The Marker of a Criminal
by Declan McCullagh
3:00 a.m. 19.Nov.1999 PST 

You're driving home from a party on a chill weekend night and encounter
your first unpleasant surprise of the evening: A police car behind you
with its lights ablaze. 

Turns out you didn't halt entirely for that last stop sign, or so the
friendly policeman says. But he doesn't seem nearly as congenial as he
hands you a cotton swab and tells you to touch it to the inside of your
cheek for a DNA sample. 

See also: What To Do With DNA Data? 
The second unhappy surprise: You're under arrest. Your DNA matched a
hair sample police think came from someone who slaughtered three people
at a restaurant last month. It doesn't matter right now that you're
innocent, although you used to dine there frequently. You're still being
handcuffed. Unlikely? Given current technology, perhaps. But police in
Scotland are already taking DNA from people stopped for any crime, even
traffic offenses. London police say they hope to be using handheld DNA
scanners within 10 years. 

The privacy implications are staggering. Unlike "mug shot" photos and
ink-and-paper fingerprinting, DNA identification involves taking human
tissue. But few safeguards for it exist: Of the 50 US states that demand
DNA from criminals, only three prohibit the unauthorized release of that
genetic material. Some medical ethicists say that DNA samples are more
intrusive than photos or fingerprints because human genomes reveal
information about health risks, race, and paternity. 

Currently, the FBI's vast database only records data about so-called
"junk" DNA -- areas of human genes that include biologically unimportant
information. But if police store tissue samples, as many now do, the
human cells could be re-tested in the future for more information.
"That's where the pressure is coming right now: To add [those] markers,"
says Eric Juengst, a Case Western Reserve University biomedical ethicist
who is a member of the FBI's DNA advisory panel. 

"It's law enforcement. What they would like to do is have markers
present." Those markers could include race, gender, physical
characteristics, potential psychiatric disorders -- in short, anything
that can be linked to specific genes.