Parabon Nanolabs and similar groups use genealogy websites to find distant relatives to crime scene collected DNA. Then they work backwards in to find potential suspects using family trees. This is how they caught the Golden State Killer.
Maybe someone had a family member get murdered in a certain area, and now they are paying a private group to collect as many samples as they can to submit to the website. This would allow the killer of their family member to potentially be found. This doesn’t sound completely absurd to me.
Holy crap that website is bad. Every few paragraphs (pretty short ones) there's all caps and bolded links like "READ MORE" or "WATCH BELOW" for tangential content. It's hard to tell whether something was a heading or tangential spam.
Reading through (and paraphrasing) all the great ideas people have posted here, I'm seeing 3 basic theories: a fraud/scam, a criminal investigation, or activism.
- FRAUD/SCAM. Example: a dishonest health care provider does expensive screening tests on poor Medicaid-eligible people which it then bills to Medicaid (i.e., to the government).
- CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION. Somebody is collecting DNA in targeted neighborhoods hoping to get the DNA of someone related to an unknown perpetrator whose DNA they have from a crime scene. This is essentially how the Golden State Killer was caught.
- ACTIVISM. This might be also called a "social media experiment" or culture jamming. It could be, for example, a subversive critique on the creation of DNA databases or an attempt to convince the public that mass collection of DNA is not a good thing.
Other possibilities: organ “donations”, budget blood transfusion matching for life extension, viral genoc precursor, illegal/unethical invasive experiments.
Someone is repeatedly targeting poor/vulnerable people for their DNA and lying about uses.
Someone has an upstream use for that data that pays or saves big money, is illegal, or is unethical. They’re hiding for some reason.
That they falsely claimed multiple difficult-to-disprove origins makes this very interesting. How difficult would it be to falsify DNA evidence, given a set of good samples?
I could also see this being used to poison DNA records in databases like FamilyTreeDNA's, who collaborate with the FBI [1]. What services and databases allow for sending in samples of this type?
Poisoning DNA dbs would be an interesting culture jam. Kind of the biological equivalent of using a postage paid envelope from a credit card company to mail them your junk mail.
Culture Jam was one of the delights of the 20th centuries that as fallen away. Of course now we have no need for culture jam in the common case of mass communications, as it has well jammed itself
Are there any laws that would prevent the government from doing this to establish a crime database? They've already used DNA testing company databases to catch people through their relatives.
I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, and the fact that the sample-takers claim to be from a private company leans me away from the government, but they could have contracted it out. And I wouldn't put anything past the current administration.
The article doesn't say whether or not people are providing their ID along with the samples, but I'd presume that they are.
Far more valuable for the government to establish a relationship with a company that will do this for them, since our laws prohibiting the government from doing thing X seem to have no qualms with it contracting with company Y to do thing X...
Government could use 5th amendment clause protecting against expropriation. It just establishes that the government has to give compensation to assume control of property, when no charges have been filed against the person or the person's property.
With DNA being part of a human being, it wouldn't make sense for the government to circumvent that amendment with civil forfeiture as it does with non-human property.
Sure, but it’s not voluntary if it’s done fraudulently. Hypothetically, if the police or their agents were doing this and telling people it was a test for cancer, that might not hold up.
>Sure, but it’s not voluntary if it’s done fraudulently.
The police are allowed to lie to you to get you to consent to a search. (The most common example is claiming they could search w/o consent but you agreeing makes it "easier")
Violating the privacy of multiple non-suspects is a search? None of the people in the article seem to be under suspicion, yet their DNA is being collected under the pretense of a “cancer test.” Police can lie to suspects, but they don’t get to violate the rights of (presumed) innocent people.
Freaky. Dna samples should sort of be viewed as banking information. Some point I am sure dna will be correlated with different arguments styles people are vulnerable to. Or their purchasing style etc. Or even better correlated with their overall life outcomes.
I wonder if they are looking for genetic correlates with homeless or marginalization or mental health.
It is surely a study without consent of the participants. Super illegitimate and shady.
> Dna samples should sort of be viewed as banking information.
Actually, because your DNA is yours for life it should be kept far MORE secure than your banking information. You can always change your bank account!
To your other points, this is already being attempted in some countries. Imagine getting a bad "social credit" score because you were born with DNA unfavorable to your government.
Your DNA is barely yours. It's all shared with a lot of other people. You have only a handful (~100) private mutations that could really be called "yours", which is moot next to the six billion base pairs that make up the rest of your genome. Now yes, the unique combination of DNA that is in your genome is virtually impossible to be shared with anyone else. But, you are not going to be able to precisely and completely reconstruct it. Even the human reference has dozens of remaining gaps. Nobody really knows exactly what is in their own genome, and every reconstruction is based on sharing with other humans, so the idea of ownership is somewhat strange to me.
Most songs are largely the same chords and notes, but that doesn't mean that any particular assemblage those isn't something that could be identifiable, unique, and expressive in a in an interestingly different way.
You can't quantify what is ultimately going to be expressed as qualities by counting the numbers of genes that may be different; it doesn't take that many bits to make you likely to ultimately stay unique for any length of future human history.
The problem with this is that all it takes is a relative to narrow things down tremendously so you could protect your DNA with Fort Knox and it wouldn’t really matter if your near-ish family did not
Your family only shares part of your genome. Even if you have full sequence data on both parents, you don't have anything near full information about the child. With siblings you would have less information, and the information gained from distant relatives becomes astonishingly small the farther you go. Don't assume that your DNA is fully compromised just because someone in your family has surrendered it.
I work to apply encryption directly to DNA molecules, the Fort Knox of DNA data security ;)
Is the article: "She swiped her co-worker’s coke. Can police say it cracked a 28-year-old murder case?" or "She swiped her co-worker’s Coke can. Police say it cracked a 28-year-old murder case."
So aside from the other post showing just one of many instances of crime scene investigation (unofficial in that case), this particular story is obviously extremely shady and very unclear what their exact goals are. Otherwise if you really wanted lots of DNA you’d be a “dishwasher” at a restaurant.
Right, I was posing that question rhetorically to make essentially those points. Obtaining DNA in this manner is different than collecting samples left publicly. I also wonder if they’re asking these people for their names, IDs, medical history, classifying or selecting by race, etc information.
So I guess then we might as well just post it online for everyone to see at the click of a button! Someone could also follow you around or put a GPS tracker on your car, so why not just post our GPS data online while we're at it. /s
Genetic data security is a real problem, and making it difficult to obtain this sensitive information has real value.
I for one live in a plastic bag to mitigate any risk that I might leave DNA around to be exploited.
Really, it's not a risk. You won't be able to name a single case of active harm caused by disclosure or sharing of genetic information. The worst thing that is possible is to learn your family isn't what you expected it to be. There have been no other known cases of harm due to genetic disclosure.
This will absolutely change if someone decided that DNA makes for a good way to access your bank account. It is not. It would be no better to key your bank account to an image of your face. Face unlocking phones look to be a good testbed for what might go wrong if security is placed on this kind of footing.
"I for one live in a plastic bag to mitigate any risk that I might leave DNA around to be exploited."
People have doors with locks, and they lock them, even though in most cases it is not too hard to break a window or make a hole in the wall.
"Really, it's not a risk. You won't be able to name a single case of active harm caused by disclosure or sharing of genetic information."
Due to limited resources, medical authorities often have to decide who gets medical treatment. For instance, if someone is an alcoholic and can't quit drinking, giving them a new liver seems like a waste, right? So, genetic information is going to inform medical decisions if it is available. If you have a gene that is thought to predispose you to a recurrence of a problem, then it's logical not to treat it the same way. And the thing that frightens me personally is the idea that this might be done based not on good information but spurious correlations, gut instincts, or popular opinion. Why would you think this is far fetched? Isn't this the way our society already works, never mind possible dystopias?
>You won't be able to name a single case of active harm caused by disclosure or sharing of genetic information. The worst thing that is possible is to learn your family isn't what you expected it to be.
There are many reasons to keep DNA private, it gets much worse than just family surprises. Your DNA is yours for the rest of your life, so even if there are no current threats (which there are to some), there may be threats in the future.
Please watch this video if you are interested in learning more:
But DNA needs to be copied to be analyzed. So we could invent a law that makes each person owner of the copyright to their own DNA. There could be legal penalties for anyone who copies the DNA without permission. Twins will need some special consideration though since they share the same DNA.
It does not need to be copied to be analyzed. You can feed it through a nanopore without any copying, and do an analysis in current flux space without ever instantiating the original sequence. But I am just being semantic. Really, we are all copies of each other, remixed and so forth. If Joe's body makes sperm that includes a haplotype in Sally's genome, is he violating her copyright? We quickly get to an absurd place. We no more own our genome than we own our great grandmother, or she owns us.
Maybe an agency or organization building a DNA database. Or maybe they're looking for a specific criminal using familial DNA, similar to how the alleged Golden State Killer was located:
Another contemporary example was the CIA staging a "vaccination campaign" in Pakistan. They were pushing vaccinations, and then harvesting the DNA to try to track individuals related to Bin Laden.
Which created a horrible atmosphere for people actually giving vaccinations, and caused and causes a lot of people to go unvaccinated.
A real blowback is going to be when we realize that Western and middle-class anti-vax sentiment caused by Wakefield and various crackpot websites is going to collide through relatives and immigration with South Asian anti-vax sentiment caused by CIA and military operations masquerading as NGO vaccination programs, and result in a vicious circle of vaccination fears.
“WAVE 3 News contacted Passport representative Ben Adkins, who said Passport is not related to the group. Passport Health warned customers about engaging with them.“
"One of these new cancer-screening tests can cost up to $2,000 ... Some Medicaid health insurance plans covers these tests, so they would reimburse that money to whoever conducts the test."
"Freedom Medical Labs was allegedly offering a new DNA-based cancer-screening test ..."
"... only offered the test to customers of Passport Health Plan, the local low-cost Medicaid insurance provider."
Passport being the one Freedom is gearing up to robo-bill through.
The DNA gets stored away in case of audit by Medicaid, in which case the donors might actually get their test results in the mail -- and maybe the results would be genuine, although that expense would cut into the profit margin of the scheme.
Hey everyone, I wrote the Global News piece (and I appreciate the jabs at our format, haha)...
Yes, we're mostly a Canada-focused website, but my job is to cover international things. I stumbled on this van story and started digging out of curiosity, and I ended up falling down a deep rabbit hole. There is a lot happening here, so if you're interested I recommend checking in on Tuesday or Wednesday. That's when I'm aiming to publish Part 2.
Maybe someone had a family member get murdered in a certain area, and now they are paying a private group to collect as many samples as they can to submit to the website. This would allow the killer of their family member to potentially be found. This doesn’t sound completely absurd to me.