I share the common emotion that this is awful and shouldn't happen, but I have trouble justifying it intellectually.
Let's say, instead of DNA, it was an outstanding bench warrant. It seems pretty clear to me that the victim should have the help of the police in apprehending the rapist, but should also be arrested for the bench warrant. You might disagree, but there's no solving the problem of both needing the help of the police and being wanted for crimes. Waiting a day to serve the warrant, out of respect? Does that help?
This is different, yes, but how different? What changes to the database should be made here? Completely separate victim and suspect lists? It's burglary this time, what if it was homicide?
Not that you can separate victim and suspect when processing rape kit DNA! Eliminating common subsequences reduces the entropy and makes matches harder, we share a lot of SNPs in common.
My complete disgust that this happened remains, but this is one of the gnarliest ethical dilemmas I've seen.
> I share the common emotion that this is awful and shouldn't happen, but I have trouble justifying it intellectually.
Incentives.
The justification would be that sexual assault is a serious crime that goes underreported. If victims are afraid to come forward because they fear arrest for other, pettier offenses, then predators are even more likely to escape justice and commit more assaults.
Really, any offenses. We could imagine that there's some method for abusing a policy of disallowing use of a victim's evidence to prosecute that victim for unrelated crimes, but until it happens, it's reasonable to ignore that possibility.
This is why if you've ever been to a music festival they make it absolutely explicitly clear that you can go to the on-site paramedics for anything and they won't incriminate you. Putting someone in a position where they have to weigh the risk of ODing verses a life-ruining jail sentence is how you end up with people dead.
You're right, that's a concern. The solution is to get everyone in the DNA database beforehand so there's no marginal cost of getting swabbed with a rape kit.
To me the real question is, why they got to keep a secret copy of the victim's DNA data for multiple years, let alone using it for things that the original owner did not consent to.
I think this is comparable to a key to your house that you gave to the police, because it was burglarized. They finished their investigations and hand the key back to you. What they did not tell you, is that they created a secret copy of your house keys and then five years later use it silently for searching through your house without a warrant.
That would be confusing yes. But you can't remove the victim's DNA from the offender's, without making it less likely to find a match. That question has an actual answer: you can't. It's literally a boolean thing: you have victim AND offender, if you XOR victim out, you lose some offender.
Legislation appears to be doing the right thing here, my question is whether the police did their duty or not. Someone signed a consent form to put them in a database that tagged them as a match. That's not a police discretion thing, it's not clear to me that damages are appropriate.
Fortunately I'm not a judge, just some guy on the internet.
It's a bit of a drama with this house key and stuff, it's more like they took your picture when you were victim and later recognized you when you were offender and used address they saved back then to knock on your door.
> It's burglary this time, what if it was homicide?
Magnitude of a crime can always be expanded to justify anything. We have plenty of things we could do to catch more criminals (even murderers!), but we don't. As an example, why not run a DNA check on any blood draws at the doctor's office? Sure it's an invasion of privacy, but what if it catches a murderer!
I get it. Here the argument is that the person approached law enforcement on their own, and thus opened themselves up to this. But this is incidental -- it happens to be that reporting this crime requires handing over DNA. But police could require everyone to do a blood draw when reporting any crime, right? I think most people would have a problem with that and think it is obviously an invasion of privacy. But OK, you can argue that the real problem there is that it is too tit-for-tat. How about instead every time you walk into a police station someone watches you and collects any hair that falls off of your head and runs it through the database? No coercion, no one can argue that they had to give their DNA in exchange for services. Still seems like it would still have a pretty negative effect on trust between people and police.
The only thing that makes this case "confusing" is that a bunch of different actors are bundled together. If the administration of a rape kit was 100% done by a doctor (as far as I know it is done by nurses but then handed over to police, currently?), and they could then trivially separate out the two genetic materials and hand over only that which didn't belong to the victim, then I think most people would find it distasteful for the police to demand both sets of DNA, right? Why do you need the other one (the doctor could confirm it belongs to the victim if that is the concern)? Just because it happens to be that the way we happen to administer this today makes it convenient to check both (and perhaps even easier than not checking both), does not in my mind introduce any sort of new ethical consideration. It still feels an awful lot like "well, if you want us to look at your crime, you have to be willing to have us check you for any crimes first".
The job of police is difficult, not as an accident of history because they didn't have the right technology when we wrote a lot of these laws, but because it's supposed to be difficult because we understand the value of what's lost if it isn't.
Can someone explain why it is considered as such, also with regard to forensics (if that makes any difference)? The original definition of privacy looks somewhat archaic in this case.
E.g.: someone follows you everywhere with a camera - it's privacy invasion. Some public camera films you accidentally at a specific place - it is not, though it's clearly you in the video. Seems like intent and focus are key here, and your image is not invasive by itself, but only if someone focuses on you. We leave DNA everywhere just like we leave images on every camera, but (to me) it's only privacy invasion if someone builds many fragments together or pauses to "look" into your business there. DNA itself is as private as your look - everyone can see it unless you actively counter it by physical means.
But the police didn't focus on her, they focused on evidence, just as if some camera filmed her in that house and they'd look at that footage, not at some drone footage tracing specifically her to see if her route maybe includes that house.
Storing DNA from previous encounters is ~ like storing your id photo (i.e. absolutely neutral info, lacking any context). Does this part invade privacy, maybe? But what's private here?
Why would you have rape victim DNA in the same database as unknown rape suspect DNA? It's because you have no safeguards and no ethical standards, and are using everything you have access to in the same way. Imagine calling the cops for a burglary, and while they're walking through your apartment they see a bankers' box that says "Taxes," so decide to audit you while they still have legal access to your apartment.
> It seems pretty clear to me that the victim should have the help of the police in apprehending the rapist, but should also be arrested for the bench warrant.
It seems to me that's a great decision if you don't want people to report murders because they have outstanding parking tickets.
One thing to keep in mind here is that there is a serious problem with the birthday paradox that impacts these DNA fishing expeditions and makes them both dangerous and very nearly useless.
Throwing any old DNA that comes into your hands into a huge database, with no prior expectation that the person whose DNA your searching is involved in a specific crime you're looking to compare them to but just to see if anything in there matches anything else in there, will turn up false positives with incredible regularity
I remember being very troubled by a case from years ago about a cop who knocked on someone's door because neighbors had heard screaming. The resident and his girlfriend had been having loud sex, but agreed to let the cop verify no violence was taking place. During the visit the cop noticed some cannabis plants and the man was convicted of possession with intent to distribute.
My rule of thumb if I were rewriting the law would be that the inadvertently discovered crime must be as or more serious than that which is being reported/investigated. If a person is a victim of or an honest cooperator in the investigation of a serious crime, lesser offenses should be held in abeyance, although a warning of potential liability in future unrelated police contacts would be acceptable.
Genuine question: had the couple refused to let the cop enter and he barged in anyway (exigent circumstances owing to potential physical assault) - could the cannabis be used against the couple as evidence of a crime or would the non-invited search limit discovery?
My hope is that the cannabis would then be fruit of the poisoned tree and reaffirms my belief that you would never work with the cops to any degree.
The victim of this policy was not the (hypothetical, I have no idea about the actual case) person who was both the victim of a crime and perpetrator of another crime, it's the much larger number of people who did not commit a crime but are being "investigated" every time a suspect's DNA is run through the system because they reported being raped.
They are subjected to the possibility of false positives or misleading true positives (it is their DNA but they didn't do the crime). These are low probability events but the population is fairly large and the number of suspect samples is also large and one images both will only grow in the future.
But I think the real problem is that it shows a certain lack of thoughtfulness when it comes to data use and governance. It doesn't seem like they considered themselves stewards of the most sensitive data possible from people who have suffered horribly. It's possible they weren't aware of the ethical quandary here or they didn't have the technological sophistication to develop a nuanced solution. Either case argues for more restriction in how the data are used while we as a society catch up to the implications of this evolving technology.
There is no ethical dilemma here. No DNA evidence collected from a victim to prosecute a sexual assault crime should ever be used to criminally prosecute that victim. To even suggest otherwise undermines the overall goals of our criminal justice system because it erodes confidence in the system overall and specifically for victims. A shoplifter (or arsonist or murderer or warrant dodger) that gets raped is not less of a rape victim, and the fear of being caught for the former should not scare them away from helping catch someone who did the latter. Your past sins should have no bearing on your access to justice.
> You might disagree, but there's no solving the problem of both needing the help of the police and being wanted for crimes.
There's a reason that so called sanctuary cities are a good idea and it's because of thoughts like this. people avoiding reporting crimes to the police because they are fearful of being deported is exactly how more crime is perpetrated without fear of retribution on marginalized communities. If you are fearful of being arrested for a bench warrant over some parking ticket you couldn't pay for or some other matter... you will not seek help from the police.
> Let's say, instead of DNA, it was an outstanding bench warrant.
A bench warrant is a court order. We have this famous law that says that no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause. If the court has done its job correctly, you only issue a warrant when you have justified suspicion of a crime.
Pulling someone's DNA from a database absent any other evidence of their involvement in a crime has no such judicial review failsafe.
So, yeah, this is different because one is just justice at work and the other is a really terrible fourth amendment violation.
To be fair to the parties involved the SF DA at the time refused to prosecute the case, the SFPD stopped the practice pretty much immediately, and the date of California is passing legislation to prevent this. Everyone seems to have acknowledged that this was wrong and have seemed to put in efforts to stop it.
It’s an interesting federal case for how it can impact other states law and raises the awareness of other “rogue” DNA databases that could be misused.
No. SFPD only stopped the practice (of reporting rape kit matches) after SF DA refused to prosecute this one particular case and it came to light that SFPD was actually doing this. Considering SFPD routinely checked DNA against rape kits for over 7 years, it's possible this was used in other cases.
"Boudin read the police department’s lab report, which said that “during a routine search of the SFPD Crime Lab Forensic Biology Unit Internal Quality Database, a match was detected and verified. Direct comparisons with the samples listed below were performed,” listing the 2016 rape kit sample.
The language suggested that the practice was routine and not an isolated incident, Boudin said, and the head of the crime lab confirmed to his office that such searches are done regularly." [1]
"The scope of how many victims or volunteers may have had their DNA queried by the department's crime lab and matched to unknown suspect DNA to solve a criminal case over the last seven years is unknown." ... "other California DAs told [Boudin] that their crime labs have also admitted to maintaining a database that includes DNA profiles from sexual assault survivors." [2]
So I don't think it's fair to claim "SFPD stopped the practice pretty much immediately" and "Everyone seems to have acknowledged that this was wrong" when clearly the SFPD and possibly other PDs have been doing this for years.
Here's a 2019 California appeal decision that on the most simple face of it would have invalidated convictions based on non consenting collection of DNA. In this particular case the appellant unfortunately for his fortune subsequently voluntarily provided DNA samples. Whether this could theoretically be overturned on lawful search grounds for procedure and investigation leading to arrest is my speculative question.
Sure, but they aren't just statements. Sooner or later, in the face of mounting evidence, you have to put aside your cynicism and admit that sometimes people do things that they say they will do.
I think everybody is going to be super cool about this while they find out who set things up to record victim DNA. It's a nice little powder keg that's been just sitting there for a while.
> If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government.
> The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes—these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations.
> chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government.
This seems pretty disingenuous - yes you gave a blood sample (which has DNA in it) but no DNA genome sequencing is taking place - they simply check it for a series of disorders to make sure a baby is healthy and yes gather aggregate data on prevalence of disorders at the population level.
But do they keep it somewhere for further analysis later (very useful medically if you want to backtest things) or do they programmatically destroy it?
Would you prefer it said "blood sample that can later be mined for DNA"? No one has a problem with the initial health screen. The problem is that they keep it around later in a form that can be used like this.
I can't believe I am the minority on this, but I don't see a problem. This woman volunteered her DNA. She has committed a crime in the past. Is it a misuse of DNA if a criminal is brought to justice, where that DNA was literally volunteered?
This does not undermine the fact this person was raped, and that is horrible, BUT justice will be carried out in that case. The justice system cannot overlook a reported crime when there is evidence to persecute because a criminal involved in that crime has been hurt.
It’s a matter of not disincentivizing victims from cooperating with law enforcement. If there’s the possibility that some information you give the police could be used to prosecute you in the future, that could deter people from going to the police or seeking justice in the first place.
In terms of DNA specifically, it’s kind of a weird power play to say “if you want us to convict the person who raped you, we’ll have to put your DNA into our database to make it easier to convict you in the future”.
I think that's a bit of a bad argument, maybe a strawman. The whole point of the law is to make good citizens so we can all live together. It is in the best interest of both individuals and a community as a whole to not break the law. Breaking the law has consequences. It is the job of the police and justice system to find criminals and punish them. Finding criminals requires the justice system to find evidence and proof.
Let's make another scenario: someone's home was burglarized, and the family who lives in the home submits DNA so the police/investigators can flag finger prints/DNA not left by the family. It turns out the father of the house raped and killed several women 30 years before. The DNA submitted by the family has effectively convicted their father by volunteering his DNA for crimes he committed 30 years ago. Would you be equally upset that this rapist and murderer has been caught?
Yes and the investigators should be allowed to use all the data available to them.
One would expect that in such a situation only the DNA of the criminal who committed the rape would have been recorded. My issue with the situation here is that a rape kit should not have been a source of data.
That the DNA of a victim should not have been saved and added to a database. It should not been made available to the investigators.
Suppose that you have a horrific knife slasher, let's call her Sally. She runs around town and kills people with a knife.
However, let's suppose that she gets raped. Will it not be beneficial to society that she is willing to go to the police over the rape case?
It's like perfidy. As a general principle you don't use the fact that people want to do something good against them, even if they're bad. There may be deeper situations where this analysis doesn't hold, for example, if your enemies are providing people schooling or food, that may be an even stronger reason why it's important to attack them, but aside from things like that, this generally holds.
They do, no one wants to make it harder to get justice for anyone. The issue isn't "oh no it's too easy to get justice" it's "victims of a crime shouldn't be afraid to report it".
They do. However once this becomes known you become progressively less likely to derive any benefit from it as criminals will simply stop reporting rapes, while you will scare away far less serious criminals and a lot of non-criminals from reporting rapes too.
Before you even consider the harm to those victims from not being able to seek justice, there's also a real risk that in doing so you may end up creating more victims by losing the ability to catch a proportion of rapists some of whom may reoffend.
> There are more victims in this story: namely, the people whose dwelling was burglarized. Do they not deserve justice, too?
Yes, but there's a conflict here, and it's penny-wise, pound-foolish to prioritize justice for the people who were burgled, when that would very obviously deter people from reporting far more serious crimes.
> There are more victims in this story: namely, the people whose dwelling was burglarized. Do they not deserve justice, too?
They are also victims, because their DNA was placed into the same system for the crime of having their house burglarized, which is almost as serious as the crime of having been raped.
This includes anyone afraid of having their DNA in a database for whatever reasons. Reading some of the HN posts about 23andMe and such, this includes a lot of people.
You do not need to be a criminal, you only need to be afraid that DNA will be misused in the future.
Political dissident, activists and whistle-blowers come to mind.
This whole story sucks. She would never have been charged or prosecuted if she weren’t robbing people.
There’s a general idea that evidence you provide about one crime can be used to prosecute you or someone else for another crime. Why is this a special exception to that rule?
If she called the cops about a rape and they recognized her as having outstanding warrants, should they let her go? What if the warrants are for murder?
What possible legal exception would apply here, but not apply across the system to a huge number of other cases?
The second order effects are obvious and negative. Fewer people will report crimes if doing so requires putting their DNA in a government database. If more crimes go unreported then everyone is less safe.
For example, say the police routinely collected and stored DNA from burglary victims in the course of burglary investigations. If that makes people likely to report burglaries then it's possible the burglary she was arrested for might never have been reported in the first place. If fewer crimes are reported, fewer criminals are caught.
Even if you yourself are perfectly comfortable putting your DNA into a government database as a prerequisite for reporting a crime, you may be less safe overall if others do not feel similarly.
Police obviously already have access to outstanding warrants. Police should not have access to a victim's rape kit DNA except for use in solving that rape. The reason is that you don't want to discourage rape victims from reporting.
How is that different for other crimes? If a murderer is a victim of burglary and the police find a dead body in their house when investigating the burglary, should they not do anything?
IANAL, but you normally would need probable cause to collect DNA from someone if you want to use it as evidence. There would be probable cause to collect someone's DNA if they have an outstanding warrant. No such probable cause exists for a rape victim.
> She would never have been charged or prosecuted if she weren’t robbing people.
Innocent people are charged and prosecuted all the time. Otherwise there would be no need for a trial.
In Sweden the "blood bank" sample taken on all newborn children was used to identify the murderer of foreign minister Anna Lind in 2003.
This was very controversial at the time. When my first child had her blood sample taken a few years later they assured me that it was used for screening purposes and for annonymous medical research only. I reminded the nurse of the Anna Lind case and she got extremly upset with me.
She got very huffy and flat out denied that the blood bank dna was used to identify the murderer. He wans't covicted using that DNA, true, but the identification was no secret.
The police had made 2 arrests of persons they later had to release at that point, so I guess they didn't like to take any chanses with the third.
It should be said that the general opinion outside of medical reserarch was supportive of the police.
In the not so distant future the government will have have a database with everyone's dna. It's just not possible to keep something secret that you literally shed everywhere you go.
> In the not so distant future the government will have have a database with everyone's dna. It's just not possible to keep something secret that you literally shed everywhere you go.
There's an important difference between physically being able to keep something secret, and legally being able to keep something secret.
For instance: today the government has the physical ability to break into my house and shoot me in the head for no reason at all, but they don't have the legal ability to do so. Likewise, they have the physical ability to illegally obtain evidence, but not the legal ability to use that evidence to convict someone at trial.
Glad you highlighted "today", because tomorrow is much different as supreme court and FBI become more politicized. Rules seem to change on a whim. Or as in Canada gov't can declare an emergency an seize protester bank accounts. Another thing to point out is "today" should be in "today in some countries". Russian oil executives are mysteriously falling out of windows and boats all of the sudden.
> today the government has the physical ability to break into my house and shoot me in the head for no reason at all, but they don't have the legal ability to do so.
Isn't that exactly what they did to Breonna Taylor in Louisville? Haven't seen anyone arrested for that.
Technically they can do it legally. Few years back in Kansas City (iirc), some guy was basically prank calling the police on a gamer, but got the wrong house, police just knocked on the door. No weapon. Killed some the dad, and walked. No repercussions at all for the police. The prank caller got like 5-10 I think, as he should. But there's something wrong when somebody dies by cop and they are unarmed and don't serve time.
I agree, but when it's this difficult to physically kept it secret, then someone will collect it. That someone will then tell the police in return for some favor and the police will cook up some parallel construction. The result is the same except more corrupt and expensive.
Even if you didn't shed it everywhere, we really just need a database of a subset of people, which we can use to match close relations to and drastically narrow down the search.
There are lots of things that the government has technically been able to do but that laws are preventing it from doing. Society has a choice here. I'm not going to argue one way or another, but having an honest debates about trade offs either way and making an explicit decision would certainly be better than things like the case mentioned in the article silently creeping in.
> A prenatal test used worldwide sends gene data of pregnant women to the company that developed it with China's military. The U.S. sees a security risk.
Such an interesting movie… I confess as a high school kid when I first saw it I thought “imagine the possibilities“ whereas others were thinking “that’s sad and horrible“ …
This might sound far-fetched, but I believe The government already has genetic information on north of 50% of the population.
However, inefficient distribution of data and legalities of its use have deeply slowed widespread use.
The future we should fear is one with an efficient and interconnected government, capable of pulling a DNA match out of a database five government agencies removed, on the side of the highway…
My biggest fear is footprinting tech that can literally follow us everywhere and even ID us if we're wearing a mask by our size+gait etc...
Mix this with some dystopian social credit system where you get points for reporting the littlest offense to big brother, and some more spying tools to spy on our own people and we literally get thought police. Soon it'll be 1984 IRL.
I don't plan on being criminal, but what's legal today could be criminal tomorrow, or what's legal in one city might not be in another, etc. I don't think we're there yet, but the future could turn all shades of bad if we don't get upset over privacy violations now.
Readit News
I share the common emotion that this is awful and shouldn't happen, but I have trouble justifying it intellectually.
Let's say, instead of DNA, it was an outstanding bench warrant. It seems pretty clear to me that the victim should have the help of the police in apprehending the rapist, but should also be arrested for the bench warrant. You might disagree, but there's no solving the problem of both needing the help of the police and being wanted for crimes. Waiting a day to serve the warrant, out of respect? Does that help?
This is different, yes, but how different? What changes to the database should be made here? Completely separate victim and suspect lists? It's burglary this time, what if it was homicide?
Not that you can separate victim and suspect when processing rape kit DNA! Eliminating common subsequences reduces the entropy and makes matches harder, we share a lot of SNPs in common.
My complete disgust that this happened remains, but this is one of the gnarliest ethical dilemmas I've seen.
Incentives.
The justification would be that sexual assault is a serious crime that goes underreported. If victims are afraid to come forward because they fear arrest for other, pettier offenses, then predators are even more likely to escape justice and commit more assaults.
Really, any offenses. We could imagine that there's some method for abusing a policy of disallowing use of a victim's evidence to prosecute that victim for unrelated crimes, but until it happens, it's reasonable to ignore that possibility.
I think this is comparable to a key to your house that you gave to the police, because it was burglarized. They finished their investigations and hand the key back to you. What they did not tell you, is that they created a secret copy of your house keys and then five years later use it silently for searching through your house without a warrant.
Legislation appears to be doing the right thing here, my question is whether the police did their duty or not. Someone signed a consent form to put them in a database that tagged them as a match. That's not a police discretion thing, it's not clear to me that damages are appropriate.
Fortunately I'm not a judge, just some guy on the internet.
Magnitude of a crime can always be expanded to justify anything. We have plenty of things we could do to catch more criminals (even murderers!), but we don't. As an example, why not run a DNA check on any blood draws at the doctor's office? Sure it's an invasion of privacy, but what if it catches a murderer!
I get it. Here the argument is that the person approached law enforcement on their own, and thus opened themselves up to this. But this is incidental -- it happens to be that reporting this crime requires handing over DNA. But police could require everyone to do a blood draw when reporting any crime, right? I think most people would have a problem with that and think it is obviously an invasion of privacy. But OK, you can argue that the real problem there is that it is too tit-for-tat. How about instead every time you walk into a police station someone watches you and collects any hair that falls off of your head and runs it through the database? No coercion, no one can argue that they had to give their DNA in exchange for services. Still seems like it would still have a pretty negative effect on trust between people and police.
The only thing that makes this case "confusing" is that a bunch of different actors are bundled together. If the administration of a rape kit was 100% done by a doctor (as far as I know it is done by nurses but then handed over to police, currently?), and they could then trivially separate out the two genetic materials and hand over only that which didn't belong to the victim, then I think most people would find it distasteful for the police to demand both sets of DNA, right? Why do you need the other one (the doctor could confirm it belongs to the victim if that is the concern)? Just because it happens to be that the way we happen to administer this today makes it convenient to check both (and perhaps even easier than not checking both), does not in my mind introduce any sort of new ethical consideration. It still feels an awful lot like "well, if you want us to look at your crime, you have to be willing to have us check you for any crimes first".
The job of police is difficult, not as an accident of history because they didn't have the right technology when we wrote a lot of these laws, but because it's supposed to be difficult because we understand the value of what's lost if it isn't.
Can someone explain why it is considered as such, also with regard to forensics (if that makes any difference)? The original definition of privacy looks somewhat archaic in this case.
E.g.: someone follows you everywhere with a camera - it's privacy invasion. Some public camera films you accidentally at a specific place - it is not, though it's clearly you in the video. Seems like intent and focus are key here, and your image is not invasive by itself, but only if someone focuses on you. We leave DNA everywhere just like we leave images on every camera, but (to me) it's only privacy invasion if someone builds many fragments together or pauses to "look" into your business there. DNA itself is as private as your look - everyone can see it unless you actively counter it by physical means.
But the police didn't focus on her, they focused on evidence, just as if some camera filmed her in that house and they'd look at that footage, not at some drone footage tracing specifically her to see if her route maybe includes that house.
Storing DNA from previous encounters is ~ like storing your id photo (i.e. absolutely neutral info, lacking any context). Does this part invade privacy, maybe? But what's private here?
> It seems pretty clear to me that the victim should have the help of the police in apprehending the rapist, but should also be arrested for the bench warrant.
It seems to me that's a great decision if you don't want people to report murders because they have outstanding parking tickets.
Throwing any old DNA that comes into your hands into a huge database, with no prior expectation that the person whose DNA your searching is involved in a specific crime you're looking to compare them to but just to see if anything in there matches anything else in there, will turn up false positives with incredible regularity
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/09/dna_matching_..., https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_02_11.htm..., etc. DNA fishing expeditions are a terrible, terrible idea.
I remember being very troubled by a case from years ago about a cop who knocked on someone's door because neighbors had heard screaming. The resident and his girlfriend had been having loud sex, but agreed to let the cop verify no violence was taking place. During the visit the cop noticed some cannabis plants and the man was convicted of possession with intent to distribute.
My rule of thumb if I were rewriting the law would be that the inadvertently discovered crime must be as or more serious than that which is being reported/investigated. If a person is a victim of or an honest cooperator in the investigation of a serious crime, lesser offenses should be held in abeyance, although a warning of potential liability in future unrelated police contacts would be acceptable.
And anyway, what is a lesser offense? Drug trafficking are serious offenses if you go by maximum sentences.
My hope is that the cannabis would then be fruit of the poisoned tree and reaffirms my belief that you would never work with the cops to any degree.
They are subjected to the possibility of false positives or misleading true positives (it is their DNA but they didn't do the crime). These are low probability events but the population is fairly large and the number of suspect samples is also large and one images both will only grow in the future.
But I think the real problem is that it shows a certain lack of thoughtfulness when it comes to data use and governance. It doesn't seem like they considered themselves stewards of the most sensitive data possible from people who have suffered horribly. It's possible they weren't aware of the ethical quandary here or they didn't have the technological sophistication to develop a nuanced solution. Either case argues for more restriction in how the data are used while we as a society catch up to the implications of this evolving technology.
It needs to be placed in the category of evidence inadmissible in other crimes, because it's not there right now.
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There's a reason that so called sanctuary cities are a good idea and it's because of thoughts like this. people avoiding reporting crimes to the police because they are fearful of being deported is exactly how more crime is perpetrated without fear of retribution on marginalized communities. If you are fearful of being arrested for a bench warrant over some parking ticket you couldn't pay for or some other matter... you will not seek help from the police.
A bench warrant is a court order. We have this famous law that says that no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause. If the court has done its job correctly, you only issue a warrant when you have justified suspicion of a crime.
Pulling someone's DNA from a database absent any other evidence of their involvement in a crime has no such judicial review failsafe.
So, yeah, this is different because one is just justice at work and the other is a really terrible fourth amendment violation.
IANAL, but I would presume this would be an illegal search and seizure and/or violate the protection against self-incrimination.
My understanding is that the cops would need a warrant to get DNA, and they need probable cause to get a warrant.
That is different than someone who has a bench warrant identifying themselves to police.
It might lead to fewer women reporting rapes/getting rape kits done.
It’s an interesting federal case for how it can impact other states law and raises the awareness of other “rogue” DNA databases that could be misused.
"Boudin read the police department’s lab report, which said that “during a routine search of the SFPD Crime Lab Forensic Biology Unit Internal Quality Database, a match was detected and verified. Direct comparisons with the samples listed below were performed,” listing the 2016 rape kit sample.
The language suggested that the practice was routine and not an isolated incident, Boudin said, and the head of the crime lab confirmed to his office that such searches are done regularly." [1]
"The scope of how many victims or volunteers may have had their DNA queried by the department's crime lab and matched to unknown suspect DNA to solve a criminal case over the last seven years is unknown." ... "other California DAs told [Boudin] that their crime labs have also admitted to maintaining a database that includes DNA profiles from sexual assault survivors." [2]
So I don't think it's fair to claim "SFPD stopped the practice pretty much immediately" and "Everyone seems to have acknowledged that this was wrong" when clearly the SFPD and possibly other PDs have been doing this for years.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/14/san-francis... 2. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/02/23/san-fr...
California v. Marquez:
https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/2019...
> If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government.
> The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes—these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations.
Previously discussed on HN last month. [2]
1: https://www.wired.com/story/police-used-a-babys-dna-to-inves...
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32473403
This seems pretty disingenuous - yes you gave a blood sample (which has DNA in it) but no DNA genome sequencing is taking place - they simply check it for a series of disorders to make sure a baby is healthy and yes gather aggregate data on prevalence of disorders at the population level.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/lawyer-challenges-courts-right...
and
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/97840280/parents-upse...
You can fill out a form and demand they return the samples to you.
Even if you can trust the government today, there is no guarantee they can be trusted tomorrow. cf. the abortion stuff in America.
This does not undermine the fact this person was raped, and that is horrible, BUT justice will be carried out in that case. The justice system cannot overlook a reported crime when there is evidence to persecute because a criminal involved in that crime has been hurt.
In terms of DNA specifically, it’s kind of a weird power play to say “if you want us to convict the person who raped you, we’ll have to put your DNA into our database to make it easier to convict you in the future”.
Let's make another scenario: someone's home was burglarized, and the family who lives in the home submits DNA so the police/investigators can flag finger prints/DNA not left by the family. It turns out the father of the house raped and killed several women 30 years before. The DNA submitted by the family has effectively convicted their father by volunteering his DNA for crimes he committed 30 years ago. Would you be equally upset that this rapist and murderer has been caught?
One would expect that in such a situation only the DNA of the criminal who committed the rape would have been recorded. My issue with the situation here is that a rape kit should not have been a source of data.
That the DNA of a victim should not have been saved and added to a database. It should not been made available to the investigators.
Suppose that you have a horrific knife slasher, let's call her Sally. She runs around town and kills people with a knife.
However, let's suppose that she gets raped. Will it not be beneficial to society that she is willing to go to the police over the rape case?
It's like perfidy. As a general principle you don't use the fact that people want to do something good against them, even if they're bad. There may be deeper situations where this analysis doesn't hold, for example, if your enemies are providing people schooling or food, that may be an even stronger reason why it's important to attack them, but aside from things like that, this generally holds.
Deliberately using someone’s rape to collect DNA so they can be later prosecuted for minor crimes is absolutely unconscionable in my opinion.
Before you even consider the harm to those victims from not being able to seek justice, there's also a real risk that in doing so you may end up creating more victims by losing the ability to catch a proportion of rapists some of whom may reoffend.
Yes, but there's a conflict here, and it's penny-wise, pound-foolish to prioritize justice for the people who were burgled, when that would very obviously deter people from reporting far more serious crimes.
They are also victims, because their DNA was placed into the same system for the crime of having their house burglarized, which is almost as serious as the crime of having been raped.
You do not need to be a criminal, you only need to be afraid that DNA will be misused in the future.
Political dissident, activists and whistle-blowers come to mind.
There’s a general idea that evidence you provide about one crime can be used to prosecute you or someone else for another crime. Why is this a special exception to that rule?
If she called the cops about a rape and they recognized her as having outstanding warrants, should they let her go? What if the warrants are for murder?
What possible legal exception would apply here, but not apply across the system to a huge number of other cases?
For example, say the police routinely collected and stored DNA from burglary victims in the course of burglary investigations. If that makes people likely to report burglaries then it's possible the burglary she was arrested for might never have been reported in the first place. If fewer crimes are reported, fewer criminals are caught.
Even if you yourself are perfectly comfortable putting your DNA into a government database as a prerequisite for reporting a crime, you may be less safe overall if others do not feel similarly.
> She would never have been charged or prosecuted if she weren’t robbing people.
Innocent people are charged and prosecuted all the time. Otherwise there would be no need for a trial.
This was very controversial at the time. When my first child had her blood sample taken a few years later they assured me that it was used for screening purposes and for annonymous medical research only. I reminded the nurse of the Anna Lind case and she got extremly upset with me.
The police had made 2 arrests of persons they later had to release at that point, so I guess they didn't like to take any chanses with the third.
It should be said that the general opinion outside of medical reserarch was supportive of the police.
There's an important difference between physically being able to keep something secret, and legally being able to keep something secret.
For instance: today the government has the physical ability to break into my house and shoot me in the head for no reason at all, but they don't have the legal ability to do so. Likewise, they have the physical ability to illegally obtain evidence, but not the legal ability to use that evidence to convict someone at trial.
Isn't that exactly what they did to Breonna Taylor in Louisville? Haven't seen anyone arrested for that.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/us-justificati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...
Anyone deemed to be "part of the forces of an enemy" may be targeted.
e.g. how the Golden State killer was finally found, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo#Arrest_a...
Your DNA is fundamentally public information.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-c...
We aren't there yet. That's still an important fact, when determining the legality of how DNA is used.
However, inefficient distribution of data and legalities of its use have deeply slowed widespread use.
The future we should fear is one with an efficient and interconnected government, capable of pulling a DNA match out of a database five government agencies removed, on the side of the highway…
Mix this with some dystopian social credit system where you get points for reporting the littlest offense to big brother, and some more spying tools to spy on our own people and we literally get thought police. Soon it'll be 1984 IRL.
I don't plan on being criminal, but what's legal today could be criminal tomorrow, or what's legal in one city might not be in another, etc. I don't think we're there yet, but the future could turn all shades of bad if we don't get upset over privacy violations now.
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