The real nightmare is that we might be right around the corner from DNA being writable to the extent that you could make mock DNA to plant at a crime-scene/evidence-locker, and there might be a couple awkward decades where the courts believe the FBI when they claim to have found DNA matches (just like that time they systematically pretended they could identify hairs, and convicted people of murder based on hairs that were literally from dogs in some cases). We'll catch on eventually if they try it, but it would suck for those of us convicted on falsified evidence. I wouldn't be so paranoid about that possibility if they hadn't lied about the dog hairs for decades.
Why bother when it's trivial to copy existing DNA? The evildoer just needs to get a tiny sample from someone who'd made a decent frame.
Sure, then you've got the problem of how to create a DNA-bearing artifact that'll fool forensics -- a spilled puddle of pure chromosomes would be weird -- but that'd be true in either case.
0: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1998-05-05-980505...
They may be able to pinpoint a location - the barber where all the DNA matches go to have a haircut, and a time - soon after all those with majority DNA in the pile of hair went to the Barber's. Then they can analyse who was in the area around the time and find a person involved.
Can you point to current DNA tech which doesn't destroy the sample while processing it?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/hair-dna-murder.h...
Go to two or three libraries in different corners of town, get what you want from the keyboards, and you should have quite the collection of DNA.
The word for this type of accumulation of mixed biological material, crumbs, dandruff, eyelashes, and such is "kroonch".
It's like snatching handbags vs online credit card fraud - the reach of criminals to victims got a lot bigger.
$150 for 10 groups: Edvotek 330 Amplification of DNA by PCR, For 10 Lab Groups https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004W7ZAYI
Bad part about that - even today - is that we know for a fact that what people remember/recall isn't necessarily what actually occurred. Also, as time goes on, those recollections can become more unreliable.
We know that the mind confabulates, making things up to fill in gaps - both at the time something occurs, and after the fact to "fill in the story".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183265/
https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/starklab/false-memory-eyewitne...
Unfortunately, the legal system has been slow in acknowledging this - on top of so many other things found and/or known to be false or bias - two big ones are so-called "lie detector" systems, and "blood spatter analysis".
Fortunately, lie detector "evidence" is generally not admissible in the United States (at least I think for criminal cases?) - but blood spatter analysis is still considered to be a "real science", when it may be anything but:
https://features.propublica.org/blood-spatter/blood-spatter-...
We had this brief period of history where good records of actual events were cheap to capture and expensive/impossible to fake (governments have been airbrushing photos for most of this period, but videos seem to have been tougher). We're at the end of that now, but the public hasn't quite caught on. I think it'll take at least one high profile case getting overturned before society at large stops believing in videos. Then we're essentially back to trusting people at their word/digital-signature, and we'll probably have "trusted" security camera companies that install tamper-proof cameras at multiple angles that cryptographically sign videos while streaming them to remote servers. Before that, and probably after it as well, some of us will rot behind bars based on state-forged evidence.
A partial or even complete match is not enough to convict anyone.
From what I know about CRISPR, and forensic DNA testing, it should be extremely difficult or impossible to, for example, change your "genetic fingerprint" as it is called.
If I remember correctly, those methods primarily use repetitive patterns, which should be hard to modify with CRISPR. And you'd need to modify hundreds of them, and in billions of cells of your body (even if you try to only get white blood cells and their progenitors).
I don't subscribe to DNA information being a secret. It tends to be "secret" in the sense that it is non-trivial to obtain. But you leave behind a trail of DNA everywhere. Ultimately, it cannot be held secret.
Therefor it is more important to regulate the use of such information, for example to prevent discrimination.
I wouldn't be so sure. Evidence observed during the execution of a warrant against the incorrect property is still valid and admissable, for example. Not saying this kind of thing applies in this specific case but thought the idea worth mentioning.
Slight correction here.
The FPT doctrine makes it so most[0] evidence obtained illegally cannot be admitted. It doesn't work in reverse, it does not imply that all inadmissible evidence is illegal.
For example, the first half of many investigations is full of inadmissible hearsay, before you narrow in on what happened and find the people who actually saw something and can testify. There's nothing wrong with talking to people to figure out who knows things, and see how stories changed when they were told to different people, so you can more fully understand what happened.
How this applies to your main question --
It might be very difficult to use a DNA database company results in a US court because you might have to involve a ton of witnesses to vouch for every part of the process. Suppose the defense asked, "But how do we know the post office didn't mix up different samples that day!?" You would be forced to either (a) have the USPS provide testimony establishing a full chain of custody, or (b) just test the defendant now to verify the match. It will always be easier to do (b), so I'd guess[1] everyone just skips to that step.
[0] Even FPT has exceptions...
[1] Maybe there are other procedural ways to approach this that are more common now, I haven't been involved in cases like these or researched it specifically, my criminal procedure knowledge is getting really dated so I might be wrong here.
> Slight correction here.
> The FPT doctrine makes it so most[0] evidence obtained illegally cannot be admitted. It doesn't work in reverse, it does not imply that all inadmissible evidence is illegal.
> For example, the first half of many investigations is full of inadmissible hearsay, before you narrow in on what happened and find the people who actually saw something and can testify. There's nothing wrong with talking to people to figure out who knows things, and see how stories changed when they were told to different people, so you can more fully understand what happened.
> How this applies to your main question --
> It might be very difficult to use a DNA database company results in a US court because you might have to involve a ton of witnesses to vouch for every part of the process. Suppose the defense asked, "But how do we know the post office didn't mix up different samples that day!?" You would be forced to either (a) have the USPS provide testimony establishing a full chain of custody, or (b) just test the defendant now to verify the match. It will always be easier to do (b), so I'd guess[1] everyone just skips to that step.
I never thought of this but it would be surprising if the USPS _didn't_ maintain some sort of chain of custody of mail items, at least at the bag level or whatever unit they use.
Probably so. And in civil contract law we almost presume the USPS works more or less like a black box and always functions correctly. I mean, more specifically here, you might not have to question the USPS but might have to question the lab techs, or some company representative, and open up debates about what safeguards they use to prevent samples from getting mixed up. Lots of openings you could avoid by just testing on site, so that will always be easier. You generally just do whatever you can to remove extraneous witnesses to simplify your argument.
The subtle trick with US criminal law is that it is still a "testimonial" system. You have to have someone vouch for every piece of evidence. If you take photos of the crime scene you technically have to ask someone questions like, "do these represent the scene of the crime?" ("How would you even know? What makes you an expert on what this place looks like?") Some of this stuff can get waived but in contentious cases you dot your is and cross your ts.
Physical evidence is a bit like a hacked on extension of an old oral only court system. You originally just asked a bunch of villagers what happened and hoped they were sufficiently scared of swearing oaths to not lie.
Maybe something like logistics (i.e., bag went out for delivery on truck FOO) but I doubt they track everyone that has had access to it.
I'm a privacy guy, but the science really is there to use DNA to narrow a list of suspects. You can't say the same for much of forensic science, or for that matter mass surveillance technologies.
https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/
The take-away is that shed skin cells containing DNA can migrate and a DNA match from that type of evidence shouldn't be relied on as proof of anything.
To my view, the combination of DNA transference, advancing DNA collection / analysis techniques, the mere existence of DNA databases, and familial searches are absolutely terrifying.
I do question if society is better off catching a few more criminals through these databases and familial matching vs the potential for innocents to be imprisoned based on nothing more than a DNA match against skin cells.
I'm also not too fond of the idea of my relatives' DNA being used to draw suspicion to another relative just because someone's DNA wound up in a database. To me it's just another one of those things (ALPRs, all the compilations of "it's just metadata") that erode our privacy and give the state a great deal of power for relatively little benefit to the people.
All crimes don't get solved, all criminals don't get caught, and in a society where everyone's a law-breaker because there are too many laws to know them all and so many of them are dumb, that's how things should be.
You investigate someone, hoping to find some law they might have broken.
This is trying to find out who committed an already known serious crime. That's just "police work", in my view.
But once such a suspect is lined up the search is over and all that will happen is to look for confirmation rather than exculpation.
There is nothing special about DNA evidence that makes it worse or better in that regard.
Get a warrant before searching for each persons DNA, not search each persons DNA then get a warrant
Signed, not a lawyer.
The cold cases broken open are the ones that are left after all the other methods have already been exhausted. Sure, some of those might have remained unsolved if not for this method. But that does nothing to show the method by itself works better than all the other police work, for that to be concluded you'd have to compare with all the cases that were solved with ordinary police work and then to conclude that if all of them were first attempted to be solved with this method that the total outcome would be an improvement.
That seems unlikely. So for a very small fraction of extra cases solved a very large change in evidence gathering methods and dragnet style fishing for suspects does not seem to be worth it to me.
More than one of those suckers just might not have an alibi.
[1] (1 - 1e-6) ^ 700,000 = 49.6 % chance of no false positive match
https://www.quora.com/Are-engineers-usually-excused-from-jur...
These genetic databases are tools used for investigation to identify suspects. Once the suspect is identified, the investigators still have to build a case against them, including obtaining their DNA directly for testing against the crime scene DNA. Since all the cases I've read about the police got the suspect's DNA samples from the garbage, it doesn't seem like the genetic research itself is even enough to get a warrant for the suspect's DNA.
The funny thing is that although I have often heard about the police finding an exact DNA match with someone who was provably not at the crime scene, I've never heard about anyone doing a different DNA test afterwards to investigate what happened: did a fragment of skin get carried in the wind from one city to another, did samples get mixed up in a laboratory, or was the match a false one, akin to a hash collision?
God forbid any of them are minorities and the victim a white person, you're 95% on the road to a conviction.
Maybe the way to solve this issue is for law enforcement to be required to mail a letter to everyone who is in the database that they are a suspect in whatever crime being investigated each time law enforcement executed or delegates the execution of a search query. I mean that is how search works: you search everything or you compute hash functions on everything to avoid searching everything, but you’ve effectively tested whether or not everyone in the database is the suspect.
On a slightly different topic, how well are these DNA databases secured and maintained? A person’s DNA might not change, but the corresponding entry in the DNA database is subject to theft, manipulation, and data corruption. What’s stopping the presumption of innocence until proven guilty becoming the presumption of innocence until the DNA database reports a match? Arguably, people should treat DNA databases with the same level of suspicion and concern as some view electronic voting: absolutely vulnerable and absolutely abusable until repeatedly proven to be not sufficiently many times.