DNA databases are a gold mine for police. But officers operate in secrecy, with few to no rules, a Times investigation finds
Orlando police Det. Michael Fields was sure he had the break he needed right in front of him to close in on a serial rapist: a list of people whose DNA partially matched the man he hunted.After a year of criticism from privacy advocates and genealogy experts, the owner of a popular DNA-sharing website had decided law enforcement had no right to consumer data unless those consumers agreed.“It was devastating to know that there’s information out there,” Fields said. “It wasn’t fair.
When DNA services were used, law enforcement generally declined to provide details to the public, including which companies detectives got the match from. The secrecy made it difficult to understand the extent to which privacy was invaded, how many people came under investigation, and what false leads were generated.
After L.A. County prosecutors filed two counts of murder against a man linked to a pair of decades-old cold cases by “It is probably one of the greatest revolutions, at least I would say, in my lifetime as a prosecutor,” said Sacramento County Dist. Atty. Ann Marie Schubert. “But it is a difficult, evolving topic because there are privacy interests at stake and in an area that’s unregulated.”
The nation’s two largest genealogy services, Ancestry and 23andMe, say they do not grant law enforcement access to their consumer data. But a third, smaller company, FamilyTreeDNA, openly permits law enforcement use except for those customers who specifically opt out.Few safeguards protect the genetic profiles of millions of consumers on genealogy sites.
Sacramento prosecutor Schubert said the rules guard against uses that might backfire and restrict DNA searches even further. What Parabon provided were GEDMatch accounts of two second and third cousins of the suspected killer — the same information any other user of the DNA registry would see. The results show the number of genome locations that match, with each match called a centimorgan. A mother and son would share about 3,400 centimorgans; a suspect’s second cousin once removed might have 123 in common.
“Give them an inch, and they’ll take it to Mars,” he said. “I tell people, ‘Don’t put your DNA in the system.’ see it as a side door around the 4th Amendment.” But the Baylor study found public support for DNA searching dropped to 34% when the crimes were not violent and police wanted the names of account holders.
“We wanted to catch him before it escalated,” said College Station Officer Tristan Lopez. Like most law enforcement departments, the police agency would not provide details of that DNA hunt. The warrant does not completely undermine efforts to ensure privacy, said GEDMatch co-founder Curtis Rogers.Critics did not agree, and said the repeated policy breaches and global search warrant show how easily privacy falls away.
But in California early this year, police investigating the 1995 rape of a 9-year-old schoolgirl in Lake Forest and a 1998 rape of a jogger in the same town used FamilyTreeDNA to identify not one, but two suspects. They were identical twins, sharing the same DNA. Both brothers were jailed until undisclosed additional evidence led to freedom for one and rape charges against the other.
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