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The Orange County Register reports:
[...] one of California's most prolific serial killers and rapists was caught by using online genealogical sites to find a DNA match, prosecutors said Thursday. Investigators compared the DNA collected from a crime scene of the Golden State Killer to online genetic profiles and found a match: a relative of the man police have identified as [the suspect, who was arrested.]
[...] Authorities didn't give the name of the site, one of many, like Ancestry and 23andMe, that allow people to send in their DNA and find long-lost relatives. [...] Contacted Friday, representatives of both Ancestry and 23andMe.com said the sites weren't involved in the case.
takyon: Also at NYT, The Sacramento Bee, NPR, and CNN, which added:
When police announced they had finally caught the Golden State Killer, Bruce Harrington had a simple message for the politicians who fought his tireless efforts to expand the California's criminal offender DNA database. "You were wrong," he said.
Harrington, whose brother and sister-in-law were killed in 1980, spent years in front of public safety committees, pleading with them to embrace DNA technology. "And frankly I ran into a buzz saw of opposition."
Many state elected officials and rights groups fiercely opposed any attempt by the state to expand its DNA collection database. Critics cited the privacy rights of people in police custody and questioned the constitutionality of allowing the state to gather DNA samples without evidence of guilt.
In 2004, California voters passed Proposition 69, known as the "DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act." It gave the state broader powers to collect DNA. Now, it could get samples from anyone not just convicted of a felony, but even arrested for one. In some cases, authorities could also collect DNA from misdemeanor arrests.
Say goodbye to your genetic privacy. We have killers to catch.
(Score: 1) by nimbius on Friday April 27 2018, @04:51PM (3 children)
disclosure: i work in biomedical sciences and abhor "DNA" evidence as the sole determinant of a crime.
Ancestry and 23andMe are not performing DNA tests at the level of research scientists. Further, crime scenes are riddled with frequent and damning contamination or errors that rule collected evidence inadmissible in court. Often times these contaminations take place at the very lab that is charged with identifying and classifying the DNA in the first place. without independent audit, the evidence found is no better than baseless hearsay. Most state labs that test DNA are backlogged nearly an entire year, and are often indistinguishable from a community college chemistry lab. The funding has never materialized for competent, reliable DNA testing by the state.
not even. this isnt the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, and in the case of someone who takes precautions to avoid social media most investigators have lost even the cursory ability to link them to a crime without a CCTV and the all mythical DNA. If the criminal isnt generous enough to carry a cell phone, most modern perpetrators enter into a plea deal, or see the charges reduced or dropped. Ted Kazinski evaded the FBI for nearly 20 years by assuming a low profile, and it wasnt until he became an evangelist to a cause that he got caught. point being: you can avoid most forms of casual surveillance from the state by simply being a bit more observant about your personal life and privacy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Friday April 27 2018, @05:44PM
The person who actually was fingered by the DNA match was a distant relative. But hundreds of hits were generated in these commercial databases.
(source) [latimes.com]
This was further narrowed down by unspecified means, and finally they followed this rapist-murderer around till he discarded something with DNA on it for a much better match against samples collected at several very old murder and rape scenes.
So YES, it IS EXACTLY like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, with all the degrees residing in your family.
Siblings, cousins, children, grand-children, parents, etc.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday April 27 2018, @08:51PM
Doctor Ted Kaczynski
FTFY
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by pdfernhout on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:56AM
Supporting your point on contamination from DNA "transfer": https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/ [wired.com]
"... In a sense, this isn't surprising: We leave a trail of ourselves everywhere we go. An average person may shed upward of 50 million skin cells a day. Attorney Erin Murphy, author of Inside the Cell, a book about forensic DNA, has calculated that in two minutes the average person sheds enough skin cells to cover a football field. We also spew saliva, which is packed with DNA. If we stand still and talk for 30 seconds, our DNA may be found more than a yard away. With a forceful sneeze, it might land on a nearby wall.
To find out the prevalence of DNA in the world, a group of Dutch researchers tested 105 public items—escalator rails, public toilet door handles, shopping basket handles, coins. Ninety-one percent bore human DNA, sometimes from half a dozen people. Even items intimate to us—the armpits of our shirts, say—can bear other people's DNA, they found.
The itinerant nature of DNA has serious implications for forensic investigations. After all, if traces of our DNA can make their way to a crime scene we never visited, aren't we all possible suspects?
Forensic DNA has other flaws: Complex mixtures of many DNA profiles can be wrongly interpreted, certainty statistics are often wildly miscalculated, and DNA analysis robots have sometimes been stretched past the limits of their sensitivity.
But as advances in technology are solving some of these problems, they have actually made the problem of DNA transfer worse. Each new generation of forensic tools is more sensitive; labs today can identify people with DNA from just a handful of cells. A handful of cells can easily migrate.
A survey of the published science, interviews with leading scientists, and a review of thousands of pages of court and police documents associated with the Kumra case has elucidated how secondary DNA transfer can undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system's most-trusted tool. And yet, very few crime labs worldwide regularly and robustly study secondary DNA transfer.
This is partly because most forensic scientists believe DNA to be the least of their field's problems. They're not wrong: DNA is the most accurate forensic science we have. It has exonerated scores of people convicted based on more flawed disciplines like hair or bite-mark analysis. And there have been few publicized cases of DNA mistakenly implicating someone in a crime.
But, like most human enterprises, DNA analysis is not perfect. And without study, the scope and impact of that imperfection is difficult to assess, says Peter Gill, a British forensic researcher. He has little doubt that his field, so often credited with solving crimes, is also responsible for wrongful convictions.
"The problem is we're not looking for these things," Gill says. "For every miscarriage of justice that is detected, there must be a dozen that are never discovered.""
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.