1984: Genetic Panopticon - Freedom Must Destroy The Matching Engine

[grarpamp]

The Genetic Panopticon: We're All Suspects In A DNA Lineup, Waiting To
Be Matched With A Crime

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a
lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the
protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches…
Make no mistake about it…your DNA can be taken and entered into a
national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly,
and for whatever reason… Perhaps the construction of such a genetic
panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the
charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths
for royal inspection.”

    - Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting in Maryland v. King

Be warned: the DNA detectives are on the prowl.

Whatever skeletons may be lurking on your family tree or in your
closet, whatever crimes you may have committed, whatever associations
you may have with those on the government’s most wanted lists: the
police state is determined to ferret them out.

In an age of overcriminalization, round-the-clock surveillance, and a
police state eager to flex its muscles in a show of power, we are all
guilty of some transgression or other.

No longer can we consider ourselves innocent until proven guilty.

Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup waiting to be matched up with a crime.

Suspect State, meet the Genetic Panopticon.

DNA technology in the hands of government officials will complete our
transition to a Surveillance State in which prison walls are disguised
within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and
scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against
terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else
about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your
ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to
follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

It’s getting harder to hide, even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide.

Armed with unprecedented access to DNA databases amassed by the FBI
and ancestry website, as well as hospital newborn screening programs,
police are using forensic genealogy, which allows police to match up
an unknown suspect’s crime scene DNA with that of any family members
in a genealogy database, to solve cold cases that have remained
unsolved for decades.

By submitting your DNA to a genealogical database such as Ancestry and
23andMe, you’re giving the police access to the genetic makeup,
relationships and health profiles of every relative—past, present and
future—in your family, whether or not they ever agreed to be part of
such a database.

It no longer even matters if you’re among the tens of millions of
people who have added their DNA to ancestry databases. As Brian
Resnick reports, public DNA databases have grown so massive that they
can be used to find you even if you’ve never shared your own DNA.

That simple transaction—a spit sample or a cheek swab in exchange for
getting to learn everything about one’s ancestral makeup, where one
came from, and who is part of one’s extended family—is the price of
entry into the Suspect State for all of us.

After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we
come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the
physical appearance of potential suspects.

It’s what police like to refer to a “modern fingerprint.”

Whereas fingerprint technology created a watershed moment for police
in their ability to “crack” a case, DNA technology is now being hailed
by law enforcement agencies as the magic bullet in crime solving,
especially when it helps them crack cold cases of serial murders and
rapists.

After all, who wouldn’t want to get psychopaths and serial rapists off
the streets and safely behind bars, right?

At least, that’s the argument being used by law enforcement to support
their unrestricted access to these genealogy databases, and they’ve
got the success stories to prove it.

For instance, a 68-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested and charged
with the brutal rape and murder of a young woman almost 50 years
earlier. Relying on genealogical research suggesting that the killer
had ancestors who hailed from a small town in Italy, investigators
narrowed their findings down to one man whose DNA, obtained from a
discarded coffee cup, matched the killer’s.

In another cold case investigation, a 76-year-old man was arrested for
two decades-old murders after his DNA was collected from a
breathalyzer during an unrelated traffic stop.

Yet it’s not just psychopaths and serial rapists who are getting
caught up in the investigative dragnet. In the police state’s pursuit
of criminals, anyone who comes up as a possible DNA match—including
distant family members—suddenly becomes part of a circle of suspects
that must be tracked, investigated and ruled out.

Victims of past crimes are also getting added to the government’s
growing DNA database of potential suspects. For instance, San
Francisco police used a rape victim’s DNA, which was on file from a
2016 sexual assault, to arrest the woman for allegedly being involved
in a property crime that took place in 2021.

In this way, “guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in a
technological age in which one is just a DNA sample away from being
considered a person of interest in a police investigation. As Jessica
Cussins warns in Psychology Today, “The fundamental fight—that data
from potentially innocent people should not be used to connect them to
unrelated crimes—has been lost.”

Until recently, the government was required to at least observe some
basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s
DNA. That was turned on its head by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings
that heralded the loss of privacy on a cellular level.

For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Maryland v. King that
taking DNA samples from a suspect doesn’t violate the Fourth
Amendment. The Court’s subsequent decision to let stand the Maryland
Court of Appeals’ ruling in Raynor v. Maryland, which essentially
determined that individuals do not have a right to privacy when it
comes to their DNA, made Americans even more vulnerable to the
government accessing, analyzing and storing their DNA without their
knowledge or permission.

It’s all been downhill since then.

Indeed, the government has been relentless in its efforts to get hold
of our DNA, either through mandatory programs carried out in
connection with law enforcement and corporate America, by
warrantlessly accessing our familial DNA shared with genealogical
services such as Ancestry and 23andMe, or through the collection of
our “shed” or “touch” DNA.

Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical
campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive
national DNA database.

This has been helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation
allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following
arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the
courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples
from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and
local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this
new crime-fighting gadget).

For example, Rapid DNA machines—portable, about the size of a desktop
printer, highly unregulated, far from fool-proof, and so fast that
they can produce DNA profiles in less than two hours—allow police to
go on fishing expeditions for any hint of possible misconduct using
DNA samples.

Journalist Heather Murphy explains: “As police agencies build out
their local DNA databases, they are collecting DNA not only from
people who have been charged with major crimes but also, increasingly,
from people who are merely deemed suspicious, permanently linking
their genetic identities to criminal databases.”

All 50 states now maintain their own DNA government databases,
although the protocols for collection differ from state to state.
Increasingly, many of the data from local databanks are being uploaded
to CODIS, the FBI’s massive DNA database, which has become a de facto
way to identify and track the American people from birth to death.

Even hospitals have gotten in on the game by taking and storing
newborn babies’ DNA, often without their parents’ knowledge or
consent. It’s part of the government’s mandatory genetic screening of
newborns. In many states, the DNA is stored indefinitely. There’s
already a move underway to carry out whole genome sequencing on
newborns, ostensibly to help diagnose rare diseases earlier and
improve health later in life, which constitutes an ethical minefield
all by itself.

What this means for those being born today is inclusion in a
government database that contains intimate information about who they
are, their ancestry, and what awaits them in the future, including
their inclinations to be followers, leaders or troublemakers.

Just recently, in fact, police in New Jersey accessed the DNA from a
nine-year-old blood sample of a newborn baby in order to identify the
child’s father as a suspect in a decades-old sexual assault.

The ramifications of this kind of DNA profiling are far-reaching.

At a minimum, these DNA databases do away with any semblance of
privacy or anonymity.

The lucrative possibilities for hackers and commercial entities
looking to profit off one’s biological record are endless. It’s
estimated that the global human identification market is projected to
reach $6.5 billion by 2032.

These genetic databases and genomic technology also make us that much
more vulnerable to creeps and cyberstalkers, genetic profiling, and
those who would weaponize the technology against us.

Unfortunately, the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA
becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth
Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—continues
to lag far behind the government and Corporate America’s encroachments
on our rights.

Moreover, while much of the public debate, legislative efforts and
legal challenges in recent years have focused on the protocols
surrounding when police can legally collect a suspect’s DNA (with or
without a search warrant and whether upon arrest or conviction), the
question of how to handle “shed” or “touch” DNA has largely slipped
through without much debate or opposition.

As scientist Leslie A. Pray notes:

    We all shed DNA, leaving traces of our identity practically
everywhere we go… In fact, the garbage you leave for curbside pickup
is a potential gold mine of this sort of material. All of this shed or
so-called abandoned DNA is free for the taking by local police
investigators hoping to crack unsolvable cases… shed DNA is also free
for inclusion in a secret universal DNA databank.

What this means is that if you have the misfortune to leave your DNA
traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file
somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file
without a name. As Heather Murphy warns in the New York Times: “The
science-fiction future, in which police can swiftly identify robbers
and murderers from discarded soda cans and cigarette butts, has
arrived…  Genetic fingerprinting is set to become as routine as the
old-fashioned kind.”

As the dissenting opinion to the Maryland Court of Appeals’ shed DNA
ruling in Raynor rightly warned, “A person can no longer vote,
participate in a jury, or obtain a driver's license, without opening
up his genetic material for state collection and codification.”
Indeed, by refusing to hear the Raynor case, the U.S. Supreme Court
gave its tacit approval for government agents to collect shed DNA,
likening it to a person’s fingerprints or the color of their hair,
eyes or skin.

It’s just a matter of time before government agents will know
everywhere we’ve been and how long we were at each place by following
our shed DNA. After all, scientists can already track salmon across
hundreds of square miles of streams and rivers using DNA.

Today, helped along by robotics and automation, DNA processing,
analysis and reporting takes far less time and can bring forth all
manner of information, right down to a person’s eye color and
relatives. Incredibly, one company specializes in creating “mug shots”
for police based on DNA samples from unknown “suspects” which are then
compared to individuals with similar genetic profiles.

Of course, none of these technologies are infallible.

DNA evidence can be wrong, either through human error, tampering, or
even outright fabrication, and it happens more often than we are told.

What this amounts to is a scenario in which we have little to no
defense against charges of wrongdoing, especially when “convicted” by
technology, and even less protection against the government sweeping
up our DNA in much the same way it sweeps up our phone calls, emails
and text messages.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair
Diaries, it’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit
of criminals from the past expands into genetic profiling and a
preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.


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