> “Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”
[0] http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-...
https://jacquesmattheij.com/your-genetic-information-is-not-...
This problem will get larger and larger.
Genetic testing reveals your father's line has the genes for severe alcoholism. You are now a "warm client" for advertisers.
And don't underestimate the social influence of targeted facebook/twitter ads.
"Detectives persuaded a magistrate judge to sign a search warrant ordering Usry to provide his DNA for comparison"
"His DNA, Hoffman wrote, did not match the semen from the scene of Dodge’s murder."
Everybody has a duty to cooperate with litigation. Even third party witnesses who are not "on trial" can be compelled to take testify about what they saw or heard.
[The judiciary] can force you to provide evidence.
Everybody has a duty to cooperate with litigation.
I agree that privacy is more important than security but I think you are going a little too far with this comment. Sure, the police should be careful with this evidence and it doesn't prove any wrongdoing but I don't see how it's unreasonable for police to ask who searched for a specific term at a specific time in a specific place.
Note that they do not even know for sure that the suspect googled the name of the victim, they are assuming that.
And that in a case where the fraud failed, so this is not even a crime that succeeded. I think this lowers the bar for dragnet style after-the-fact fishing expeditions to the point where you might as well hand over your search history in real time just in case you commit a crime at some point in the future.
I'm sure some LE would see that as the holy grail, but me, I prefer they actually do their digging with someone specific in mind rather than to declare us all suspects to a crime simply because we happen to live in a certain city and google a certain name.
That would make it worse not better.
> If this information exists it may help the police find the scammer and they don't seem to be overreaching to me.
Yes, that's clear. But I'd rather they found the scammer first and then petitioned google or whoever they feel might have relevant information with a targeted request. Instead they now will use this information to generate a suspect which is the wrong way around.
Having said that I am concerned with the alarmist tone this article takes and the clickbait nature of the headline. The police are not doing what the article makes it sound like they are doing. This kind of thing undermines the fair criticism of police evidence collection and a productive conversation about privacy.
And then just add those people to a list of people who should be watched closely at transportation centers.
And then maybe make them wear a little orange circle on their jackets so they are easier to identify.
And then maybe put them all in a concentrated containment area so the rest of us were safe from all the would-be terrorists?
Or maybe at that point filter it down to just the orange-circles who happen to be from germany.
Everyone who searched for "Douglas". Please. There's nothing reasonable about that.
Citation?
The bridge is one of very few points where you can cross from the Southern part of the Netherlands into the Northern part ( https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.6106721,5.6448216,16z?hl=en ), and has cameras on it making it an ideal choke point for ~30% of the North-South traffic in NL.
The burglaries were all in Friesland, quite a bit further North and the thieves iirc came from Amsterdam all the way to the North to hit wealthy looking solitary houses (of which there are quite a few in the North and almost none near Amsterdam where the population density is a lot higher).
So I can totally see why the police figured that this would work and it did.
Anyway, I can't readily find a citation but I recall the case clearly because there was a lot of uproar here that the thieves were set free when it was 100% clear that they were guilty based on how they were discovered.
But all my queries regarding 'ketelbrug, vrijspraak, inbrekers' do not return anything useful.
So why does the intent of the investigator, to confirm versus discover, matter? If evidence is highly probative, and doesn't infringe on anyone's property rights, what's wrong with it? There's no right not to have the government find out you did something wrong...
The suspicion is something what I could do wholly without.
Just use whatever dragnet method you already have in place and phone it in. Subpoena google for all searches done in all cities and go round up the folks whose searches match the names of the victims.
I'm sure your going to get a fantastic conviction rate.
A society like that already existed: It was called East Germany and petty crime there was nearly non-existent. What crime there was was mostly corruption and went unpunished (who will watch the watchers).
Former East Germans seem to prefer the society they have right now.
Well you could argue then that they should be allowed to look at everything because if they do they could discover any number of crimes by looking at all communications.
Here's the thing. Lets' say hypothetically there is a crime committed at a high school. Are people generally ok with the police opening every single school locker to see who is a potential suspect for that one crime?
And what if while doing so they discover evidence of another crime? Is that ok and usable? If it is then we get to a point where it's conceivable that the police will then use any reason to say there is a crime to which they need to open school lockers knowing that they will almost certainly find evidence of some crime in one of them.
Yes, yes, and yes. Police can open any (or all) locker(s) they want for any purpose, though generally they ask for permission from the school administration first, and they can and do use any evidence discovered. Pick your favorite BS legal handwaving, I think it's usually "the lockers belong to the school, and by its good grace allows[/forces] the students to use them"
Did you think this one through? Law is a lagging indicator of what society thinks is acceptable. That works in both directions: sometimes things are legal that shouldn't be, but also things are illegal that should be. Beware a lopsided bias, or you get a ratchet to a totalitarian society.
Oh, come on. The police are looking for a list of persons of interest to start with.
If someone disappears, their spouse gets put on the list of persons of interest. So do the last people seen with them. For each one, the police see if there is a case to be made, or if they know anything that could help, and then move on.
Because the natural consequence of this "experiment" is to cast all subjects in doubt, you must have a methodology that actually selects for the criminal instead of just correlating really strongly. It's the same problem as the social sciences. Except this one comes with legal consequences.
Luckily, people are convicted when a judge or jury is convinced that the evidence points at them being guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Not when an investigator feels clever.
So, we have a system where an investigator can indeed "feel clever," produce a defendant based on sketchy evidence, who then pleads out for any number of reasons. Neither judge nor jury ever hears what the evidence is in these cases. Ta da: the immaculate conviction.
1. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/26/plea-bargainin...
That's because there is a relationship and historically the occasional spouse has been implicated in the murder of their other half.
> So do the last people seen with them.
Proximity means they might be witnesses, not immediately suspects.
> For each one, the police see if there is a case to be made, or if they known anything that could help, and then move on.
Yes. But they don't place everybody that was in a 10 mile radius around the crime scene on their list of suspects because they spoke the name of the victim out loud in the three weeks preceding the crime. And that's roughly the level this is at.
There is a relationship here too, although it is not exactly a marital relationship.
Then maybe they should ask Google "of this list of people, did any of them search for this person?". Not "give us the list of the entire town's search history, we'll narrow it down to a few people and then totally just throw the rest of this very fascinating data out, pinky-swear".
>Case closed, crime solved, right?
No. Not by a long shot.
Your analysis omits the fact that the standard for investigating a person is different from the standard for convicting a person.
The remainder of your reasoning -- to borrow a turn-of-phrase from legal theory -- is fruit of the poisoned tree.
So say they get 1 name, and that name happens to be you. I'm sure you had a perfectly good reason to google that name, no matter how obscure it was, and it happens to be a day and a bit before the money was taken (which, btw according to TFA it wasn't).
No matter how you spin it, you will look suspicious. Maybe you'll even admit to doing it when you didn't, maybe you'll be offered a plea if you confess.
Case closed, crime solved, right?
Or rather not, because it is you and you'd never do such a thing?
A similar thing happened here in NL. A number of burglaries in a region that was only accessible via a single bridge, and that bridge had a camera on it.
Correlate the license plates crossing the bridge with the nights of the burglaries and only one car was left.
So that had to be the person that did it. Which, in fact it was! Still, the judge threw out the evidence because it was gathered without specific intent to confirm, not discover that such a person existed, and in theory anybody that crossed that bridge suddenly became a suspect in the case until they could be ruled out.
So +1 for clever thinking, -100 for botching a case where there might have been a legitimate way of obtaining this information.
Total surveillance means very little crime, but as a society we should push back against that because it also means that we are enabling an element of government that already has a lot of power over our lives.
It's worth the occasional $28K loss (presumably to insurance companies) in order to safeguard the rights of the rest of us.
Oh, and that's besides the potential for a Joe Job, where you would go to someone else's computer that you access in a coffee shop or some other place where you can get momentary access to someone's computer (co worker, whatever) and then google the name of the person you intend to hit causing them loss of their job and potentially much more.
This is just wrong, on many levels.