Surveillance: Can The Fourth Amendment Save Us?

(Reason)

More and more, police have been using "biometric" technologies—facial recognition, DNA matching, forensic genetic genealogy, and other techniques that are supposed to discern and verify people's personal identities. As civil libertarians worry about such identification techniques' effects on our constitutional rights, the techniques themselves are improving, the databases are getting larger, and the technologies are starting to converge. (It will soon be possible to match faces to DNA found at crime scenes.) What limits do we need to put on how the police use these new powers?

Courts have ruled that the cops can compel arrestees to submit to fingerprinting and DNA cheek swabbing. These data are matched with profiles cataloged in growing biometric databases. The FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System contains fingerprint records from more than 70 million accused or convicted criminals, plus 31 million non-criminal fingerprint records such as those of federal employees. And the agency's National DNA Index contains nearly 14 million offender genetic profiles, 3.5 million arrestee profiles, and 1 million forensic profiles as of April 2019.

Forensic genetic genealogy is the latest way for police to use biometric information to identify persons of interest. Paragon Nanolabs, one of the leading commercial practitioners of this art, defines the field as a "combination of genetic analysis with traditional historical and genealogical research to study family history." It works by comparing a DNA sample from a crime scene with database of DNA from volunteer participants to determine whether the source of the sample has any relatives in the database and how closely related they are. Genealogists then cross-reference those data with traditional genealogical sources, such as census records, birth and death certificates, and so forth.

Forensic genetic genealogy first gained wide public attention last year, when California police used it to trace, identify, and arrest Joseph James DeAngelo. DeAngelo is alleged to be the so-called Golden State Killer, who committed a series of rapes and murders in the 1970s and 1980s. Read more