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<b>From:</b> <a href="mailto:brentmesick@yahoo.com">Brent Mesick</a>
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A DNA database of all US citizens was proposed under PATRIOT II, the
legislation that would have strengthened the Patriot Act and weakened
civil rights. PATRIOT II was leaked, the country outraged and the
legislation pulled. Now, it appears as if it's being re-proposed little
by little.<br>
<br>
The House has passed the Children's Safety and Violent Crime Reduction
Act, which allows voluntarily provided DNA to be captured permanently in
a DNA profile stored by the gov't. The gov't would be allowed to take DNA
samples from people not charged or arrested - just detained.<br>
<br>
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</font><font size=5><b>Vast DNA Bank Pits Policing Vs. Privacy<br>
</b></font><font size=3>Data Stored on 3 Million Americans<br>
</font><font size=2>By Rick Weiss<br>
Washington Post Staff Writer<br>
Saturday, June 3, 2006; A01<br><br>
</font><font size=3>Brimming with the genetic patterns of more than 3
million Americans, the nation's databank of DNA "fingerprints"
is growing by more than 80,000 people every month, giving police an
unprecedented crime-fighting tool but prompting warnings that the
expansion threatens constitutional privacy protections.<br>
With little public debate, state and federal rules for cataloging DNA
have broadened in recent years to include not only violent felons, as was
originally the case, but also perpetrators of minor crimes and even
people who have been arrested but not convicted.<br><br>
Now some in law enforcement are calling for a national registry of every
American's DNA profile, against which police could instantly compare
crime-scene specimens. Advocates say the system would dissuade many
would-be criminals and help capture the rest.<br><br>
"This is the single best way to catch bad guys and keep them off the
street," said Chris Asplen, a lawyer with the Washington firm Smith
Alling Lane and former executive director of the National Commission on
the Future of DNA Evidence. "When it's applied to everybody, it is
fair, and frankly you wouldn't even know it was going on."<br>
But opponents say that the growing use of DNA scans is making suspects
out of many law-abiding Americans and turning the "innocent until
proven guilty" maxim on its head.<br><br>
"These databases are starting to look more like a surveillance tool
than a tool for criminal investigation," said Tania Simoncelli of
the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.<br><br>
The debate is part of a larger, post-Sept. 11 tug of war between public
safety and personal privacy that has intensified amid recent revelations
that the government has been collecting information on personal phone
calls. In particular, it is about the limits of the Fourth Amendment,
which protects people from being swept into criminal investigations
unless there is good reason to suspect they have broken the law.<br><br>
Once someone's DNA code is in the federal database, critics say, that
person is effectively treated as a suspect every time a match with a
crime-scene specimen is sought -- even though there is no reason to
believe that the person committed the crime.<br><br>
At issue is not only how many people's DNA is on file but also how the
material is being used. In recent years, for example, crime fighters have
initiated "DNA dragnets" in which hundreds or even thousands of
people were asked to submit blood or tissue samples to help prove their
innocence.<br><br>
Also stirring unease is the growing use of "familial searches,"
in which police find crime-scene DNA that is similar to the DNA of a
known criminal and then pursue that criminal's family members, reasoning
that only a relative could have such a similar pattern. Critics say that
makes suspects out of people just for being related to a
convict.<br><br>
Such concerns are amplified by fears that, in time, authorities will try
to obtain information from stored DNA beyond the unique personal
identifiers.<br><br>
"Genetic material is a very powerful identifier, but it also happens
to carry a heck of a lot of information about you," said Jim Harper,
director of information policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think
tank in Washington concerned about DNA database trends.<br><br>
Law enforcement officials say they have no interest in reading people's
genetic secrets. The U.S. profiling system focuses on just 13 small
regions of the DNA molecule -- regions that do not code for any known
biological or behavioral traits but vary enough to give everyone who is
not an identical twin a unique 52-digit number.<br>
"It's like a Social Security number, but not assigned by the
government," said Michael Smith, a University of Wisconsin law
professor who favors a national database of every American's genetic ID
with certain restrictions.<br><br>
Still, the blood, semen or cheek-swab specimen that yields that DNA, and
which authorities almost always save, contains additional genetic
information that is sensitive, including disease susceptibilities that
could affect employment and health insurance prospects and, in some
cases, surprises about who a child's father is.<br>
"We don't know all the potential uses of DNA, but once the state has
your sample and there are not limits on how it can be used, then the
potential civil liberty violations are as vast as the uses
themselves," said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of
Massachusetts.<br><br>
She and others want samples destroyed once the identifying profile has
been extracted, but the FBI favors preserving them.<br><br>
Sometimes authorities need access to those samples to make sure an old
analysis was done correctly, said Thomas Callaghan, who oversees the FBI
database. The agency also wants to be able to use new DNA identification
methods on older samples as the science improves.<br><br>
Without that option, Callaghan said, "you'd be freezing the database
to today's technology."<br><br>
<b>Crime-Fighting Uses<br><br>
</b>Over the past dozen years, the FBI-managed national database has made
more than 30,000 "cold hits," or exact matches to a known
person's DNA, showing its crime-fighting potential.<br><br>
In a recent case, a Canadian woman flew home the day after she was
sexually assaulted in Mexico. Canadian authorities performed a semen DNA
profile and, after finding no domestic matches, consulted the FBI
database. The pattern matched that of a California man on probation, who
was promptly found in the Mexican town where the woman had been staying
and was charged by local authorities.<br><br>
Congress authorized the FBI database precisely for cases like that, on
the rationale that sexual predators and other violent felons tend to be
repeat offenders and are likely to leave DNA behind. In recent years,
however, Congress and state legislators have vastly extended the system's
reach.<br><br>
At least 38 states now have laws to collect DNA from people found guilty
of misdemeanors, in some cases for such crimes as shoplifting and
fortunetelling. At least 28 now collect from juvenile offenders, too,
according to information presented last month at a Boston symposium on
DNA and civil liberties, organized by the American Society of Law,
Medicine and Ethics.<br><br>
The federal government and five states, including Virginia, go further,
allowing DNA scans of people arrested. At least four other states plan to
do so this year, and California will start in 2009.<br><br>
Opponents of the growing inclusion of people arrested note that a large
proportion of charges (fully half for felony assaults) are eventually
dismissed. Blood specimens are not destroyed automatically when charges
are dropped, they note, and the procedures for getting them expunged are
not simple.<br><br>
Even more controversial are DNA dragnets, which snare many people for
whom there is no evidence of guilt. Given questions about whether such
sweeps can be truly voluntary -- "You know that whoever doesn't
participate is going to become a 'person of interest,' " said Rose
of the ACLU -- some think they violate the Fourth Amendment.<br>
Civil liberties issues aside, the sweeps rarely pay off, according to a
September 2004 study by Samuel Walker, a criminology professor at the
University of Nebraska. Of the 18 U.S. DNA dragnets he documented since
1990, including one in which police tested 2,300 people, only one
identified the offender. And that one was limited to 25 men known to have
had access to the victim, who was attacked while incapacitated in a
nursing home.<br><br>
Dragnets, Walker concluded, "are highly unproductive" and
"possibly unconstitutional."<br><br>
Familial searches of the blood relatives of known offenders raise similar
issues. The method can work: In a recent British case, police retrieved
DNA from a brick that was thrown from an overpass and smashed through a
windshield, killing the driver. A near-match of that DNA with someone in
Britain's criminal database led police to investigate that offender's
relatives, one of whom confessed when confronted with the
evidence.<br><br>
Not investigating such leads "would be like getting a partial
license plate number on a getaway car and saying, 'Well, you didn't get
the whole plate so we're not going to investigate the crime,' " said
Frederick Bieber, a Harvard geneticist who studies familial
profiling.<br><br>
But such profiling stands to exacerbate already serious racial inequities
in the U.S. criminal justice system, said Troy Duster, a sociologist at
New York University.<br><br>
"Incarceration rates are eight times higher for blacks than they are
for whites," he said, so any technique that focuses on relatives of
people in the FBI database will just expand that trend.<br><br>
<b>A Universal Database?<br><br>
</b>That's a concern that many in law enforcement raise, too -- as an
argument in favor of creating a universal DNA database of all Americans.
The system would make everyone a suspect of sorts in every crime, they
acknowledge. But every criminal, regardless of race, would be equally
likely to get caught.<br><br>
Opponents cite a litany of potential problems, including the billions it
would cost to profile so many people and the lack of lab capacity to
handle the specimens.<br><br>
Backlogs are already severe, they note. The National Institute of Justice
estimated in 2003 that more than 350,000 DNA samples from rape and
homicide cases were waiting to be processed nationwide. As of the end of
last year, more than 250,000 samples were backlogged in California
alone.<br><br>
And delays can matter. In 2004, police in Indiana arrested a man after
his DNA matched samples from dozens of rapes -- the last 13 of which were
committed during the two years it took for the sample to get through the
backlog.<br><br>
A big increase in tests would also generate more mistakes, said William
C. Thompson, a professor of criminology, law and society at the
University of California at Irvine, whose studies have found DNA lab
accuracy to be "very uneven."<br><br>
In one of many errors documented by Thompson, a years-old crime-scene
specimen was found to match the DNA from a juvenile offender, leading
police to suspect the teenager until they realized he was a baby at the
time of the crime. The teenager's blood, it turned out, had been
processed in the lab the same day as an older specimen was being
analyzed, and one contaminated the other.<br><br>
"A universal database will bring us more wrongful arrests and
possibly more wrongful convictions," said Simoncelli of the
ACLU.<br><br>
But Asplen of Smith Alling Lane said Congress has been helping states
streamline and improve their DNA processing. And he does not think a
national database would violate the Constitution.<br>
"We already take blood from every newborn to perform
government-mandated tests . . . so the right to take a sample has already
been decided," Asplen said. "And we have a precedent for the
government to maintain an identifying number of a person."<br><br>
While the debate goes on, some in Congress are working to expand the
database a bit more. In March, the House passed the Children's Safety and
Violent Crime Reduction Act.<br><br>
Under the broad-ranging bill, DNA profiles provided voluntarily, for
example, in a dragnet, would for the first time become a permanent part
of the national database. People arrested would lose the right to expunge
their samples if they were exonerated or charges were dropped. And the
government could take DNA from citizens not arrested but simply
detained.<br><br>
The bill must be reconciled with a Senate, which contains none of those
provisions.<br>
<div align="center">© 2006 The Washington Post Company<br><br>
</div>
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