The form of familial searching in that California law is different than what was used in the Golden State Killer case, and is highly regulated. They take a crime-scene profile and search the state Convicted Offender database (the FBI does not allow familial searches in the national database). The CA law requires a judge’s order and demonstration of imminent or continuing threat. It hasn’t actually been used all that often - most famously in the Grim Sleeper case.
One counterpoint to the successes of familial searching, also involving an ancestry company:
This is very intriguing in multiple ways. Which sites were used and how? Do the services know how they were used in that way and does it run afoul of any usage guidelines or privacy requirements from the sites?
But further, this would mean that essentially many more criminals could be caught, not by their own submission, but by anyone with similar familial DNA. As more and more people use those services, it creates its own crime solving method. That is an amazingly huge thing for forensics and the solving for cold cases. I’m sure there are a lot of nervous people who might hear about the method though.
Just imagine the possibilities if a government that’s hostile to non-whites somehow came into power and could legally start doing this. They could use DNA to target specific races or geographic groups as much as they wanted. Build up a database of those individuals and then start checking vast numbers of evidence against it, investigating even remotely close matches. Then use whatever manipulated results they acquired to further target these groups in the media.
What about people finding information on biological parents that do not want to be found?
What protection is there for those in witness protection?
Could this be used to track down runaways that don’t want to be found? Or exes, or any number of people that don’t expect to be tracked anonymously by DNA.
What does the system do if it sees DNA submitted as new by someone already registered elsewhere?
The sharing of that data just opened up a wormhole.
I’m glad we got the guy, but holy cow. Someone could get DNA from you somehow, pretend to be you signing up for services, then track down parties related to you, perhaps even to you directly.
All valid concerns. But the link Ron provided on California’s law regarding familial DNA appears to have some pretty strict guidelines in place.
Plus, reading that it is still unclear to me if this was the law cited to capture GSK. I mean, how do you get a judge to agree that GSK in 2018 poses an imminent or continuing threat? Especially given how many in law enforcement believed the killer was likely dead?
The point is that the GSK search was done totally separate from the Calif familial searching law. The law only covers what can be searched in the Convicted Offender database. There are, simply, no rules regarding searches using these ancestry services. I have seen speculation that they did not directly query one of the ancestry companies, but instead used one or more ‘matching services’. People use these to try to find birth parents, etc.
Just an update with one more podcast, this one an entire season (season 2) devoted to the Golden State Killer as well as a follow up based on the arrest.
It’s now semi-confirmed that he committed part of his crime spree while a cop, and there is speculation he even did so while working.
No prob.I had a road trip to Atlanta and burned through half of it, they are extremely detailed on going through the timeline. I didn’t understand the scope of the fear he had the area in until this podcast. He was everywhere.
It’s kind of grandstanding to jump straight to comparing your random cold case profile to the Golden State Killer suspect, when they could have compared the Simi Valley sample to any one of the GSK crime-scene samples at any time and proven that they were not connected. Crime-scene to crime-scene matching is a regular part of what CODIS does.
Maybe. Odds are the scenario was: they had no suspect and the case had been cold for decades and someone involved with it said “Hey, maybe that guy they caught is also our guy. We could piggyback off their arrest and close a cold file.” So they ran it, not expecting it to be connected, but taking a shot in the dark to maybe bring closure to a family or something.
One of the most interesting parts of the Ear/Ons/Gsk capture has to do with an early defense strategy he’ll most likely be using in relation to a supposed violation of his 4th amendment rights when singling him out with familial DNA public geneology database he himself had never used. No matter which way the court rules on that it’ll be sure to set a huge precedent for future investigators wanting to use these same methods.
But some of investigators aren’t waiting for such a court ruling, as they see an opportunity to close cases for violent crimes that have gone unsolved for far too long, and they’re following suit by testing for matches in other public online DNA database. Here is news of one such case that broke today:
Authorities say they used information from public genealogy websites to pinpoint Talbott as a suspect then arrested him after getting a DNA sample from a cup that fell from his truck.
Another example of using the genetic databases to catch someone not in them:
I was chatting with my daughter’s boyfriend’s parents last night and they brought up this story. I shook my head and said, “Man, things are changing fast. It was a lot easier to be a murderer when we were kids.” It’s possible I should have not have said that, given that this was only our second meeting.
