#dna databases

Home Office written question – answered on 21 May 2018

Philip Davies Conservative, Shipley

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many DNA profiles were (a) held on the national DNA database and (b) added to the national DNA database in each of the last eight years.

Hansard Source

Nick Hurd The Minister of State, Home Department

a) The number of sample profiles retained on…

By Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post, April 30, 2018

SACRAMENTO--Detectives had searched for four decades for the clue that would unlock the identity of the Golden State Killer, the predator who terrorized California top to bottom with a string of horrific rapes and homicides in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Criminal DNA databases produced no hits, sweeps of crime scenes no fingerprints and hefty rewards no definitive tips. But Paul Holes, an investigator and DNA expert, had a hunch he could create a road map to the killer through his genetics.

Holes used DNA recovered from a crime scene to find the killer’s great-great-great grandparents, who lived in the early 1800s. Branch by painstaking branch, he and a team created about 25 family trees containing thousands of relatives down to the present day.

One fork led to a 72-year-old retiree who was quietly living out his golden years in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights. Holes was intrigued after learning the man was a disgraced cop who had bought guns during two bursts of activity by the killer.

The test of Holes’s novel sleuthing would come in mid-April, when officers scooped up an item discarded by the man that contained his DNA and tested the genetic material against the killer’s. The shot in the dark produced a match--an improbable ending fit for detective fiction.

Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in Citrus Heights on April 24.

“Everything else up to this time had failed,” Holes said. “For 44 years, law enforcement has been trying to solve this case. No other case has had more resources poured into it in the history of California. I was just stunned.”

The role of genetics in the case is well known, but this account reveals for the first time the massive scope, intricate science and sheer doggedness of the effort to catch one of the nation’s worst serial predators.

Initial DNA work identified distant relatives--not a suspect. Holes said a team of five investigators spent four months building out family trees, name by name. They pored over census records, newspaper obituaries, gravesite locaters, and police and commercial databases to find each relative and, ultimately, DeAngelo.

Sacramento sheriff’s deputies put DeAngelo under surveillance and picked up the discarded item containing his DNA. After the match, they arrested DeAngelo at his home, not far from where he allegedly carried out many of the crimes. He now faces eight counts of murder.

On Friday, DeAngelo, whose attorney did not return calls seeking comment for this article, was pushed into a Sacramento courtroom in a wheelchair to face arraignment. He appeared frail in an orange jumpsuit, answering a judge’s questions in a thin, raspy voice.

Holes said he was gratified to finally put a face to the ghost he chased for so many years.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.  A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure…

By Jill Lawless, AP, Jul 12, 2013

LONDON (AP)--You can ditch your computer and leave your cellphone at home, but you can't escape your DNA.

It belongs uniquely to you--and, increasingly, to the authorities.

Countries around the world are collecting genetic material from millions of citizens in the name of fighting crime and terrorism--and, according to critics, heading into uncharted ethical terrain.

Leaders include the United States--where the Supreme Court recently backed the collection of DNA swabs from suspects on arrest--and Britain, where police held samples of almost 7 million people, more than 10 percent of the population, until a court-ordered about-face saw the incineration of a chunk of the database.

The expanding trove of DNA in official hands has alarmed privacy campaigners, and some scientists. Recent leaks about U.S. surveillance programs by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden have made people realize their online information and electronic communications may not be as secure as they thought. Could the same be true of the information we hold within our genes? DNA samples that can help solve robberies and murders could also, in theory, be used to track down our relatives, scan us for susceptibility to disease, or monitor our movements.

Earlier this year Yaniv Erlich, who runs a lab at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, published a paper in the journal Science describing how he was able to identify individuals, and their families, from anonymous DNA data in a research project. All it took was a computer algorithm, a genetic genealogy website and searches of publicly available Internet records.

"It was a very weird feeling--a 'wow' feeling," Erlich told The Associated Press. "I had to take a walk outside just to think about this process."

Erlich says DNA databases have enormous positive power, both for fighting crime and in scientific research. But, he said, "our work shows there are privacy limitations."

Ethical qualms have done little to stop the growth of genetic databases around the world.

The international police agency Interpol listed 54 nations with national police DNA databases in 2009, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany and China. Brazil and India have since announced plans to join the club, and the United Arab Emirates intends to build the world's first database of an entire national population.

The biggest database is in the United States--the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which holds information on more than 11 million people suspected of or convicted of crimes.

It is set to grow following a May Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of police forces to take DNA swabs without a warrant from people who are arrested, not just those who are convicted. (Policies on DNA collection vary by state; more than half of the states and the federal government currently take DNA swabs after arrests.)

The court's justices were divided about implications for individuals' rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy, for the five-judge majority, called the taking of DNA a legitimate and reasonable police booking procedure akin to fingerprinting.

But dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia argued that it marked a major change in police powers. "Because of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason," he said.

A similar note of caution has been struck by Alec Jeffreys, the British geneticist whose 1984 discovery of DNA fingerprinting revolutionized criminal investigations. He has warned that "mission creep" could see authorities use DNA to accumulate information on people's racial origins, medical history and psychological profile.

Police forces have already tracked down criminals through the DNA of their innocent relatives, a practice that is both a goldmine for investigators and, according to skeptics, an ethical minefield. Charles Tumosa, a clinical assistant professor in forensic studies at the University of Baltimore who is wary of the potential for genetic surveillance, says relatives of suspects could be identified through DNA and leaned on for information about their family members.

"There's got to be a debate," said Tumosa. "Nobody has talked this out.

"At what point do you say, enough is enough? Do we want to have a society where 5 percent of the crime is unsolved, or do we want to have a society where 100 percent of the crime is solved" but privacy is compromised. "What's the trade-off?"

Both supporters and critics of DNA databases point to Britain, where until recently, police could take the DNA of anyone 10 or older arrested for even the most minor offense--and keep it forever, even if the suspect was later acquitted or released without charge.

Police say the database has helped solve thousands of crimes, including murders and rapes. On the other side of the coin are hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children, who feel shamed and tainted by inclusion on a database of criminal suspects--a status some legal experts say undermines the presumption of innocence.