Last week, law enforcement officers in California arrested former cop Joseph James DeAngelo and charged him with committing a series of rapes and murders in California in the 1970s and 1980s known as the work of the “Golden State Killer.” The case has generated enormous attention beyond the public’s typical fascination with serial killers because of the unusual way the police caught DeAngelo: through his great-great-great-grandparents’ DNA.
DeAngelo isn’t the first alleged serial killer caught by his own family’s genetic code: In 2010, after a man was arrested on a weapons charge, his DNA profile was submitted to California’s criminal DNA database (which contains profiles of more than 2 million felons) and yielded a match to a family member who turned out to be his father—as well as a serial killer known as the “Grim Sleeper.”
The landscape of DNA databases has changed dramatically since 2000, when Iceland shocked the world by selling its entire country’s genetic material to a private company, deCODE Genetics (which was later bought by Amgen), for scientific research. Today, according to MIT Technology Review, more than 12 million people have submitted DNA samples to genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and health sites such as 23andMe, with approximately a million more added every month. Niche DNA companies market to parents, urging them to bank their children’s DNA in case a child is kidnapped or offering to help determine paternity. Still others will extract DNA from the recently deceased to provide a genetic profile to surviving family members.
In other words, genetic analysis and testing has become big business—and it’s a business that speaks to some of our deepest fears (death, disease, the loss of a child, a cheating spouse).
It’s also largely unregulated, which is why it was easy for California law enforcement officials to upload DNA from a crime scene to a private genetic genealogy website, GEDmatch, and look for the Golden State Killer. They didn’t ask for consent or permission because they didn’t have to; the information was freely available, as GEDmatch acknowledged after the arrest. The familial match helped police narrow their list of suspects; after obtaining DeAngelo’s DNA from something he threw away, they made a definitive match.
The public is understandably dazzled by the power of DNA evidence when it leads to the solving of crimes or the convictions of murderers, even though in reality familial DNA searches are not especially accurate (one 2014 British study claimed a failure rate of 83 percent). If DNA databases help cops catch a horrible killer, the reasoning goes, what’s the problem?
But you might have a different reaction if a police officer wielding a large Q-tip knocked on your door and insisted you allow him to take a sample of your DNA to help solve a case. This is what happened during the search for the Golden State Killer. Police swabbed the cheek of at least one person that we know of—an elderly resident of a nursing home in Oregon City—without his daughter’s permission, before ruling him out as a suspect, and misidentified another man as a possible suspect last year, according to the Washington Post. Would refusing to participate make you appear suspicious? Courts have upheld a convicted felon’s right to refuse to provide a DNA sample as part of the terms of his probation, accepting the argument that it was an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment, but haven’t ruled on familial search requests.
Even if you offered up your DNA willingly, what would the police do with your DNA profile after you were ruled out as a suspect? Store it in one of many state or federal DNA databases, just in case you or some close relative commits a crime in the future? Similar questions have been raised about DNA dragnets, when law enforcement gathers swabbed evidence from a wide range of people living or working near a crime scene to rule them out as suspects.
These questions matter because DNA is a particularly revealing source of information about individuals—bioethicist George Annas calls it your “future diary”—and thus highly valuable data. But data is never entirely secure, as the experience of many data breaches has taught us, and data gathered for one purpose is often used for another, as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal recently revealed. Even if states or the federal government adopted sensible oversight policies for the growing number of DNA databases, they would never be entirely secure. As well, it’s not possible to give true consent with regard to your DNA, because every year brings new discoveries about what we can learn from it. You can’t consent to what you don’t know.
The reasons given for expanding the reach and power of DNA databases are usually compelling: cure diseases, catch criminals, find long-lost relatives. But we need to reckon with the equally compelling risks these databases pose to individual freedom. If we can’t guarantee the privacy and integrity of the information stored in them, how can we prevent their misuse? And do we really want to live in a world where uploading one’s DNA into a database is eventually viewed as a necessary public obligation (because, as the U.K.’s government surveillance program motto suggests, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”)?
We should be grappling seriously with these questions now so that in our zeal to solve crimes we don’t sacrifice liberty. Doing so could lead to a world where we all become unwitting genetic informants and where our “future diaries” have become open books.
