For police officers in the US, the genetic profiles that 20 million people have uploaded to consumer DNA sites represent a tantalising resource that could be used to solve cases both new and cold.
But for years, the vast majority of the data have been off-limits to investigators.
The two largest sites, Ancestry.com and 23andMe, have long pledged to keep their users genetic information privateand a smaller one, GEDmatch, severely restricted police access to its records this year.
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However, a Florida detective announced at a police convention that he had obtained a warrant to penetrate GEDmatch and search its full database of nearly 1 million users. Legal experts said that this appeared to be the first time a judge had approved such a warrant, and the development could have profound implications for genetic privacy.
Thats a huge game-changer, explainedErin Murphy, a law professor at New York University. The company made a decision to keep law enforcement out, and thats been overridden by a court. Its a signal that no genetic information can be safe.
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Ye et al/Current Biology
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Reuters/AP
The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn"
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The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth.
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Scott Birch. Wellcome Images
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Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average.
Getty
The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females.But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal
Ye et al/Current Biology
African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017.
Reuters
Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago
A. Gennari
A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste
Steven G Johnson
Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands
Clay Bolt
Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal
New Mexico Museum of Natural History
Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold
Faye Levine, University of Maryland
A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males
Getty
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase
Getty
The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies
Getty/AFP
The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Grard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers
Reuters/AP
The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn"
Viktor Radermacher / SWNS
Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star.
ESO/A. Mller et al
Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins
Getty
Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs
Jos Iriarte
More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test.Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly.
Getty
The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth.
Pictures by: Tom Momary
Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels.
Scott Birch. Wellcome Images
Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid. The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squids mantle cavity can be clearly seen.
Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Images
DNA policy experts said the development was likely to encourage other agencies to request similar search warrants from 23andMe, which has 10 million users, and Ancestry.com, which has 15 million.
If that comes to pass, the Florida judges decision will affect not only the users of these sites but also huge swaths of the population, including those who have never taken a DNA test. Thats because this emerging forensic technique makes it possible to identify a DNA profile even through distant family relationships.
Using public genealogy sites to crack cold cases had its breakthrough moment in April 2018, when California police used GEDmatch to identify a man they believe is the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo.
After his arrest, dozens of law enforcement agencies around the country rushed to apply the method to their own cases. Investigators have since used genetic genealogy to identify suspects and victims in more than 70 cases of murder, sexual assault and burglary, ranging from five decades to just a few months old.
Most users of genealogy services have uploaded their genetic information in order to find relatives, learn about ancestors and get insights into their health not anticipating that police might one day search for killers and rapists in their family trees.
After a revolt by a group of prominent genealogists, GEDmatch changed its policies in May. It required law enforcement agents to identify themselves when searching its database, and it gave them access only to the profiles of users who had explicitly opted in to such queries. (As of last week, according to GEDmatch co-founder Curtis Rogers, just 185,000 of the sites 1.3 million users had opted in.)
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Like many others in law enforcement, Detective Michael Fields of the Orlando Police Department was disappointed by GEDmatchs policy shift. He had used the site last year to identify a suspect in the 2001 murder of a 25-year-old woman, a case he had spent six years trying to solve. Today, working with a forensic consulting firm, Parabon, Mr Fields is trying to solve the case of a serial rapist who assaulted a number of women decades ago.
In July, he asked a judge in the 9th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida to approve a warrant that would let him override the privacy settings of GEDmatchs users and search the sites full database of 1.2 million users.
After Judge Patricia Strowbridge agreed, the site complied within 24 hours. He said that some leads had emerged but that he had yet to make an arrest. He declined to share the warrant or say how it was worded.
Mr Fields described his methods at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago last week. Logan Koepke, a policy analyst at Upturn, a nonprofit in Washington that studies how technology affects social issues, was in the audience. After the talk, multiple other detectives and officers approached him asking for a copy of the warrant, Mr Koepke said.
DNA policy experts said they would closely watch public response to news of the warrant, to see if law enforcement agencies will be emboldened to go after the much larger genetic databases. I have no question in my mind that if the public isnt outraged by this, they will go to the mother lode: the 15-million person Ancestry database, Ms Murphy said. Why play in the peanuts when you can go to the big show?
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Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer at MyHeritage, a genealogy database of around 2.5 million people, agreed. They wont stop here, he said.
Excerpt from:
Detective granted game-changing warrant to search genetic database - The Independent
