Relative's DNA from genealogy websites cracked East Area Rapist case
This is a very interesting issue with sending your DNA to sites like 23andme.  This means that a police officer can get a warrant to submit a DNA sample to the site, and get back anyone who matches. (Or in this case, their relatives.)<p>The reason I think it's particularly interesting is that it <i>passes</i> one of the basic tests I have for whether something should be searchable by law enforcement: Do they have a target in mind and a warrant to search for that target?  For PRISM and the other things that Snowden warned us about, the answer was no: the government was doing dragnet surveillance of all sorts of data warehouses to find people who fit a profile, without knowing who they're looking for ahead of time.  With this, they have to have a DNA sample found at a crime scene, and they're using that combined with a warrant to do a targeted search for people with matching DNA.  It just happens to be a website that people send their DNA to, rather than a police database.<p>So I'm actually inclined to say I think this is ok?  But I'm not 100% sure how I feel yet.<p>EDIT: ok it looks like this was done not necessarily with a warrant, but with the officer just submitting the DNA as if they're a customer of the site.  But actually my point still stands if they changed their technique to instead use a warrant and ask the site directly, not hiding that they were police officers... it's just that in this case they didn't even need to because it's so easy to just send others' DNA samples to these sites?  It really seems like the lack of a warrant was a technicality here and could have easily gone the other way and still got to the same result.