In what some are calling “game-changer” warrant, a Florida judge has allowed for police to access a private DNA database to search for profiles to catch a serial rapist.
A Florida detective investigating a serial rapist will have access to the DNA profiles of nearly one million people after a judge recently approved a warrant to search the full database of the same site used to catch the Golden State Killer, reports say.
Detective Michael Fields with the Orlando Police Department was working to solve the case of a serial rapist believed to have assaulted a number of women decades ago when his investigation came to a sudden stop after the commercial DNA site GEDmatch made a policy change in May that significantly restricted police access, according to The New York Times.
Fields had previously had success using the site — in 2018, he was able to successfully identify the suspect wanted in the 2001 murder of a 25-year-old woman, the Times reported.
But GEDmatch, one of the smaller websites that logs the genetic information of participating users, changed its policy in the face of major backlash by privacy groups after the arrest of James DeAngelo, 72, the suspect in the notorious Golden State Killer case, who was tracked down using DNA matches to his third cousin’s DNA profile from the website.
Fields filed for a warrant in the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida just two months later to regain access to the data. After the warrant was approved, GEDmatch complied within 24 hours, according to the report. (source)
There is no problem with wanting to catch a criminal. It is the use of this database that is the problem.
People who have had their DNA tested have “sold” their DNA to a database, and they did so under the concept that it was going to be “private” information.
However, something that one should know from living in the US, is that there is no such thing as “privacy”, only the ideal that if not outright ignored by companies and sold privately to whoever they want to, is immediately turned over to the government as soon as they request to see it.
There is no such thing as privacy when the government is involved. It does not exist, and those who try to resist WILL be forced at usually great expense to them. This is one of the reasons why so many companies based in the US (not per se foreign companies, who can retreat to their host nation) immediately cave under even the smalllest or non-intrustive of requests.
There are already cases of police using DNA from public databases in order to catch criminals, and not always by matching direct dna from one person to another, but by matching the family members of a person who have already entered themselves in.
One might consider the recent DNA databases to be a massive scandal, for while they have helped people to learn about their history, they have been weaponized against the average man by his own government.
This trend is going to continue, and with the added technologies of facial recognition, voice recognition, and the application of AI and robotics technologies, modern life will not resemble something like that of a science fiction novel where people travel to the stars, but a slave society where every man’s move is used against him. It is a dystopia, and a reflection of hell itself, as those who are encouraging this creation have been inspired by ideas that could have come from no other place but this.
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