Your DNA on a DATABASE?

[cressida]

I was listening to Radio Five/Live last night and a caller said an internet database could be hacked into, which meant that DNA details could be copied and pasted and someone could be accused of a crime they hadn't committed.

 

He was asked that if the Database was guaranteed 100% secure would he allow personal details to be put on a Database. He said of course he would.

 

The advantages would be to catch terrorists, to find matching donors quickly and for other medical reasons.

 

What say you

[Tony]

You need two things to hack the database; Username and Password.

 

Which pretty much covers every copper, civilian, administrator, computer operator, etc that has a username and password.

 

Hopefully the database is about to be reduced to a shadow of its former self when innocent peoples information is removed by our new government.

[alchresearch]

It sounds like the caller had his tinfoil hat on too tightly.

 

Yes, any database can be hacked. But to extract the DNA and "plant" it elsewhere? Who would be doing the hacking - a criminal? Anyone with that level of DNA expertise would be on a decent wage to bother with comitting crime.

 

It would be easier for a criminal to sneak into someone's house and cut off their hair or fingernails and leave that at a crime scene.

 

Sounds more like sci-fi.

[esme]

say you can hack in and pull out the dna information of a particular person

 

what exactly have you got ? - you don't have their DNA sequence, you have an electronic record of someone's DNA profile which is a different thing entirely

 

for example take all the letters in a book from start to finish, with that information you can make a copy of the book so this is a rough analogue for a DNA sequence for that book

 

now take an editor and break this character stream every time you see a specific sequence of characters like "and then" or "this is", however throw in the odd mistake and split at a random place every now and then as well, then sort the resulting segments by size and discard any segments that are the same size so you are left with a set of unique numbers sorted into order, this is a rough analogue of the DNA profile for the book

 

you can't recreate the book from it but generally different books will have different profiles however occasionally some books will have very similar profiles so you can use the profile to identify the book within a certain margin of error

 

a DNA profile looks like a bar chart, it can be used to identify an individual within certain confidence limits but that's about all you can do with it

 

you can't take it and recreate a DNA strand to plant at a scene of crime and frame someone, about the best you can manage is to spot families and even this is suspect as matches between unrelated people have been found in the FBI DNA database CODIS

[Cyclone]

Give the government a massive DNA database and who's to say what else might be done with it in the future.

Use it to predict likely criminality, or to restrict NHS services for those with a predictable health problem. That's just off the top of my head.

 

Since it doesn't actually help them solve crime in any meaningful way there's no argument to justify.

[Scutts]

....Since it doesn't actually help them solve crime in any meaningful way there's no argument to justify.

 

Can you explain why you think DNA doesn't help solve crimes?

[Cyclone]

Firstly it only works for people that are in the database, secondly only if there is DNA left at the scene, thirdly it doesn't rule out lots of other DNA being at the scene, fourthly if not secure then rather than hacking in and stealing data, someone would hack in and change it.

 

I talked to serving officers about it, they don't find it all that useful, and in a few cases where it has been relied on it has resulted in miscarriages of justice.

 

Maybe I overstated it though, it's not that it's not potentially useful, it's that it's a massive invasion of privacy and the risks far outweigh the benefits.

 

The exact same reasons that we don't finger print every adult in the UK as a matter of course.

[Scutts]

Firstly it only works for people that are in the database,

 

So if everyones DNA was on it, it would work.

 

secondly only if there is DNA left at the scene,

 

I thought DNA could be got from things such as strands of hair?

 

thirdly it doesn't rule out lots of other DNA being at the scene,

 

But knowing who was at the scene would be a good start.

 

fourthly if not secure then rather than hacking in and stealing data, someone would hack in and change it.

 

How many burglers, murderers and other criminals would have this unique skill?

 

......it's a massive invasion of privacy and the risks far outweigh the benefits.

 

Many people such as myself would disagree and would have no objection to a DNA database.

[esme]

Can you explain why you think DNA doesn't help solve crimes?

 

DNA does help solve crimes, the DNA database doesn't

 

there are problems with the "irrefutability" of DNA evidence, when a match is made it is assigned a probability of say 1 in 10000 or 1 in 500000, which means they would have to sample an average of 10000 or 500000 people to make as good a match

 

so first problem is that a 1 in 10000 match means that in a country with 65000000 people you can expect to find 6500 matches

 

but the accepted wisdom assumes that the matches are randomly located, which means that these are spread all over the country and only a vanishingly small number from this specific area where the crime was committed will match, so if you find one than thats your villain

 

this is wrong, it's the second problem with DNA matching

 

a family tends to skew the randomness of a sample, in a given area they all have similar DNA to a given degree of variability.

 

someones grandad or great grandad could have been a bit of a lad and had kids out of wedlock, one of their descendants could commit some crime and you might be identified from the DNA given a 1 in 10000 probability, the fact that you have a relation you know nothing about living in the same area makes a nonsense of the assumed randomness of the probability figure.

 

DNA comparison tests do not identify individuals they identify groups, and if you happen to fall into a particular group then you will be a suspect.

 

the next problem with DNA matching relates to how the sample is analysed

 

a DNA sample is broken into fragments using enzymes possibly after being replicated first to give a larger sample which introduces its own problems with replication errors, it's a bit like photocopying photocopies, these fragments are then passed through a filter gel and the larger fragments don't travel as far as the small ones in a given time (you may have done something similar with ink and filter paper at school) the result looks a little like a bar code and given a perfect sample from a single individual it can be used to identify that individual. However errors creep in when ambient radiation (heat, light) degrade the initial sample or if samples from more than one individual are accidentally taken (mixed semen from consensual sex followed by rape), accidental contamination by police officers on the scene ... basically DNA samples are small and in the wrong conditions are easily damaged, it's not like it is on CSI.

 

further the best UK labs can turn round a sample in a week if they aren't too busy, it's definitely not a case of going back to the lab with a swab and identifying the bad guy before the program ends

 

taking a DNA sample from a scene of crime and comparing it to a sample taken from a suspect can either eliminate that suspect or provide supporting evidence for their guilt, please not that's "supporting evidence" not "proof"

 

you don't need a DNA database to do this either

 

no cold case to my knowledge has been solved by referring to the DNA database

 

cold cases may have been solved when a sample taken from a newly arrested individual is speculatively run against samples from cold cases and a match was found that sparked further investigation that led to the case being solved

 

but the cold case samples are not in the DNA database

 

the DNA database only contains the DNA of people who have been arrested, not unknown samples taken from crime scenes

[alchresearch]

Firstly it only works for people that are in the database, secondly only if there is DNA left at the scene, thirdly it doesn't rule out lots of other DNA being at the scene, fourthly if not secure then rather than hacking in and stealing data, someone would hack in and change it..

 

Same with fingerprints, but that's a tried and tested method.

 

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/37232072/ns/today-today_people/