I don't mean to be dismissive, but engineers tend to simplify these problems, as if the legal system is a perfect justice-dispensing black box. But that's not how it works. This is a question of ethics and moral weights. This is why we have things like habeas corpus, chain of custody, rules about juries and evidence, and all kinds of things.

DNA acquisition is rife with privacy concerns. The chance that some criminals might elude capture is one of the implications of why, for example, we don't implant everyone with a tracking chip, or require people to report their whereabouts to the government. If everyone had a tracking chip, no one could commit crimes any more, right?

This is a reductio argument, but it shows why what might seem like "sure-shot" strategies (versions of which, in some cases, have been implemented in authoritarian governments) were definitely not "net wins" for society.

> DNA acquisition is rife with privacy concerns

Such as?

You know, collecting the DNA of everyone and being able to use it to trace them.

Trace them how?

Supposed you lived in Nazi germany during Kristallnacht and someone could just say "Hallo Siri, wo sind die Nicht-Arier?"

I urge you to spend time reading the Wikipedia page of the golden state killer. Put yourself in the victims’ shoes. Imagine someone waking you in the middle of the night with a floodlight, shoving a gun in your face, screaming at you to lay on the floor while they put dishes on your back, saying “If I hear these fall, I’ll kill everyone.” Then he takes your loved one to the livingroom and mercilessly rapes her for hours.

The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA.

How, then, is it ethical to look someone in the eye and say “Your lover was murdered, and we could find who did it, but we won’t”?

This justification could have literally come from the mouth of a Simpsons parody of a republican talk show host[1]. By that logic, what can't we justify by imagining the worst criminals in history and how they could have been stopped with a surveillance state?

[1] https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E05/743793

You are using an argument style of the sort “there is a good reason to do this, and a bad thing that will happen if we don’t do this.” It’s flaw is that it ignores the bigger picture and competing interests, where we find there are other competing good and bad things to think about.

If you imagine a world where crime is truly impossible, it is a world where humans are utterly incapable of disobeying the government under any desperate or impassioned circumstance

I’ll ignore the “won’t someone think of the children” argument, and highlight the research into how frequently DNA evidence is misused, and how poor juries are at understanding both DNA science and probability/stats.

The vast majority of murders that we are in fact actually pretty poor at preventing or solving are the result of people killing people they know or criminals killing one another.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

We only solve less than 2/3 of murders that are known to be murders which individually ought to be vastly easier than random murders.

It is hard to quantify how many of the missing are victims estimates range from 180 to 1800 annual deaths. This means its between half as many as drown in their bathtub and 5 times as many in the worst case.

All this out of a population of aprox 330M people 600k people who will for example die of cancer for context.

It is terrible that serial murderers exist but we cannot and should not rearrange all of our priorities and ignore the rights of the hundreds of millions in order to protect the few.

This perspective is understandable, but requires a lot more reading before you stick to it. There's a lot of bad bad history based on this viewpoint.

This is a tale as old as time, seeing something that can, in morally-perfect hands, be used for good and saying "why not!?" while ignoring the human capacity (inevitability?) to use it ignorantly or outright maliciously and cause harm that outweighs the potential good.

If it makes you sleep better, these crimes happened 50 ago, it wouldn't be possible to repeat today with the prevalence of technology (phone tracing, fingerprints, cameras, fingerprints, etc...). The perpetrator would be caught fairly quickly.

> The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA.

The atrocities committed by authoritarian governments by far exceed the emotional force of your argument. From the Holocaust, to the Great Leap Forward, to the Holodomor. We're talking so much suffering that you can't even comprehend it (think of it like a moral neutron star). Millions murdered, raped, and tortured over the course of decades. Given what history has taught us so far, the ethical downsides of authoritarian carte blanche by far exceeds the downsides of erring on the side of protecting individual rights.

DNA testing revealed that I am 47% Jewish, so yes, the holocaust argument is particularly relevant. I have weighed these concerns. But you’re vaguely gesturing towards atrocities and saying “There are good reasons, right there!” And I just don’t see them.

Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people? Because certain unnamed countries seem to already be doing that, and they are either already using DNA or don’t need it.

The argument here seems to be “if we let the US do this, there is a very real risk of authoritarian overreach.” Sure, I see that. I just don’t buy it. What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing?

Even if the world mandated DNA testing tomorrow for the entire population, we would largely be in the same position we’re already in, thanks to the internet and smartphones.

I realize this is an unpopular stance. But is it mistaken?

> Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people?

Imagine a genetic marker predisposes someone towards crime X. Now imagine that in the hands of law enforcement.

If X happens one of the first things they'll do is round up everyone with genes for X and try to place them at the scene of the crime.

The problem with that is that it means nothing. Just because a person is more likely to do X does not mean they've done X.

How do we know that will happen? Because it already happens with DNA evidence today. It weighs far more heavily in cases than it should. It may prove that you were there, but it doesn't show what you did. And that's a problem. Juries aren't generally good at realizing what DNA does and does not show.

You might think "Well, the defense should do a better job at debunking the DNA evidence". Yeah, they should. However, it's a long uphill battle to educate someone. Most people still think lie detectors and handwriting analysis actually work. Hell, many people believe that "essential oils" have mystical healing properties. You want to walk those people through the long process of "correlation is not causation"? Good luck. All the prosecutor has to do is get a DNA analysis finished which proves the presence and a cop to say "Oh, he was really evasive when I arrested him".

The state of our justice system is perfectly summed up by this tweet.

"I actually wore a bandana covering my face, nose down, to go to the bank today. Whole time I'm thinking, 'I've convicted people on less evidence than this ...'", Andy McCarthy [0]

It takes staggering little evidence to convict someone of a crime and the general public sees DNA evidence (due to shows like CSI) as absolute proof of guilt.

This may not be "murder of millions" but it certainly wouldn't be a place I'd want to live. I'd rather not be arrested by a lazy cop because I happened to go to the bank the same day it was robbed.

[0] https://twitter.com/andrewcmccarthy/status/12581541951040184...

I very purposefully avoid hypotheticals which is why I didn't reply to @sillysaurusx (because you're just debating fantasy), but this is a good post and seems entirely plausible within the next century.

PS: I really wish people would stop mass downvoting @sillysaurusx. This is a pretty good discussion.

(It's okay! Karma shmarma -- I enjoyed talking with you too. Lots of people made some excellent points.)

Same here. I’m not agreeing with all @sillysaurusx is saying but I’m learning from the exchange and don’t want it discouraged.

> What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing?

Nobody can say, because the conditions that would lead to abuse would manifest themselves in the future. The only thing we do know for sure is that there is no form of government that is immune to potential abuses of power. They have all had abuses in the past, and we can be confident that abuses of power will happen again.

My issue is largely the assumption that presence of DNA == person who committed the crime.

We leave DNA all over the place. If I drop some hair at the scene of a crime 12 hours before it was committed, I could become the innocent sole suspect of something heinous.

> DNA testing revealed that I am 47% Jewish

That's not what DNA tests do. They do not tell you whether you are factually X% of A and Y% of B, as they do not have the data to make such claims and they do not have DNA of ones' ancestors except through inference.

What they do tell you is that, based on current day large-scale survey data which they use to identify markers, you share certain markers with certain contemporary groups. Especially the percentages they give you should take with a grain of salt as they are approximations to a ground truth (one which nobody fully knows).

Interesting. The context is here: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1286481753675374594

I didn't realize there might be an error term. But, fwiw, my father's brother mentioned almost in passing to my wife about my Jewish ancestry. Apparently one of my parents were the first to marry outside of the faith in a very, very long time. Getting back a 47% match seems to be experimental proof of this, which I was very surprised was possible.

So perhaps the error is around ~3%? I wonder what it might be...

We know the Nazis used German census data to identify Jews to round up. They also had many pseudo-scientific tests such as the size of a nose, to help them identify the Untermenschen in the general population. The next regime that pushes a superman theory will be able to base their selection criteria on DNA testing as soon as the perfect Nordic / Aryan genes are determined. Or pseudo determined. That's how you get from DNA testing to millions being killed or enslaved.

Let us imagine some scenarios. There are constant low level crimes that are always going on. Perhaps the best example is drug usage an ever present issue. Whereas different groups commit such "crimes" enforcement is anything but even. Also those so caught often fall prey to factors that make it harder for them to get a job or a home and thus are more likely to end up re-offending. One can imagine "proving" that certain genetics that just happen to be correlated with African heritage correlate with offending when it actually correlates with being more likely to be caught and then racism laundered by bad science and stats justifies the extra scrutiny that results in additional scrutiny that results in greater prosecution and greater persecution.

How about increasingly good tech makes smaller and smaller amounts of DNA testable providing a genetic trail that proves not your participation in the crime but merely your presence at some point where it happened or even in areas where people you may have touched carried it to. With nearly a third of murders unsolved it would be awfully convenient to pin some of those on people that just happened to pass nearby especially if the person is a minority or someone with a record. The fact that most cases in America are conducted by threatening parties with penalties many times worse than they would experience and extracting pleas makes this substantially easier especially when you wont necessarily get great representation if you are poor. Take this plea for 20 years with parole possible after 10 years or we will fight to have you yourself murdered for a murder you didn't commit!

Another example derive increasingly good data on people's likely health outcomes as health care costs skyrocket due to being designed to extract value and not to promote health. First wait until it is in danger of destroying an increasing toll of lives not saved due to lack of funds then instead of fixing ANY of the systemic flaws promote the the idea that your insurance/care is only becoming so expensive that you can hardly afford it because you are carrying people who aren't being responsible by paying for their own care extra points if you tie this to race, nationality, or best yet both.

Completely ignore the fact that with sufficient foreknowledge costs are mostly predictable and the entire purpose of a cost pool is to provide a single predictable cost financed by transferring funds from the those who are not needy to those who are while allowing the person running the pool to earn interest in the interim and stick to the narrative that the people with predictable costs this year aren't paying their share and fight for the ability to offer insurance indexed to their increasingly predictable costs.

If you do a good enough job at this you can extract increasing rents for years while killing more people than Hitler before you manage to collapse health care as you know it and eventually the surrounding society as the only people that can afford healthcare will increasingly be those who don't need it or those experiencing a truly difficult to foresee misadventure.

When the serfs realize how badly they have it you can graduate from Hitler level of excess mortality to great leap forward levels in the ensuing violence and famine.

Edit: The cheap shot is of course people can use a pre existing database to decide whom to target for murder.

Because a crime scene might also have the DNA of innocent people.

Because public DNA information could be a source of prejudice mis-used by government, law enforcement, health services, employers, even family, friends, and potential spouses.

Because in all likelihood it would become another way to generate targeted advertising.

The number of killers in the world is significantly dwarfed by all of the people who aren't killers. And even then, among all of the people who have ever killed someone, the number who were not caught but would have been caught if the police only had access to everyone's DNA is so vamishingly small, that there is no reason to take this seriously.

Not to mention that your argument falls apart once you realize that we have no real idea how powerful DNA evidence is, especially when found in small quantities. Is it possible that, if I walk daily by a high-rise that I have never entered, my DNA could be found in a room inside that building (e.g. because a fallen hair or my sneezing got on the clothes/shoes of someone passing by)? Likely, yes.

In fact, I would bet that trying to match all of the DNA at all of the crime scenes with all of the people in America would be much more likely to increase the number of false convictions than to help bring more murderers to justice.

Since we're actively in the midst of a national reckoning with police overreach (at a minimum), while people are getting arrested for constitutionally protected speech largely based on their political alignment, I think the slippery slope argument is honestly quite valid here. It's scary to me that a relative's choice to dig into their family tree will law enforcement to significantly narrow the search space for someone they don't like and happen to have a strand of hair from.

Chief Medical Officer of Intel talking about what hacks look like on people's genetic information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

Leave someone else's dna at a crime you've framed someone, how did you get that dna, well you bought it from some unscrupulous lab. Or how about insurance companies start purchasing this data, oh but thats illegal so lets just say we don't but actually really do and totally pervert the idea of insurance. Golden state killer might stick out in your mind as a horrible evil but its nothing against the trillions of cuts by making this data widely available for purchase.

> Can someone help me understand some concrete scenarios where DNA testing is clearly a bad thing?

It may be a good thing for society, but it may be bad for me.

Suppose that in the process of investigating all 2,000 possibilities, the detective in question was lazy, and figured that you know, #56 fits the bill if we kind of squint.

#56 would then have a pretty nasty legal surprise to deal with, where they had to come up with an alibi for "Where were you on the night of November 23rd, 1986?" Best of luck defending yourself against that!

If I had more faith in our police system, this wouldn't be a concern. I don't, though. Police have a history of routinely misused partially-matching DNA/fingerprints/police line mugshots, to either convict, or cause serious problems for people who later turned out to be innocent.

So, I'll have a strong pass on having my DNA entered into a database. There is no personal upshot for me, and only downside, if some idiot with a badge, a gun, and an incredibly poor grasp of statistics stumbles upon me.

Question: do the hacker/home-DNA labs allow for the ability to take someone's DNA, amplify or recreate it, then allow you to smear it on a jacket or a dead person's cheek, thereby framing an innocent person?

They would need to purify the DNA (remove all other amino acids and membrane proteins etc.) to amplify it and remove any traces of chemicals used for the amplification.

But A) naked DNA will be exposed to the elements/chemicals which could cause damage/denaturation, B) it would look really odd to find batches of pure DNA without any hairs/cells/other proteins.

Maybe some techniques exist to replicate more believable tissue? Honestly not sure as I'm not too well versed on lab-techniques other than sequencing.

Methylation analysis could tell them apart, since DNA from PCR isn't methylated. But most forensic labs wouldn't do this, and I think it would be very possible to frame someone in this way.

DNA is often not enough though. We also need a camera at home (maybe not in the bathroom though) and a body camera that can record us and others, to help police solve crimes. no?

Funny I came to the exact opposite opinion from that.

It really looks like something useful, until it will be misused. It is not a matter of if, but of when. So, better to not have this at all, even if the price to pay is if some cases will go unsolved.

You must think about the worse case and consider the consequences. Think about a reelect Trump feeling empowered using such a thing, don't know, to target minorities with his white supremacist ideals. If this is too much for you, consider China with Uighurs instead.

Make this 100x worse considering this is a private enterprise.

The authoritarian Left is just as much a concern as Trump. Consider China with the... Wait, you already said China.