Th3 Core
Why We Are Here => Water Cooler => Topic started by: ergophobe on April 29, 2018, 11:42:16 PM
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Police uploaded a DNA sample to a database that people upload their DNA to in order to find long lost relatives. Enough of the Golden State Killer's relatives had uploaded DNA that they were able to find him, or at least a very strong suspect.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/health/dna-privacy-golden-state-killer-genealogy.html
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Wow
"The arrest of a suspect has set off alarms among
some scientists and ethicists worried that consumer
DNA may be widely accessed by law enforcement."
Indeed, amazing idea and the consequences do seem fairly major there.
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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/trivia?item=tr0655458
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This news broke a day after I posted about how my dad discovered a bunch of family in NC via DNA. This news is going to have a real impact on this type of activity. The GSK was matched up indirectly by the DNA of a relative -- think about that for a bit.
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Sounds like it could be construed as an illegal search.
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They first got a match using a public "open source" DNA repository, then they were issued a warrant and grabbed something from his trash to confirm. As unsettling as it may be, I don't think they broke any laws.
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>As unsettling as it may be, I don't think they broke any laws.
Yeah, that's what's bothering me. We've created the Gattaca Police State without even trying.
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Ditto. That's what prompted me to share. Add in all the stuff RC has been posting about facial recognition and voice recognition and it's Gattaca Plus
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There has been a small stream of these "family tree" arrests. Another one:
Raymond Rowe Charged With 1992 Murder of Pennsylvania Teacher Christy Mirack Thanks to Genetic Genealogy DNA Technique
http://www.newser.com/story/269688/how-dj-was-busted-in-old-cold-case-gum-a-water-bottle.html
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This tech is going mainstream.
Her murder went unsolved for nearly 40 years, until DNA pointed to a serial rapist named 'Animal' | Stuff.co.nz
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/110374062/her-murder-went-unsolved-for-nearly-40-years-until-dna-pointed-to-a-serial-rapist-named-animal
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A bit like being a 'friend of a friend' on FB, and the insidious correlations FB do.
Only it's for people in your family tree and the correlation is pretty much inescapable.
Once there's a FB sized database of genomes, criminals will be needing to wear a lot more than gloves.
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It's disheartening that we're living in two 20-yr-old movies now: "Gattaca" & "Enemy of the State."
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Enemy of the State
Haven't seen that one. Is it now essential watching to understand my current world? Is it a good movie?
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It's essential, but you'll be seeing now routine surveillance. Just try to remember that it was sci-fi at the time.
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What bothers me most is that the rise of this type of technology is coinciding with governments moving away from democratic rule.
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and James Clapper lied to Congress about it and he is not in jail YET
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This has been in my feeds for a couple of days.
But unbeknown to its users, the Houston-based firm quietly and voluntarily agreed in 2018 to open its database of more than a million records to the F.B.I. and examine DNA samples in its laboratory to identify suspects and victims of unsolved rapes and murders.
FamilyTreeDNA Admits to Sharing Genetic Data With F.B.I. - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/business/family-tree-dna-fbi.html
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...and another one.
Remains Found Under Billboard in 1998 Identified as Boy, 10
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/north-carolina/articles/2019-02-05/remains-found-under-billboard-in-1998-identified-as-boy-10
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Napkin DNA cracks 1993 cold case
https://nypost.com/2019/02/14/dna-from-used-napkin-cracks-1993-cold-case-murder-docs/
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“There is no known relationship between the individuals, and that’s what makes these sort of cases so hard to solve,” Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder told WCCO.
There is a fundamental problem here. I recommend
Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You, by Gerd Gigerenzer
https://www.amazon.com/Calculated-Risks-Know-Numbers-Deceive/dp/0743205561/ref=as_li_ss_tl?crid=2JI0IB5C0B28V&keywords=calculated+risks+how+to+know+when+numbers+deceive+you&qid=1550194344&s=books&sprefix=calculated+ris,stripbooks,152&sr=1-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=ll1&tag=ultraskiercom-20&linkId=baf225ec2df4e5ab84ff369532db07cf&language=en_US
He talks about breast cancer, AIDS diagnoses and conviction by DNA evidence.
The short version is this.
They will say things like "Based on the DNA, there is a 99.99% chance that it is from the same person." So in other words, if you test 10,000 people, you will get one false positive.
So in a city with 2,000,000 people, there are 200 false positives walking around the city. So if I *randomly* find someone ("no known relationship"), my chance that I have the right guy is not 99.99% as juries are led to believe. In the absence of any other evidence, the chance is actually 0.5% (one in 200). People's lives have been completely ruined because most people do not understand the logic there.
The book has similar analyses for other things. Very interesting and very troubling because most lawyers, judges, juries, testing labs, doctors and cops do not understand this simple statistical problem.
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>there are 200 false positives walking around the city
>the chance is actually 0.5%
That's a really good point.
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Yeah, that book gave me a few simple tools like that to evaluate a lot of things.
Another example... This test reduces the risk of dying by this type of cancer by 50% and only costs $1,000 ever five years. Clearly it's worth it right?
Well, the risk of dying from that type of cancers is 3 per 100,000. By reducing the risk 50%, you've brought that down to 2 and saved one life per 100,000 at a cost of $100,000,000 every five years.
If you spent that money in another way, could you save, OMG, TWO lives for $100,000,000? I bet you could.
What does this have in common with the DNA case? In both cases, people are lead astray by looking at percentages. They should be looking at absolute numbers.
I know this is OT, but one last example.
People are told that the test for HIV is 100% accurate because it's actually two tests - a gram negative and a gram positive. If it says you have HIV, it means you have it. Doctors tell people this all the time.
That's not what it means. It means that if you have HIV, the test is basically guaranteed to detect it. If it says you're clean, you can stop worrying.
But it actually has a 1 in 1,000 error rate of false positives. The rate of HIV in the monogamous heterosexual male population is 1 in 10,000. So if you're a monogamous heterosexual male and you test positive for HIV, there isn't a 99.999999% chance you have it. There is a 10% chance.
The author of the book tells the story of a man who lost his job, house and wife only to find out three years later that he didn't have HIV. He has stories of people convicted on DNA evidence just because they were a random match only to have someone else, who also matched the DNA, get caught for the crime later.
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At the risk of sounding flippant, is the 99.99% stat a rounded number? After all, our genetic make up is what makes us unique. I don't know the specifics of how they use genetic evidence in courts in any particular country, I vaguely remember something about there being the potential for ~420 billion unique human beings.
I feel we could run into problems if a subset of those possibilities invariably end up in jail...
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[Video]Catching Criminals With Their Relative's DNA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT18KJouHWg)
This video gets into some of the aftermath; that's it, they already have your dna.