Data From Open-Source Ancestry Site Leads to More Arrests (fastcompany.com) 126
schwit1 tipped us off to new arrests made with genealogical evidence -- and growing interest in open source genealogy databases. Fast Company reports:
In the last week, police have arrested two suspects in unrelated cold cases thanks to data gleaned from open-source ancestry site GEDMatch, reports the New York Times. That's the same open-source ancestry site that was used to track down the alleged Golden State Killer earlier this year. One of the arrests this week was of a 66-year-old nurse who is suspected of killing a 12-year-old girl in 1986. The other arrest is of a 49-year-old DJ who strangled a schoolteacher in 1992. Thanks to data from GEDMatch, Texas law enforcement also thinks that a man who was executed in 1999 for killing a 9-year-old girl was now also behind the murder of a 40-year-old realtor in 1981.
It all reminds me of that scene in "The Circle" where they demo technology that finds "a randomly-selected fugitive from justice -- a proven menace to our global community" -- within 20 minutes.
Last month DNA-based investigations also led to the arrest of the suspected murderer of two vacationers in 1987, and helped identify a suicide cold case from 2001.
Now an Ohio newspaper reports: Emboldened by that breakthrough, a number of private investigators are spearheading a call for amateur genealogists to help solve other cold cases by contributing their own genetic information to the same public database. They say a larger array of genetic information would widen the pool to find criminals who have eluded capture. The idea is to get people to transfer profiles compiled by commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe onto the smaller, public open-source database created in 2010, called GEDmatch. The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not.
But the push is running up against privacy concerns.
It all reminds me of that scene in "The Circle" where they demo technology that finds "a randomly-selected fugitive from justice -- a proven menace to our global community" -- within 20 minutes.
Last month DNA-based investigations also led to the arrest of the suspected murderer of two vacationers in 1987, and helped identify a suicide cold case from 2001.
Now an Ohio newspaper reports: Emboldened by that breakthrough, a number of private investigators are spearheading a call for amateur genealogists to help solve other cold cases by contributing their own genetic information to the same public database. They say a larger array of genetic information would widen the pool to find criminals who have eluded capture. The idea is to get people to transfer profiles compiled by commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe onto the smaller, public open-source database created in 2010, called GEDmatch. The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not.
But the push is running up against privacy concerns.
Beware Leaky DNA (Score:5, Interesting)
The threat of excess reliance on DNA evidence, remains the same, it can always be obtained from you and then planted where ever they want it, https://www.quora.com/How-many... [quora.com]. You leak DNA where ever you go, that is what they are relying on to prosecute you but you loose it where ever you go and they want to prosecute your for that. Drop a hair on the actual criminal and they drop it at the scene of the crime, you are fucked. The criminal collects it before hand and leaves it too obscure the crime trail. Use a hooker to collect an undeniable sample. Yeah over reliance on DNA is extremely dangerous to the enemies of a corrupt state. You can be any where they want you to be, well, at least your DNA can.
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There's a good discussion on the podcast "The Insight" titled "The Golden State Killer and the Genetic Panopticon" May 2, 2018. It requires a lot of additional narrowing of suspects and investigative work, both on the genealogy and investigative side. At least until the databases are much more comprehensive with accurate genealogy and a critical mass of dna.
Re:Beware Leaky DNA (Score:4, Insightful)
These databases need to be deleted too. The privacy violates are incredible.
What do you do when an insurance company notices that someone in your family has a hereditary disease and decides to jack up your premiums? We need strong laws to protect DNA data and prevent that kind of abuse.
Re:Beware Leaky DNA (Score:5, Insightful)
These databases need to be deleted too. The privacy violates are incredible.
What do you do when an insurance company notices that someone in your family has a hereditary disease and decides to jack up your premiums? We need strong laws to protect DNA data and prevent that kind of abuse.
How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?
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That couldn't possibly work, certainly not just after a major war left the country's economy in the shitter.
I mean, there'd be something on the telly about it, wouldn't there?
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>"How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?"
How about a better approach where first almost everyone works, contributes to society, and pays taxes so such a system is financially viable? It is hard to have one without the other, especially when there is already a $21 trillion debt which is increasing at over $2 thousand dollars a second.
Re:Beware Leaky DNA (Score:4, Insightful)
Even the Neanderthals looked after sick members of the tribe. For chrissakes, act like a human being.
Re: Beware Leaky DNA (Score:1)
Americans stopped acting like human beings a loooong time ago.
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No, they just are too slavishly attached to the Invisible Hand, so they have created a highly inefficient health care system that ultimately costs consumers more.
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How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?
How about a better approach where first almost everyone works, contributes to society, and pays taxes so such a system is financially viable? It is hard to have one without the other, especially when there is already a $21 trillion debt which is increasing at over $2 thousand dollars a second.
The debt is certainly a problem, but it doesn't preclude progress on the health care issue.
The USA is ALREADY spending roughly 17-18% of its GDP on health care, including all public and private spending.
European nations with health care programs are spending 9-11% of their GDP on health care - and getting better results in many key statistics. The same applies to the rest of the developed world, such as Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
In short, the USA is spending a lot more than it needs
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Sure that's why in 2014 52,513 Canadians came to the U.S. for health care. Why over 500,000 Australians went abroad for medical care in 2017. Obviously their medical care must be perfect.
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> How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?
I would rather have more competent health care and my nurses not needing to use a food bank.
It never ceases to amaze me how broke idiots want to value money they don't even have more then their life.
Doctors with modpoints? (Score:2, Troll)
Okay kids, explain how that was flamebait. Quote the relevant sections.
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No, geezer, figure it out for yourself. All of it.
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No, geezer, figure it out for yourself. All of it.
So, none of it? You're just upset because it had my name at the top? Since you didn't provide an explanation, I'm free to seek my own, and that's most plausible.
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All of it.
I'm hardly upset, but you fail to realize: (a) nobody here works for you, so don't expect people to heave to your assignments. (b) "Kids;" this exemplar of your usual attitude explains why "They said they really wanted to hire me, then they just stopped returning my emails" -- not your self proclaimed "morals and standards" -- and (c) whin
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Finally, if people dare provide an explanation with facts you simply run away to the next topic,
That's a good description of what happens with other people when I post citations, but not such a good description of my behavior. Again, put up or shut up.
Re:Beware Leaky DNA (Score:5, Insightful)
What you need is more doctors, but the AMA has taken steps to prevent that. Consequently there is a health care shortage.
The AMA doesn't help, but their contribution to the American medical care shambles is rather small overall. The big problem is the system where insurance and pharmaceutical companies have inserted themselves between the doctors and the patients, and ensconced themselves there via intense lobbying and bribery.
The private insurance industry adds an average overhead of 18% to medical care costs. By comparison, public insurers like Medicare or Medicaid have an overhead of about 3% or less. The savings of replacing private insurance with a public solution have been estimated to over $350 billion annually. That is enough to give medical coverage to every American, and still leave enough over to improve everybody's health care.
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This.
More controversially, I wonder what percentage of costs would be reduced if we:
o Allowed and facilitated access to assisted suicide for *everyone* in chronic pain or with a terminal condition
o Stopped covering willful self-inflicted chronic conditions, ie. lung cancer for smokers, colon cancer for meat eaters.
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The AMA is a lobbying group for conservative doctors. 25% of doctors are members. You seem confused about what their role is.
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Re:Beware Leaky DNA (Score:4, Insightful)
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What about making other people pay because of what one puts into one's mouth?
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Already law for genetic discrimination (Score:5, Interesting)
These databases need to be deleted too. The privacy violates are incredible.
What do you do when an insurance company notices that someone in your family has a hereditary disease and decides to jack up your premiums? We need strong laws to protect DNA data and prevent that kind of abuse.
We already have a law, it's called Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008. The only catch, congress didnt put any protection for life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term care insurance.
https://www.genome.gov/1000232... [genome.gov]
Re:Beware Leaky DNA (Score:5, Informative)
This is terrible! How can they justify convicting people based on DNA evidence alone!
Oh wait, they don't.
But here's an interesting fact: the first time DNA evidence was used in the UK it exonerated a mentally retarded suspect who'd already confessed.
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This is terrible! How can they justify convicting people based on DNA evidence alone!
Oh wait, they don't.
And they do not arrest, interrogate, hold people in jail in violation of the Eighth Amendment, charge them, and pressure them into a plea bargain either, except when they do.
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The threat of excess reliance on DNA evidence, remains the same, it can always be obtained from you and then planted where ever they want it, .
Because no defence lawyer has ever thought of this.
I'm pretty sure that murder trials go into a bit more detail than just matching DNA...
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They're a saying. As long as it's indicted, they'll convict a ham sandwich of murder. Just remember, the people that hold your future in their hands are people that were not smart enough to get out of jury duty. They also don't want to be there and they'll assume you're guilty. You were indicted after all and that nice prosecutor wouldn't think of indicting anyone that wasn't guilty. Would they? Happens all the time.
Good case of that was the Mike Tyson trial. The man acted like a caged animal in the court
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They're a saying. As long as it's indicted, they'll convict a ham sandwich of murder.
Fortunately I have more experience of how a courtroom works than just 'They're a saying'.
There is no doubt in my mind he was innocent....he was clearly guilty and I think everyone knows it
Courtrooms don't work like media headlines, even if that's all you know about the actual cases...
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You already seem to have forgotten all those people fucked up with wrongful convictions based upon one forensic DNA scientist screwing with test results and even faking them completely, so there nothing back FAKE DNA evidence lead straight to convictions for hundreds of people. Yep, just DNA evidence will get you destroyed in court and force you to try to prove how it got there and that it was not your legal responsibility.
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I have to wonder if you read my response, got a phone call or something and forgot where you were? I'm indicting the justice system for what it is. Usually a crap shoot. A jury certainly not of my peers. In fact they are often below average people and they'll convict with very flimsy evidence. To your point - in the future cases were overturned by DNA ruling them out illustrating how broken the justice system is.
To me this is all terrible because I happen to have a very strong sense of right and wrong. Send
If you've got nothing to hide, you've... (Score:2)
By the way, if you've got absolutely nothing to hide -- what are all of your credit card and banking numbers again? I'm verifying data from Exactis [marketwatch.com]. Thanks.
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Follow the DNA line over to the person who lived in that part of the USA at that time.
Find out if the police interviewed them in the past?
Collect DNA today from that person thats ok for a court.
The next step is to go international. Moving to or from the USA decades ago to escape might not be as protective as it once was.
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Not only that, but wait 'til the mob gets a hold of this. You want to be in our crew? No problem, hand in some hair samples. And should you try to get out, you might escape us, but we'll always find someone to club some knees in.
All that 1960-90's police work (Score:4, Interesting)
All the small town police who got told about people in their own community but never did anything?
Federal, state, city informants who always had a call made for them?
The DNA draws into once powerful groups in a community that never had to consider police results.
That trend of the serial offender 3 states over could cover for many informants and powerful locals crimes. Local 1960's solution rates to homicide dropped as police corruption set in all over the USA.
Now that DNA is back to tell its own local story. Shredders will we working overtime to save reputations of police still working and of now high rank.
Political leaders who cover for well connected locals?
Decades later someone puts in for a DNA test and real police follow the truth back down to a small town.
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More likely the corrupt cop will just claim he was sloppy at collecting sample at the scene of the crime. Of course you expect to see the cops DNA at the crime scene. Never mind that the sample was from a bit of semen.
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Everything that was once a mystery going back to the ~1960's is going to be tested from all over the USA.
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Somehow I don't think gay black people make up a large segment of Trump's support base.
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> They aren't but they consider being called "nazi" a compliment
No, you've just abused the term (and all of the others) to the point where they no longer have any meaning. The insult only makes YOU look like a lazy idiot at this point.
Dependence on these kinds of insults makes your brain rot. You can't make a real argument anymore. Your mind has atrophied.
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It's the grand unification between the political sides!
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Curiously they are also often the ones that belong there. But then, we don't jail rich people, so they're good.
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How many prisons does california have? Then compare that to every other state.. Yes please do count conservation/fire camps. Even without them the numbers are staggering.
Imagine if they'd just test what they have (Score:3)
Re: Well, people are stupid. (Score:2)
The reality is jurors see DNA evidence as God's Own Truth. Even though it's clear someone's DNA can end up in a place they've never been.
Re: Well, people are stupid. (Score:2)
The OJ trial was not an exercise in finding truth, it was an exercise in finding racial justice.
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Of course it is. If you're looking for a red honda civic with a license plate starting with X3G, that's a fairly specific search. You're looking for a specific thing, and cars btw, are not presumed innocent.
It's something quite different than "hey, let's look see if we can find anyone in this gigantic database of suspects - males living between $SEARCH_START_DATE and $CURRENT_DAY - which even remotely matches, and then proceed to dig into these "leads". And that's just the start.
Because then comes the next
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1) Private entities don't dispense justice and hence can't violate "presumption of innocence" (which can't be violated outside of a trial anyway).
2) Calling a partial hit on a DNA database a violation of a right is an extremely long bow to draw (which civil right is being violated?).
3) No-one has a privacy interest in anyone else's DNA anyway (I predict this will be litigated before the Supreme Court in the next decade or less).
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Just imagine what they could have done with actually being able to do DNA tests.
Then again, just imagine what they could've done with atomic bombs.
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> In my moms youth having "wrong" DNA was chriminal.
Deranged comparisons like this are a form of Holocaust denial.
Exonerated (Score:1)
I wonder how many "solves" cases they're going to go back through to figure out how many people were wrongly executed. Oh, right, that requires someone other than the State to look into. I mean, they did their duty when the prosecutor pushed hard to be "tough on crime". Let's all forget that really means "tough on the suspect".
Don't get me wrong. There's almost certainly a lot of people who are found guilty or plea bargain who are guilty. But we don't really hold much accountability for all those who a
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When Bush was elected President, there were reports that law enforcement agencies destroyed evidence related to the cases of people executed during the time Bush was Governor of Texas.
They were afraid, apparently, proof might emerge that Bush had signed off on the execution of someone who could be proved innocent.
Yeah, right... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Texas law enforcement also thinks that a man who was executed in 1999 for killing a 9-year-old girl was now also behind the murder of a 40-year-old realtor in 1981."
No doubt this same dead guy was guilty of every unsolved, cold case murder committed in Texas for the last 35 years.
In other news, Texas law enforcement is now boasting about having the highest percentage of solved cases in US history.
But where.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Innocence project (Score:1)
Check out the innocence project. They have successfully reversed wrongful convictions.
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..are the exonerations? The truth is The Police and DA's are willing to bend the laws to use DNA evidence against you, but when that DNA evidence proves your innocence, especially if they've broken you down into confessing, they do everything they can to keep you from using it to get out of prison.
It may shock you to learn that police don't have the resources to keep investigating cases they've already closed. You don't need to do much googling to find cases where DNA exonerated someone who was found guilty, but it wasn't the police investigating that...
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It may shock you to learn that police don't have the resources to keep investigating cases they've already closed. You don't need to do much googling to find cases where DNA exonerated someone who was found guilty, but it wasn't the police investigating that...
But they have the resources to object to releasing evidence for testing when it might prove innocence.
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Most of the cases I hear about it's the DA's Office actively fighting exoneration. The Police can get involved too depending on who's ego or reputation it would tarnish. There are plenty of cases where groups like The Innocence Project have spent the time and money to prove that someone is innocent but the DA's fight it like hell, going so far as to try and use Alford Pleas so they can keep a conviction on their record.
I don't expect the Police to keep investigating old closed cases on their own. But when n
Fast to jail, slow to unjail (Score:4, Insightful)
One way justice system [sfchronicle.com].
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Considering that this is the age of Alexa, that's not a bad approach. People will happily subject themselves to the modern version of Big Brother for a small bit of convenience.
Insurance (Score:2)
Get to the actual story here: has anyone else been refused health insurance based on this type of DNA?
Snitches get stitches (Score:2)
You want me to submit my DNA to a public database in order to put my relatives in prison for indeterminate, supposed crimes?
No thanks...
Governments change. Data is forever. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see serious issues with this technology, and it's not a subtle one.
Trump jokes aside, today I do not live under an authoritative regime. I don't exactly trust my government, but I do feel free to speak out against their abuses without fearing prison or worse.
The problem is that governments change, and data is forever. Thirty years from now I could be a geriatric freedom fighter or my children could be fighting the war against the machines. If that happens, that DNA data will still exist and be used against us. I won't be a single wrinkly face among billions, I'll be in a tiny well-documented pool of possibly a dozen individuals.
In this case "think of the children" is entirely appropriate. Contributing to these databases today takes away privacy options for future generations permanently.
This is a terrible idea. Abort. Terminate. Halt. Cease.
Alleged (Score:3)
hahahahah (Score:1)
Require a search warrent (Score:2)
The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not.
There's an easy solution to that problem. Make them get a search warrant before searching the public site too. DNA is super sensitive personal information. The police shouldn't be searching it without a warrant.
I know, people will say that doesn't make sense. It's a public database. Anyone can access it. The information was freely given away by other people. But we're dealing with a hard paradox. On one hand, your DNA is super sensitive personal information. No one but you should be able to give it
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No statute of limitations on murder.