwawayForMe2• 3 years ago

https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-c...

ignite• 3 years ago

Well, they are already collecting covid DNA from wastewater: https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater#3925188384-9...

And they are looking for one person, who has interesting characteristic, from a covid perspective:

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/healthcare/2023/06/08/co...

giantg2• 3 years ago

Gattaca air filtration tracking here we come.

EMCymatics4• 3 years ago

Yeah but notice air is likely the least effective means. They also used a very loud vacuum pump so the active air sampling will be more noticible than most. You just have to run away from noises man (joke)

I question their use of the y chromosome as unfair (joke)

Zamicol• 3 years ago

I was thinking of the cool little vacuums the investigators used. My high school biology teacher has our class watch that movie.

SketchySeaBeast3• 3 years ago

The thing to keep in mind is that that data can't be just be linked automatically to people, they need, as the article says to "compare these sequences to public genetic data without too much difficulty."

It's just another version of a researching accidentally capturing you in a camera, but much harder to link you to the captured information.

ehhthing• 3 years ago

We're a small step right now from the police getting access to genetic databases like 23andMe, so if anyone in your family tree has gotten a genetic test it may be possible for them to identify you based on ancestry.

SketchySeaBeast3• 3 years ago

Then they'd know that that person had a relative there. We're still a lot of dots away from going "Well, we found this DNA by accident, it was clearly and obvious Bob was there."

morebortplates• 3 years ago

That's exactly how the so called Golden State Killer was caught.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo#Invest...

Video by Veritassium about the case: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KT18KJouHWg

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

The GEDMatch database has frequently been used for this purpose.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gedmatch

samtho• 3 years ago

it may be possible for them to identify you based on ancestry

Small correction, but an important one:

The ancestry portion of the consumer autosomal DNA testing does not imply genetic relation to another human being. By contrast, the genetic relative matching these tests perform is very accurate because it lines up matching SNPs between your test and others’ tests to determine relation.

EMCymatics4• 3 years ago

The amount of people who have used 23andME, ancestry et all can absolutely help identify people based on their relatives.

acomjean3• 3 years ago

Some states take DNA from anyone arrested. But they can search for family members (California approved this in 2010 I think). They caught the "Grim Sleeper" partially because his son got arrested for a Felony.

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

"Franklin was identified at least in part on familial DNA analysis.[41] 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.[42]"

mensetmanusman2• 3 years ago

Blood is sampled at birth in America, so we aren't too far away from being able to identify people who litter forever.

Just takes one policy change... we are building the cells of a possible future prison.

kaliqt• 3 years ago

That's... Incredibly scary.

searine• 3 years ago

You could say the same about fingerprints, facial recognition, or behavior patterns. People get really paranoid about DNA for some reason but then willingly give out other kinds of PIID without caring.

mensetmanusman2• 3 years ago

You can hide everything except DNA.

rolph2• 3 years ago

PIID can be forged, and fraud dept. works with this.

DNA can be forged as well, the installation needs tradecraft.

DNA carries authority for now, but its easier to transfer a DNA smear than to lift and install a fingerprint.

sublinear4• 3 years ago

Unless it's found in the middle of nowhere, and maybe not even then, how does one determine if a piece of trash is there by the deliberate act of littering?

As well, lots of trash has several people's DNA with no one individual having the majority such as product packaging, and that's the most likely to be littered.

SketchySeaBeast3• 3 years ago

Then why aren't they already doing that with CCTV and facial recognition?

perihelions• 3 years ago

We are?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/07/artificial-intel...

- "National Highways has revealed that it is set to launch a trial in the coming weeks which will see the high-tech cameras installed in road lay-bys which will scan the area for any instances of littering."

- "Unlike traditional CCTV cameras where enforcement officers would have to trawl through hours of footage to find offenders, the new AI cameras will be able to pick out offences and automatically send them to an enforcement control room."

EMCymatics4• 3 years ago

Facial recognition is probably a last resort given there are better signatures.

acomjean3• 3 years ago

They kinda are. Recently some lawyers got banned from Madison Square Garden because MSG corporate bans lawyers involved in cases against them from their venues. They found a lawyers image somewhere and fed it into the "banned from this establishment" facial recognition group .

Nobody really knew about this till the lawyer showed up to a show there with a girl scout troop going to a Christmas Show and was denied entrance. If they can do it to a lawyer..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104400

Of course the lawyers are suing, but its kinda over the top and the show was missed.

jonhohle2• 3 years ago

There are already companies partnering with OBGYNs to have cord blood banked at birth (for later stem cell treatments). I'm sure millions of 10 and unders already have their biological matter held by private companies.

activiation• 3 years ago

At a fall festival here in FL, the sheriff's office wanted to DNA test children to "help in the event of a kidnaping"

sublinear4• 3 years ago

I am no statistician, but wouldn't mass DNA collection reduce the reliability of DNA evidence?

ashirviskas• 3 years ago

Why could that be a case?

sublinear4• 3 years ago

I think the precise location where the DNA is found is more important to proving a case than merely finding it. Environmental DNA lacks this information. When collecting DNA from a scene, I believe there are guidelines and really just plain common sense where you'd want to swab.

That is, finding someone's DNA in a common area is less convincing than finding it on the handle of a weapon. If environmental DNA is abused by an overzealous court, it may call into question the general effectiveness of DNA testing.

acomjean3• 3 years ago

Because you leave DNA everywhere.

I remember a case study where they found the accused with DNA, only to find out, while the match was good, the match had been dead for a couple years and couldn't have been the perpetrator.

These "false positives" would make confidence in the system less.

sb52191• 3 years ago

I think it depends on use cases and advancements in our understanding of time's effect on the DNA captured.

I.e. I could imagine that in the not too distant future, we know that DNA in air (exposed to sunlight) degrades at a certain percentage over time, and therefore could be used to determine if a person was near a given location recently. Sort of like carbon dating.

You could imagine law enforcement using this as a tool to find suspects: Drive around with a device that constantly captures air and checks it for the DNA of a suspect (which could have been found at the scene via other, more traditional methods) and then allows them to narrow down a persons location.

sublinear4• 3 years ago

Drive around with a device that constantly captures air and checks it for the DNA of a suspect

Why would they drive around when there are undoubtedly hotspots where they would install sensors?

freedude2• 3 years ago

Another tool for the Orwellian Tyranny to follow the population with. Combined with automation and AI and you won't ever get lost again.

jefftk• 3 years ago

Here's the paper this is summarizing: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02056-2

In cases where a lot of people are contributing DNA to a sample, which I'd expect for most environmental sampling, it seems like you would need impractically large amounts of sequencing before you could identify anyone specific in sequencing conducted for other purposes: you'd need to get a sequencing read which could have come from only one person, or enough reads each matching a small number of people that you could make an inference about an individual.

The paper does have "The long eDNA reads sequenced here suggest that with targeted enrichment of informative genomic locations, one could achieve individual-level identification even from pooled samples" but this is just saying that environmental sampling with the specific goal of identifying individuals could be possible. This is very different from this being something that normal researchers might do by accident in the process of environmental sequencing for a different purpose.

godelski• 3 years ago

I know very little about DNA and sequencing, so this may be a naive or even bad question. But aren't small sections of DNA unique? Or do you need a bunch of those small sections to actually create said fingerprint? Maybe a better question is asking how many of those chains you'd need to collect (and how long they are). Or how DNA identification even works.

While the fingerprinting might not be something normal researchers do, there still is the question about if the information exists. Unfortunately you only need a single bad actor. Most people might not go through the trouble to deanonymize this user account, but it definitely is possible and would also be possible (though quite taxing) purely through processing my words alone.

chris37879• 3 years ago

They're probably unique, but the search space is so large you can't be sure that the specific section you have is the section you're checking for from the target.

There's only the 4 base pairs in your DNA, so for any given length of base pairs 4^n combinations that are possible to exist. A complete human genome is 3.2 billion base pairs long. So yeah, it's definitely a length vs information density problem.

Though those numbers may seem very very large, they get cut down to size very very quickly. Across all human's, there's very little variation in nearly all of our genome, something like 99.6% of those 3.2b genes are identical between all humans, which leaves 0.4% (around 12m) base pairs of DNA that make you you out of all other humans. We have identified (or at least think we have) some specific regions of those 12m pairs that control certain things, that's what the field of genetics has been up to with things like the Human Genome Project, so, plausibly, if they caught an environmental dna sample that was long enough to identify _which_ gene site they had, and they knew (or could at least guess) what value your genes would have at that site, yeah, they could probably tell whether it was you that was nearby, or at least someone related to you!

NoRelToEmber• 3 years ago

But the police will keep complaining about "going dark", despite the massive growth of surveillance and forensics. The less privacy we have, the more of a problem what remains of it seems to be.

ben_w• 3 years ago

2028:

"We need to ban people from possessing tiny organoids whose sole purpose is to spew out large quantities of irrelevant DNA that confuses our sensors."

2029:

"The DNA evidence is fake news, as are the fingerprints, the eye witnesses, the CCTV recordings, the multiple livestreams, the police and news drones that was following the events, the GPS recorder, and the cell phone records."

"Can you prove that?"

"My retinal implant digitally signs and timestamps every image I see."

rolph2• 3 years ago

presence of DNA doesnt mean a person was ever at a particular location. the amount of DNA recovered must also be considered, along with associated objects, and habits of a person.

We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies

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