State bills limit use of DNA databases
Texas legislators are considering several new proposals to restrict law enforcement’s ability to access databases from genetic testing companies, placing the state at the center of a roiling national privacy debate over a technology already solving some of the most stubborn unsolved cases.
“These people didn’t really sign up to help law enforcement, that wasn’t their intent,” said Amy Mcguire, the Leon Jaworski Professor of Biomedical Ethics and director of medical ethics and health policy for Baylor College of Medicine. “So, it’s a question of, what other purposes can that information be used for? And is this somehow a violation of their rights?”
Across the country, some police departments — but not the San Antonio Police Department — are checking crime-scene DNA against data gleaned from popular genetic testing kits, like Ancestry and 23andme. These increasingly popular mail-order kits allow consumers to share their DNA in hopes of finding long-lost relatives or track their family’s geographic roots. But as the technology can pinpoint long-lost siblings or relatives, it also can link people to crimes.
Representatives of Texas District and County Attorneys Association took to social media recently to decry the proposed legislation and how it might hamper law enforcement.
House Bills 4 and 2545 and Senate Bills 704 and 1014 all impose new restrictions for the blossoming number of companies offering genetic testing.
State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-keller, who sponsored the House measures, rejected the idea that they might hamper law enforcement.
“I have made securing the data privacy of Texans a priority of mine since I first entered the Legislature,” he said.
Under the proposals, companies must get consumers’ consent before they transfer data to another entity, said Christopher Slobogin, a professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School.
“They all regulate an industry that up until now, in most states, has been self-regulating,” Slobogin said.
He said that the larger companies are fairly transparent with consumers, but “some of these companies have played fast and loose with people’s genetic information,” and given the information to other companies without consent or notice.
The largest private companies in the industry have shifted in recent years, as officials learn more about the potential power of the technology, and require customers to opt out of sharing their information with law enforcement, said Mcguire, from Baylor College.
Customers can visit the company’s website and click a separate box to withdraw their consent. But under the proposed Texas legislation, the information would remain private unless the consumer takes the added step to opt in.
Golden State case
Investigators used DNA evidence in a public genealogy database to identify Golden State Killer Joseph Deangelo, who killed at least 13 people and raped up to 51 in California, after decades of investigation, according to the Associated Press.
Detectives are using DNA evidence collected from cold cases and matching it against the genealogy companies’ customers to find any close matches, according to the Los Angeles Times, in explaining the technology’s use in identifying Deangelo.
In Texas, Houston police detectives are using the same ancestry DNA information to solve cases involving missing people and those that have long been unsolved, said Sgt. Richard Rodriguez, the cold case unit’s supervisor.
Officers investigating a fresh homicide can take unknown DNA samples from the scene and enter the information into a national database, called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, to see if it returns any results, Rodriguez said. But the system has limits. A suspect’s identity remains a mystery unless they already had DNA on file.
Genealogy databases gives investigators an expansive new pool of potential DNA matches, Rodriguez said. Most of the time, a search doesn’t return a direct result, but links them to someone in the same family tree, like a sibling or a parent. That can be a monumental breakthrough in solving older crimes.
Even after companies created the opt-out option, the data sets were enough to identify about 96 percent of residents with European descent, Mcguire said. Experts expect that numbers will soon reach 100 percent at the current rate of growth in genetic genealogy’s popularity.
Capriglione said his measures shouldn’t hamper law enforcement. HB4 provides certain exemptions for law enforcement agencies with warrants or that meet other legal requirements. And HB2545 is modeled after measures that became law elsewhere in the country without issue, he said.
Identifying remains
The technology’s use to solve the Golden State case showed investigators across the country how useful it can be while examining decades-old cold cases, according to detectives at several Texas agencies. And not just in identifying potential killers, but helping families identify what happened to their loved ones years after a death.
“It’s a very useful tool for us to help identify the family and identify lost loved ones,” said Detective Scott Minyard, an investigator with the Fort Bend County Sheriff ’s Office.
Investigators in Fort Bend County, for instance, recently used the technology to track down the identity of a woman whose body was found in December 1984, Minyard said. Detectives found human remains on a property that was part of the Manford Williams Ranch in the county, but because they were skeletal, investigators couldn’t find any fingerprints or a cause of death, Minyard said at the time.
“Her family didn’t know where she was for 30-plus years,” Minyard said. “Only through investigative genealogy were we able to identify her. Without that, she’d still be unidentified.”