Monday's Activities Include: really gross weather

The weather today was really gross, without even the saving grace of spectacular anything. Well, R.'s job site lost power for a while, possibly due to a brush fire involving asian bittersweet. So, there's that. It was so muggy, the stores I went to after dropping A. off at Minecraft camp had fully steamed windows. Weird effect.

The liquor store wasn't open at 9 a.m. like the sign said, not even at 9:06, so I switched to Trader Joe's to get granola bars and as much of the grocery shopping list as I could manage. I did okay -- I may go to Roche Bros later in the week; I may not. TJ's had champagne grapes, which I love. The liquor store _was_ open upon my return. I picked up some wheat whisky from Gloucester, MA, and Burnside Bourbon. R. was going through the Dry Fly too fast for me to feel like I was going to get much of it myself (and I really like it!), so I figured some local wheat whisky might help with that. And we were all out of bourbon, which is just no place to be. Next up: I will probably be buying the JP Wyzer's Canadian blended. We have their rye; R. wants a Canadian. Fine by me.

I had a great phone call with K. My heart goes out to her; she has an offspring contemplating rush. We are _not_ people who rush. Well, not in my generation, anyway. Yikes! Perhaps the impulse will go away.

I got 2 walks, both by myself (just the short loop). M. visited in the morning, but it was still raining at that point. Sort of. The kind of rain that basically just hangs in the hair, mugging you. That's why it's called "muggy", right?

Cold Cases, Genetic Genealogy and a Few Remarks on Whether We Should Worry About This

This will be link fu. Expect updates. Probably. I mean, I _might_ say all I have to say in one go. It could happen.

Recently -- like, since school let out -- there have been a series of arrests in cold cases from the mid- to late 1980s. These arrests are for heinous crimes: the kind of murder that isn't motivated by anything you or I would recognize like passion or fear or greed, the kind of murder that makes you wonder what the hell us that person has been doing where we _didn't_ collect DNA from the victim because we never found them.

John Miller, in Indiana, for the murder of April Tinsley in 1988, and the use of what he did to her to terrorize numerous other children:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/arrest-made-30-year-child-murder-indiana-dna/story?id=56611688

The NYT has, helpfully, summarized several of these arrests:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/science/dna-family-trees-cold-cases.html

Gary Hartman, in Washington, for the murder of Michella Welch in 1986.

Raymond Rowe, in Pennsylvania, for the murder of Christy Mirack in 1992

And a 1981 case, where the man believed to have committed the murder of Virginia Freeman, is already dead.

This post at WaPo, shortly after the earlier arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo in California, by Vera Eidelman of the ACLU has been widely referred to, quoted from, or additional quotes have been solicited from her by articles about the new set of arrests.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-creepy-dark-side-of-dna-databases/2018/05/08/279e9c2c-5230-11e8-abd8-265bd07a9859_story.html

"In fact, investigators’ decision to upload a detailed genetic profile generated from crime-scene DNA to a public website likely violated the alleged perpetrator’s privacy rights."

and

"Even if DeAngelo is found guilty of the crimes he is accused of, penalties for such crimes do not typically entail releasing a person’s entire genetic makeup. People may not be so troubled by such an intrusion when it comes to a serial killer, but imagine the implications of using this technique for shoplifters or trespassers."

That's at least two major arguments -- a civil rights violation of a person who has not yet been convicted of a crime -- and a "slippery slope" argument that could be described as a sort of Kantian, if we would feel uncomfortable doing that to a shoplifter, maybe we shouldn't be doing that to a person who left DNA at multiple crime scenes.

I've been trying to generate situations where what was done with the public database is the problem. I can think of all kinds of ways to violate civil rights while also using the public database (a friend came up with a doozy: what if you knew a bunch of people you were interested in identifying met in a coffee shop and you were able to lay hands on all the used coffee cups. Would it be okay to upload all that DNA to GEDmatch and see what you got? My answer to that was: do your feelings about this change if the people who want to run all that DNA get a warrant before they do so? The problem isn't the DNA and the problem isn't the database.). What I can't come up with is a way to violate civil rights by using the database where the parallel no-database-involved situation is totally fine.

(The coffee shop thing is particularly entertaining, because it sort of overlaps with peak facial rec frenzy, which is even more ridiculous than DNA database frenzy, because facial rec isn't particularly accurate and no one who actually uses it thinks it is. As opposed to, say, writers for police procedurals on TV. What's the difference between running CCTV footage by a whole bunch of people who _might_ know the people in the footage, vs. running facial rec on the footage vs. running the coffee cup DNA? Answer: running the footage past a whole bunch of people who _might_ know the people in the footage will get you a list of names much, much faster. Really, it's a lot like What's the Difference Between an Autonomously Driven Uber and a Human Driven Uber? The Autonomously Driven Uber has _two_ human drivers and the computer driver. The human driven Uber has just the one human driver.)

Will we eventually make some kind of horrifying error with genetic genealogy? You betcha! We've already done it with fingerprints and eyewitness testimony and all kinds of other forensic science. I'm sure we'll turn up problems here.

But the problem are unlikely to revolve around the database. If there were meaningful privacy rights violations associated with uploading someone's DNA without permission to a database, twins would never be allowed to upload anything without permission from each other. And similar things could extend to other closely related persons.

DNA isn't private. It's not. And we need to quit pretending it is. It is something different, and we probably should have some rules around that, but the privacy model is not going to be it.

ETA:

I've posted in the past about Poopers, because, dude, poop is funny. I think it's really hilarious that Eidelman thinks that we don't want to violate the genetic privacy of trespassers. If those trespassers are Poopers, we sure as fuck _do_ want to violate their privacy. Correctly identifying and rehabilitating (whether that means running them through a diversion program or through the corrections system or fining the heck out of 'em and making them wear an ankle bracelet to catch them pulling their nonsense again, I don't really care and am prepared to let the experts decide) Poopers is an awesome project and one I fully support.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/24/8840155/forced-dna-testing-mystery-poop-ruling

Clearly, the company should have uploaded the DNA to GEDmatch instead. Neither of the people it demanded samples from were the Pooper in question. And employers aren't allowed to even _ask_ for DNA samples from their employees, so, bad on them.

More details:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/virginiahughes/landmark-genetic-discrimination-case

ETA:

If you really want to persist -- and I'm betting, collectively, we will, because status quo bias is a powerful force socially -- in believing in privacy as it applies to genetics, this is a really interesting and useful discussion:

http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/culr/2017/08/24/protect-your-dna-ensuring-privacy-in-the-age-of-genetic-testing/