Crimes and commercial DNA 'testing' companies

I'll stay with this
The cop interviewed on the Tee Vee said they used this service because they 'didn't have to mess with' warrants and court orders.

Cool beans that they circumvented a ton of laws passed to protect our civil rights and "Privacy" FROM the Gov't/police.

Me, I'm not so happy.

I will acknowledge the fuzz was very clever in working this angle to solve the crimes (GSK - who killed 12 people and raped 45 women across California between 1976 and 1986) and I am happy that the same cops (finally) caught another killer/cop. And it only took 32 (or 42) years. It did take that long for the technology and social media to mature to the point where the retro-regressive DNA analysis to solve the puzzle.

For more case were family DNA was used to solve crimes... - The ingenious and ‘dystopian’ DNA technique police used to hunt the ‘Golden State Killer’ suspect.

The suspected Golden State Killer was not in this database, either, but it didn’t matter. A distant relative of his was, police say, and that person’s DNA partially matched evidence related to the serial killer. Instantly, the pool of suspects shrank from millions of people down to a single family.

Detectives then used traditional investigative techniques to narrow the family members down to one suspect: DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer who lived within a few miles of many of the attacks. This part was real-deal investigative work and so - to be commended.

There is also this caution: (from story linked above)

On the more dystopian side of the spectrum, Wired reported on a filmmaker named Michael Usry who was accused of a 1996 murder in Idaho Falls nearly 20 years after the fact — coincidentally the same month that Phoenix police got their break in the Canal Killer investigation.

Usry, who was a teenager at the time of the killing, was picked up by police at his doorstep in New Orleans in December 2014, Wired wrote. He was interrogated by an FBI agent and spent a month under suspicion — all because the killer’s genetic code was similar to his father’s, whose DNA sample had been obtained by Ancestry.com.

But unlike Miller and DeAngelo, Usry’s DNA test ruled him out as a suspect. His father was one of many false positives that plague familial DNA testing, Wired wrote.

“He seemed like a really good candidate,” an Idaho Falls police sergeant told the New Orleans Advocate after Usry was cleared. “But we’ve had that happen before.”

Familial DNA searches, in fact, had an 83 percent failure rate in a 2014 British study, Wired wrote. This is part of the reason that many warn against the practice, even as law enforcement agencies master its uses.

I remember a time when there was genuine concern over the introduction of bar codes and mag stripes on credit cards. They’ll be used to track and control us!

Today people can’t wait to participate in their own surveillance.

— Mike Spinney (@spinzo) April 27, 2018

 

Correction: Old Murder Case-Arrest story

It appears to be coming quite common