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Sweden: man goes on trial for 2004 murder after DNA matched to genealogy site:
A 37-year-old Swedish man has gone on trial for double murder after two killings that went unsolved for more than 15 years until police matched his DNA on a popular genealogy website.
Daniel Nyqvist, who confessed to the crime shortly after his arrest last June, has been charged with the 2004 murder of a 56-year-old woman and an eight-year-old boy.
The two victims – who were unrelated – were stabbed in a random act in the quiet southern Swedish town of Linkoping [sic Linköping].
The crime shocked the nation, with investigators unable to come up with either a perpetrator or a motive, despite finding the suspect’s DNA at the scene, the weapon that was used, a bloody cap and witness descriptions of a young man with blond hair.
Police even called upon the FBI for help, but to no avail. Over the years, the case file grew to become the second biggest in Sweden’s history, after that of the 1986 murder of former prime minister Olof Palme.
The case was finally cracked when new legislation in January 2019 allowed police to search for matches to suspects’ DNA on commercial genealogy websites, which are popular among Swedes seeking long-lost relatives.
[...] “We received a match almost immediately. And several months later, the suspect could be arrested. His DNA was taken and matched 100%,” police said in a statement the day after his arrest.
How much might other repositories uncover, and are any fundamental freedoms violated by so trawling?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aiwarrior on Tuesday September 22 2020, @07:59AM (4 children)
This is exactly what scares me. Imagine Nazi Germany or Pol Pot with access to this thing. Hell, even segregation with this tech. Even Facebook/Google scares me already as, even if not DNA, it is possible to connect a lot of my social graph. If I become an undesirable or anybody in the social graph is undesirable the sweep would make the Nazis plan a thing to execute in about a year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2020, @04:34PM (3 children)
Unfortunately all my extended family are exactly those kind of mouthbreathing social network whoring plebs, and most of the rest of my family already got DNA testing done 10-20 years ago.
So for me there is no hope outside of obscurity and staying off the radar. Which is becoming harder and harder each year without emigrating.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2020, @06:23PM (1 child)
Don't murder anybody in the US. ♡
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2020, @12:03AM
And don't vote for the wrong party.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Wednesday September 23 2020, @12:14PM
This is why i believe more and more that the next civilizational evolution will need to happen in law rather in the tech. With the tech we are basically fucked. The law is now our only resort, and why more than ever constitutional democracy regimes need to be protected and nurtured by it's people. While tech can in theory give us anonymity, due to our social nature it actually, it actually decreases it in privacy.
Also morality as in the Abrahamic kind will need to be scaled back. Instead of evil being a thing that is abhorrent and abnormal it will need to be taken as being part of our existence and mitigated. I find it ironic that the moral orthodoxy of the liberals is as strong as any zealot.