I just heard about this on the evening news tonight. Basically the state legislature overrode the Governor’s veto passing a law that requires the police to collect DNA samples from people arrested on a felony charge. It seems like the focus is on getting the information to the lab quickly to run the results for possible matches on other crimes. The one big problem I see with this is that if you’re wrongly arrested, your DNA is in the system. While the government is supposed to purge the DNA records of the falsely accused there’s no guarantee that they actually will. There’s also another problem in that the larger these databases get, the higher the chance of a match between 2 unrelated profiles. I mentioned this before in another post linked to an article in the LA Times.
Tag Archives: DNA database
DNA matches, not exactly black and white…
I swear, every time I visit reddit I find something that makes me sigh in disgust. Apparently, the degree to which a person’s genetic profile (which is an extremely small sample of your overall genetic makeup) is unique has been called into question by research performed on the FBIs national DNA database called CODIS. It’s not the fact that DNA evidence isn’t as bulletproof as the FBI has claimed, it’s the actions of the agency in attempting to prevent any such research into the matter that has me steamed. The LA Times article linked to on reddit shows just how far the FBI was willing to go to protect their flawed assertions about the reliability of the information in their database.