Police Are Getting DNA Data From People Who Think They Opted Out
I'm getting ready to go to the IAI Conference next week, so here's a fascinating article by the redoubtable Jordan Smith from The Intercept
Forensic genetic genealogists skirted GEDmatch privacy rules by searching users who explicitly opted out of sharing DNA with law enforcement.
Jordan Smith at The Intercept goes deep into the murky newness of ethics, investigative genetic genealogy, and “noble cause” bias. A lot of people were asked to comment and, well, not many did. Interesting.
Some excerpts follow.
…several high-profile genetic genealogists who exploited a loophole in a commercial database called GEDmatch, allowing them to search the DNA of individuals who explicitly opted out of sharing their genetic information with police.
The loophole, which a source demonstrated for The Intercept, allows genealogists working with police to manipulate search fields within a DNA comparison tool to trick the system into showing opted-out profiles. In records of communications reviewed by The Intercept, Moore and two other forensic genetic genealogists discussed the loophole and how to trigger it. In a separate communication, one of the genealogists described hiding the fact that her organization had made an identification using an opted-out profile.
The communications are a disturbing example of how genetic genealogists and their law enforcement partners, in their zeal to close criminal cases, skirt privacy rules put in place by DNA database companies to protect their customers. How common these practices are remains unknown, in part because police and prosecutors have fought to keep details of genetic investigations from being turned over to criminal defendants. As commercial DNA databases grow, and the use of forensic genetic genealogy as a crime-fighting tool expands, experts say the genetic privacy of millions of Americans is in jeopardy.
Law enforcement officers have used genetic genealogy to solve crimes that aren’t eligible for genetic investigation per company terms of service and Justice Department guidelines, which say the practice should be reserved for violent crimes like rape and murder only when all other “reasonable” avenues of investigation have failed.
Just how prevalent these practices are may never fully be known, in part because police and prosecutors regularly seek to shield genetic investigations from being vetted in court. They argue that what they obtain from forensic genetic genealogy is merely a tip, like information provided by an informant, and is exempt from disclosure to criminal defendants.
…forensic genetic genealogy is a giant fishing expedition that fails the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment: that law enforcement searches be targeted and based on individualized suspicion. Finding a match to crime scene DNA by searching through millions of genetic profiles is the opposite of targeted.
“All of a sudden, we have a national DNA database and we didn’t ever have any kind of debate about whether we wanted that in our society.” A national database in “private hands…”