So many questions. How did "sexual assault" sneak in here next to homicide? That's not a capital crime. Is the irony of having a one-person opt-in/opt-out box entirely lost on the people running genealogy websites? How can you give informed consent to sharing your data when the entire point of these sites is not knowing what you discover?
And of course the biggest problem of all, which is that these sites are used to discover third-parties not using the site or consenting at all. The article bizarrely omits this, making the whole thing seem like a cookie consent popup.
> So many questions. How did "sexual assault" sneak in here next to homicide? That's not a capital crime.
Regardless of one's belief of how murder should be punished, I think it's pretty clear that rape is an offense as destructive as murder. The reason it does not bear the same penalty is pragmatic: if the punishment were the same then why should a rapist not kill the victim as well? The penalty would be no worse and the chance of being captured would go down.
> How can you give informed consent to sharing your data when the entire point of these sites is not knowing what you discover?
Your question isn't just genetic question but really a mass surveillance question. E.g. relatives tend to look alike so an advanced facial recognition system could be used to, say, see where a wanted suspect's possible relatives live and then follow them in case said suspect contacts them. Or simply look for people who have a "guilt factor" above X near where a crime was committed and sweep them up.
> The reason it does not bear the same penalty is pragmatic: if the punishment were the same then why should a rapist not kill the victim as well?
The real reason is even more prosaic in the U.S.: the Supreme Court in Coker v. Georgia decided that it was unconstitutional, despite having been constitutional and practiced by some number of states for nearly 200 years.
It doesn't get any more philosophical than that: six men didn't like it, so the nation doesn't have it any more.
But, to the grandparent's point, rape has been a capital crime in the past, and there's no reason it couldn't be again.
I really don't like some of the philosophies expressed in this article. The whole "put family members in jail" bit feels like a worthless appeal to emotion.
If your family member is a mass murderer, I really don't care if investigators use information related to you to catch them. Even if that data is your DNA, and it was shared contrary to your expectations.
Nobody wants to see their loved ones go to prison, but the Golden State Killer was an absolute monster, and it's an demonstrably good thing he was caught and faced justice.
I understand that people feel that using DNA information from genealogy services to investigate crimes might feel like a slippery slope towards egregious abuse (and maybe that's true), but the Golden State Killer is definitely not an example of such abuse.
If a family member is charged for a crime, unless it is your spouse, isn't it true that the State can compel you to provide evidence that might incriminate the family member?
I don't buy this justification. It's like the people talking about mass surveillance saying,
"I understand that people feel like unchecked government mass surveillance might feel like a slipper slope towards egregious abuse, but it's worth it to catch all the evil terrorists and pedophiles"
Sure the Golden State Killer was a terrible person, but I'm not willing to just blindly trust and accept that the government should be able to access and use whatever data they want to keep me "safe."
Personally, I fall into the "Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither" camp
An aside, but that sentiment "Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither" makes no sense.
Every person in every civilization has made the trade off between liberty and security to some degree. All but the staunchest anarchists are for some laws.
Discussion over where the grey areas end are valid; and I'd argue more useful then assuming what ever is currently acceptable to any given person must be the optimal tradeoff.
Exactly this. Police in most countries can search your home if they have proper legal justification. That is extremely invasive, but it is allowed by many societies because they recognize that invasive searches with proper oversight can bring around greater liberty, if such searches catch individuals who are harming others.
As I see it, the issue is not that these websites are being used by law enforcement, but that there is not formalized rules for doing so, nor is there transparency in how they are used by law enforcement. An example of a formal rule would be a warrant requirement.
I would gladly move to any country that did not have this police ability in a heartbeat. There is no level of security that can justify to me anyway, even the most mundane aspects of our policing activity.
The problem is that police don't actually make anyone safer, they simply create order for the state after something has occurred. I have never once called the police and had them actually do a single thing to help or solve the problem I was facing. Yet I can recount countless instances of them harassing me for nothing? Why is that? Maybe the fundamental notion of 'secure vs liberty' is flawed if we aren't actually provided with more security.
I've had a fugitive apprehension team surround my home... guns drawn, riot shield, the whole nine yards... looking for the guy who broke into my home, stole a firearm, sexually assaulted a person living there, and had continued threatening the victim via phone calls and texts for months.
After they caught the guy, I found out that those guys showed up due to a DNA match against subsequent violent crimes, for which we were the only victims who knew his identity. Soon after the cops re-victimized us they put out a media alert that quickly resulted in someone turning him in. It was two more months before anyone told us they'd caught him. Two. Friggin. Months. Of continuing to worry that this criminal might make good on their threats of doing further harm.
Seriously, I can't imagine many people reading this have lived for months under that level of stress and fear.
It doesn't make sense because it's so often butchered. Here's the real quote from Franklin:
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
So, the liberty must be "essential" and the safety must be "temporary" - and the classification as such would be the essence of the argument. It's not so much a statement of principle as it is invective.
And in context, it's actually about the liberties of a legislative assembly [1] rather than those of the individual, but that's a minor detail.
This is an example of the "end of history" fallacy, which assumes that civil and cultural freedoms do not regress once they are attained. But in fact, limits on policing are the very reason why homosexuals and blasphemers were able to get enough of a voice to become accepted in the first place.
It's a fallacy to suggest that any possible future is a probable future.
I donated blood earlier today. Maybe I shouldn't have because there is a possible future where a newly evolved disease is discovered that is rampant in sterile needles, lays relatively dormant for 10 years in people, and then kills them.
Persecution of minorities is not a possible future, it is a fact of the present. It was even worse in the recent past, and what progress we've made is not the result of predestined change in sentiment but of prioritizing civil liberties instead of the boogeyman of crime and moral degeneracy. You don't punch holes in the levee after the flooding stops.
How will you feel when your 2nd cousin is convicted of being a murderer based on nothing more than shed skin cells, and your whole family believes their alibi of being with their mother, but the jury doesn't because mothers lie for their children and DNA transference sounds far-fetched?
That's the nightmare scenario of familial matching and government access to / creation of DNA databases.
Here's a story of someone who came close and probably would have been convicted had their attorney not credibly identified a source of the transference.
Sorry to tell you but a droplet of your DNA ended up in the vial of a serial rapist. So sorry that we tore your life apart when you were so obviously guilty. Mistakes happen, eh?
Agree with your point of view and I think the challenge is the latter half of your statement.
It is akin to the darknet and illicit behavior. They can (and have) stopped bad people doing seriously bad things on the net so should we allow an authority to moderate that.
At a point in time everything may work as intended but the track record is that the system will be abused.
So the people you're saying you'd want to trust with this info in order to do the right thing, are sometimes literally the "Bad Guys" you shouldn't. :(
> At one point, the site secretly allowed police to upload DNA from the scene of a violent assault—following a personal appeal from the detective to one of GEDmatch’s co-founders.
One thing with these DOJ guidelines is that they will create a 2 tier system of justice. Ordinary victims won't be able to use these genetic databases to try to obtain justice. However, family members and close friends of the executives of these companies will have access to these (If the founder of the company comes to law enforcement and says, "Here are the closest DNA matches for the assailant of my niece." do you think law enforcement will refuse that information?)
I don't think that's a big concern because law enforcement will have to refuse the information or the case will be thrown out. They can't just go up and present illegally obtained evidence. Even the crappiest public defenders should catch something like that.
Parallel construction might be a possibility (though still illegal), but it would be difficult in this situation when the criminal isn't a suspect already.
I think law enforcement can use information provided by third parties, that they could not themselves obtain, if they had no part in obtaining that information.
It seems like it wouldn't be hard to have hospitals do DNA sequencing after birth so that eventually everyone with a birth certificate had their DNA on file. The data could then be used for medical research, law enforcement, genealogy, etc.
I'm sure this would have terrible unintended consequences but I can't think of any at the moment.
I'm sure this would have terrible unintended consequences but I can't think of any at the moment.
I'm sure insurance companies would like to get their hands on this information. I can see people with certain problematic genes being unable to get life insurance for example.
By US law (GINA, passed in 2008), health insurance companies and employers are barred from discriminating on the basis of genetic results. Life insurance companies are allowed to, as is housing and schooling, interestingly enough.
It kinda makes sense that life insurance companies would be able to, or it would be really easy to abuse the system. You could do a genetic screening on yourself, and find out that you are very likely to die within x number of years... and then take out a TON of life insurance on yourself.
Maybe not a huge risk, but does present a bit of an interesting problem.
It was signed by George W. Bush(Republican) into law.
I remember being surprised because I would have thought that health care companies would have made a some kind of "free market enterprise" argument that they should be able to use DNA data to make insurance more "efficient".
This just highlights the inherent contradictions in wanting a 'free market health care system'.
People say they want a free market health care system, but also they want 'fairness'..... and most people feel that being charged more for something outside of your control is 'not fair'. These two notions are at odds.
The only way to solve this is by having a single payer, universal health care system.
False positives. When selecting from a small pool of suspects the chance of a false positive is negligible. If you are searching the entire population it is no longer negligible.
False positives mean a SWAT team knocking down your door and shooting your dog and possibly you. A false positive means your name forever associated with horrible crimes.
Universal DNA databases are an IMMENSE increase in govt power that needs to be matched by greater accountability and oversight.
Sure, he wasn't declared guilty, but he also got a $2 million settlement. What happened to him was bad. $2 million bad. And it was because of a poorly handled finger print. I can't imagine people in the future will be treated better because we're using DNA instead.
I don't think the thing about false positives is actually true, though obviously it will depend on how good the crime scene sample is, and on how good the police are at their jobs.
The data could be used by dating sites, employers, hate groups, insurance companies, human cloning labs, and would greatly help our secret police!
This is certainly unethical (informed consent) and probably illegal under federal and state law. Would you like to make your DNA available to anyone who wishes to utilize it without your consent?
The glaringly obvious one is outing the real father in cases where a woman had an affair (or was raped) and is trying to make things work with some other man.
This is potentially a huge can of worms. Irrefutable evidence that Pillar of the Community is Daddy to multiple children because he's a serial philanderer or serial rapist is generally pretty explosive news that can tear apart whole communities, especially in small towns or religious communities.
I wonder how long until someone creates a DNA site where you can upload your DNA, and then get a "reward" if yours is used to locate a suspect, with closeness of relation being worth more. The rewards could be paid for by the money they charge the law enforcement agencies to use the database. If the rewards were high enough, you'd probably get a lot of people signing up for the chance to make money off their relatives. Of course, you'd need some way to ensure people are only uploading their own DNA, but that's probably do-able if you handle the DNA samples directly.
We already have rewards for help solving some crimes, this just makes it more of a market. Participants could opt to have their rewards donated to charity. If I knew anything about DNA, I'd probably be very tempted to work on this.
What we really need is some sort of a cyber-fatwa calling all valiant friends of freedom to kill those working on these sorts of surveillance systems without delay, no one shall infringe on the fundamental right to privacy. And whoever is killed in this cause shall be a martyr.
Meanwhile, if someone has access to the authors of the surveillance systems but is incapable of carrying out the execution, they should inform the people so that the perpetrator is punished for his actions.
69 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadAnd of course the biggest problem of all, which is that these sites are used to discover third-parties not using the site or consenting at all. The article bizarrely omits this, making the whole thing seem like a cookie consent popup.
The value to society of catching the perps in these cases is large enough to make giving police access on a case-by-case basis worth it.
That is for a judge to decide. While signing (or not) a warrant
Regardless of one's belief of how murder should be punished, I think it's pretty clear that rape is an offense as destructive as murder. The reason it does not bear the same penalty is pragmatic: if the punishment were the same then why should a rapist not kill the victim as well? The penalty would be no worse and the chance of being captured would go down.
> How can you give informed consent to sharing your data when the entire point of these sites is not knowing what you discover?
Your question isn't just genetic question but really a mass surveillance question. E.g. relatives tend to look alike so an advanced facial recognition system could be used to, say, see where a wanted suspect's possible relatives live and then follow them in case said suspect contacts them. Or simply look for people who have a "guilt factor" above X near where a crime was committed and sweep them up.
The real reason is even more prosaic in the U.S.: the Supreme Court in Coker v. Georgia decided that it was unconstitutional, despite having been constitutional and practiced by some number of states for nearly 200 years.
It doesn't get any more philosophical than that: six men didn't like it, so the nation doesn't have it any more.
But, to the grandparent's point, rape has been a capital crime in the past, and there's no reason it couldn't be again.
If your family member is a mass murderer, I really don't care if investigators use information related to you to catch them. Even if that data is your DNA, and it was shared contrary to your expectations.
Nobody wants to see their loved ones go to prison, but the Golden State Killer was an absolute monster, and it's an demonstrably good thing he was caught and faced justice.
I understand that people feel that using DNA information from genealogy services to investigate crimes might feel like a slippery slope towards egregious abuse (and maybe that's true), but the Golden State Killer is definitely not an example of such abuse.
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2282
"I understand that people feel like unchecked government mass surveillance might feel like a slipper slope towards egregious abuse, but it's worth it to catch all the evil terrorists and pedophiles"
Sure the Golden State Killer was a terrible person, but I'm not willing to just blindly trust and accept that the government should be able to access and use whatever data they want to keep me "safe."
Personally, I fall into the "Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither" camp
Man what a dumb quote. Trading liberty for security is the foundation of what a society/civilization is.
Every person in every civilization has made the trade off between liberty and security to some degree. All but the staunchest anarchists are for some laws.
Discussion over where the grey areas end are valid; and I'd argue more useful then assuming what ever is currently acceptable to any given person must be the optimal tradeoff.
As I see it, the issue is not that these websites are being used by law enforcement, but that there is not formalized rules for doing so, nor is there transparency in how they are used by law enforcement. An example of a formal rule would be a warrant requirement.
The problem is that police don't actually make anyone safer, they simply create order for the state after something has occurred. I have never once called the police and had them actually do a single thing to help or solve the problem I was facing. Yet I can recount countless instances of them harassing me for nothing? Why is that? Maybe the fundamental notion of 'secure vs liberty' is flawed if we aren't actually provided with more security.
After they caught the guy, I found out that those guys showed up due to a DNA match against subsequent violent crimes, for which we were the only victims who knew his identity. Soon after the cops re-victimized us they put out a media alert that quickly resulted in someone turning him in. It was two more months before anyone told us they'd caught him. Two. Friggin. Months. Of continuing to worry that this criminal might make good on their threats of doing further harm.
Seriously, I can't imagine many people reading this have lived for months under that level of stress and fear.
Fuck the police.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
So, the liberty must be "essential" and the safety must be "temporary" - and the classification as such would be the essence of the argument. It's not so much a statement of principle as it is invective.
And in context, it's actually about the liberties of a legislative assembly [1] rather than those of the individual, but that's a minor detail.
1. https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said
I donated blood earlier today. Maybe I shouldn't have because there is a possible future where a newly evolved disease is discovered that is rampant in sterile needles, lays relatively dormant for 10 years in people, and then kills them.
That's the nightmare scenario of familial matching and government access to / creation of DNA databases.
Here's a story of someone who came close and probably would have been convicted had their attorney not credibly identified a source of the transference.
https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/
Using "but wouldn't you want to lock up those darn killers" is itself an emotional appeal.
At a point in time everything may work as intended but the track record is that the system will be abused.
As was pointed out by another commenter, the (accused) Golden State Killer was a police officer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Killer#Joseph_Jam...
So the people you're saying you'd want to trust with this info in order to do the right thing, are sometimes literally the "Bad Guys" you shouldn't. :(
One thing with these DOJ guidelines is that they will create a 2 tier system of justice. Ordinary victims won't be able to use these genetic databases to try to obtain justice. However, family members and close friends of the executives of these companies will have access to these (If the founder of the company comes to law enforcement and says, "Here are the closest DNA matches for the assailant of my niece." do you think law enforcement will refuse that information?)
Parallel construction might be a possibility (though still illegal), but it would be difficult in this situation when the criminal isn't a suspect already.
I'm sure this would have terrible unintended consequences but I can't think of any at the moment.
I'm sure insurance companies would like to get their hands on this information. I can see people with certain problematic genes being unable to get life insurance for example.
Maybe not a huge risk, but does present a bit of an interesting problem.
It was signed by George W. Bush(Republican) into law.
I remember being surprised because I would have thought that health care companies would have made a some kind of "free market enterprise" argument that they should be able to use DNA data to make insurance more "efficient".
It even passed in the house 416 - 16.
People say they want a free market health care system, but also they want 'fairness'..... and most people feel that being charged more for something outside of your control is 'not fair'. These two notions are at odds.
The only way to solve this is by having a single payer, universal health care system.
False positives mean a SWAT team knocking down your door and shooting your dog and possibly you. A false positive means your name forever associated with horrible crimes.
Universal DNA databases are an IMMENSE increase in govt power that needs to be matched by greater accountability and oversight.
Sure, he wasn't declared guilty, but he also got a $2 million settlement. What happened to him was bad. $2 million bad. And it was because of a poorly handled finger print. I can't imagine people in the future will be treated better because we're using DNA instead.
https://gizmodo.com/when-bad-dna-tests-lead-to-false-convict... https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/mar/09/forensics-firm-i... https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/forensics-gone-wrong...
That being said, there are also many false convictions where the innocent accused people were exonerated after DNA testing became available.
And it will depend on the bandwidth for the city/county/state attorneys to take this to plea/trail.
I think the pure probability based on the size of the sample pool makes a false positive an inevitability at scale.
This is certainly unethical (informed consent) and probably illegal under federal and state law. Would you like to make your DNA available to anyone who wishes to utilize it without your consent?
Please don't encourage the surveillance state to go around and keep a DB of all your genetic information. It doesn't end well.
The glaringly obvious one is outing the real father in cases where a woman had an affair (or was raped) and is trying to make things work with some other man.
This is potentially a huge can of worms. Irrefutable evidence that Pillar of the Community is Daddy to multiple children because he's a serial philanderer or serial rapist is generally pretty explosive news that can tear apart whole communities, especially in small towns or religious communities.
I mean, this is clearly dystopian...but you know that (I hope)
Meanwhile, if someone has access to the authors of the surveillance systems but is incapable of carrying out the execution, they should inform the people so that the perpetrator is punished for his actions.