11 ms·

The article quotes Denver's district attorney as saying that this familial DNA searching is especially good for "cold cases where the victims are women or child

• uhtred 11y ago
  Showing the world that you pay constant attention to the safety and well being of women and children is a good way to assert how much of a good, real, honest, straight man you are to society. Along with loudly proclaiming "they should all be shot" whenever the word paedophile is mentioned.
  • mjolk 11y ago
    Did you just go from creating a straw man to a "well, actually paedophiles are kind of redeemable" stance? The gallantry and defense of children is because men that are in charge are predominantly straight and have children. Not everything is a charade.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • aw3c2 11y ago
      A pedophile is not by definition a child molester/abuser. I wish they would get help and be redeemed from their abnormal urges.
      • lotharbot 11y ago
        to clarify this comment: "pedophile" refers to someone with primary sexual attraction to children, whether or not they act on that attraction. Terms like "predator", "molester", and "abuser" refer to someone who takes sexual actions against children. There is overlap between the groups, but they're not identical. There are celibate pedophiles, and pedophiles who have ordinary adult relationships and keep themselves away from children. And there are predators who aren't specifically attracted to children, but instead are attracted to the power imbalance.
        • jarfil 11y ago
          I get the feeling that some people want others to focus on the thought instead of the action, because their own actions are deplorable and they're just trying to convince everyone that their thoughts are pure.
          • mjolk 11y ago
            Yes, that's been the case since the predominant alma mater of Hacker News became either Wikipedia State or Reddit University. It's no longer a place for discourse, but instead for people trying to get internet points based on falling back to general, unoffensive platitudes.
          • lotharbot 11y ago
            I think people draw the distinction because there's a huge difference between finding someone sexually attractive, and sexually assaulting them. (This applies to attraction to adults, not just children. "I find that person attractive" is very different from "I'm going to have sexual contact with that person without their consent".)
      • mjolk 11y ago
        Paedophiles only enter popular conversation in response to one doing something unredeemable (acting on their urges). Of course I'd people to get treatment before someone is hurt.
    • ATsch 11y ago
      …as oposed to the women who, if there were more of them in significant political positions, would not be predominantly straight and have kids and therefore would not be so defensive of children?
      • mjolk 11y ago
        No, not opposed to those women, but the wording would be "family" instead of "women and children."
    • bsder 11y ago
      > Did you just go from creating a straw man to a "well, actually paedophiles are kind of redeemable" stance? No, but you went to a straw man very quickly. In addition, it's clear you don't understand statistics. First, DNA is often far from definitive. So, if the error rate is 1 in 30,000, you're very likely to get quite a few hits of innocent people when the perpetrator isn't in the database. Second, people who use "women and children" or "pedophiles" as justifications can generally be considered to be engaging in dishonest behavior. Something that has a logical justification doesn't have to hide behind emotional appeals. Third, "pedophile" or "sex offender" are terms you can get saddled with very easily in the US for a whole range of behaviors including things like giving a child a lost child a hug to comfort them (oops: now you're a pedophile) or taking a whizz in public (congrats: you're a sex offender). Finally, even the worst and most guilty among us deserve to have their rights protected because those are OUR rights when WE get accused of something heinous of which we are not guilty.
      • Gotadime 11y ago
        > In addition, it's clear you don't understand statistics. Yep. This person you're responding to just doesn't understand statistics. Not any specific data that you presented. Just statistics in general. Wait a second...did you even present any data (or "statistics") in your original comment at all? What "statistics" were there to be misunderstood? How can you say that this person doesn't "understand statistics" when you presented no statistics at all? "it's clear you don't understand statistics." I think I said this exact thing in an argument that I had during my sophomore year of college. It was a good way to make it seem like I had some type of reliable data to back up my claim when really I was just suffering from a superiority complex because I thought I thought I was "educated".
        • mjolk 11y ago
          You're replying to someone who replied to statements that I didn't make and hoped to argue using both using emotional appeals ("our rights as people) and against emotional appeals -- "those statistics I read on wikipedia 'win the conversation' because I brought them up first (even though they're not related to your point), which means it follows that I can state my opinions as fact."
• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Didn't you know? Familiar DNA is only useful when the cold case victim is a woman or child. It's not actually any good if the victim was a man. That's just like, basic science, man.
  • josu 11y ago
    You are right. The reason behind it is that these companies use mitochondrial DNA for their analysis, which is only passed down from mother to child. /s
    • facepalm 11y ago
      But why do they need to analyze the victim's DNA - wouldn't they typically be looking for a match for the perpetrator of the crime?
      • Absentinsomniac 11y ago
        I guess if the victim's DNA were on the offender... But then why not ask the victim for a sample? :/
        • bjacks 11y ago
          Because the victim is dead and they can't find any family.
      • Turing_Machine 11y ago
        Because the victim is a John or Jane Doe (i.e., they don't know who it is).
    • nly 11y ago
      Except they analyse Y-chromosomal DNA as well.
    • chrisprobert 11y ago
      You're right that Ancestry.com is focused on mtDNA, but 23andMe actually uses a custom Illumina microarray with autosome, allosome, and mitochondrial targets. Here's a study where 23andMe used their (old version) chips to replicate a bunch of known genetic associations, most of which are autosomal: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002141 http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• anigbrowl 11y ago
  Women are at about 3x the risk of men for intimate partner violence, which includes sexual assault -- see http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/datasources.html http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolenc... for extensive background. While I strongly object to mass DNA testing of the type proposed here, the DA's comment should be read in the light of the huge backlog that exists for testing rape kits. Denver, CO's clearance rate is only about 30%, and there was until recently a strong bias towards testing cases involving stranger assault but not assault from family members: http://www.endthebacklog.org/denver http://www.endthebacklog.org/denver So without endorsing the DA's call, it us based on a legitimate public policy issue rather than purely emotional grandstanding.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    The bias against testing rape kits when a family member was the alleged rapist comes from the difficulty of prosecuting cases where both people agree that sex happened, but one says it was rape and the other says it was consensual. There's not much point testing DNA in those cases because it doesn't help you decide if consent was gained. (I agree with your post, btw.)
    • anigbrowl 11y ago
      I totally agree, but one reason to do so anyway* is because of the non-zero probability that someone who attracts a rape accusation from one person may well predate upon others, sequentially or in parallel. A topical example would be Bill Cosby, who's now accused by some 50 women of sexual assault, many of whom said they kept silent for years because he was so famous and they thought nobody would believe them. * which is fraught with its own ethical pitfalls re. DNA storage, but is in line with current US legal mores, if not your or my personal ideals on privacy.
      • caseysoftware 11y ago
        An accusation alone is not grounds to keep your DNA information around forever. A conviction is another matter.
• pervycreeper 11y ago
  If you look, you will find this kind of reasoning underlying a great deal of public (and increasingly, private) policy.
• draw_down 11y ago
  Gotta stop the terrorists, gotta stop the child pornographers, gotta stop the human traffickers.
  • bayesianhorse 11y ago
    Why notta?
• zmmmmm 11y ago
  Not sure why children, but in the case of women, could it be that a male perpertrator's Y chromosome is particularly easy to separate from the victim's DNA?
• tzs 11y ago
  NOTE: the original submission of this was the fusion.net story. The mods changed it to a wired.com story, then later changed it back to the fusion.net story. It was the wired.com story when ksenzee read it. Only the wired.com story quotes the Denver DA. Since the discussion of ksenzee's comment is the most popular branch of the discussion, I think there should be a link somewhere to the story ksenzee read, so here it is: http://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-innocent-people-into-crime-suspects/ http://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-inn...
• ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-ebook/dp/B00CCGF81Q http://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-...
• pdkl95 11y ago
  > cold cases That is the terrifying part. Does anybody known how much data these databases are actually storing about someone's DNA, after processing? I ask because in the case of some forensic DNA matching techniques, the set of possible results is small enough to have birthday paradox problems. Matching an unknown sample against a handful of suspects is probably fine, but fishing in an entire database of for hits on a set of cold cases? I suspect the probability of finding a false positive grows quickly when the number of possible matches increases.
  • peter303 11y ago
    Forensic DNA use variable repeating sequences in non-protein-coding sections of DNA. Special chemicals latch onto to each key sequence. The repeat lenghth appears as distance or intensity in a chromatagraph. Enough probes and the chance of multiple matches can be less than the worlds population. Forensic DNA was developed 30 years ago when actual DNA sequencing was mostly a pipe dream (just short disease areas).
    • pdkl95 11y ago
      I'm very familiar with the traditional methods of sequencing, including the commonly used forensic techniques[1]. I used to work at a well-known genetics lab way back when everybody used Sanger sequencing. I left right around when the first pyrosequencing machine was available, so I'm not familiar with the newer techniques that were developed after that point. My question is what these newer methods are storing. Elsewhere in this threat someone mentioned that 23andme was able to inspect >100k SNPs, which would be outstanding data if they can produce it with an acceptable error rate. > the chance of multiple matches can be less than the worlds population. See, this is exactly what I was talking about: it depends on what question you are trying to answer. If have a sample from the scene of a crime, we can get very high confidence when matching that sample to even a large number of suspects. The "paradox" happens when you try to ask a different (but related) question that changes the search from one-to-many into many-to-many. Even with a low probability of a match, the larger number of possible matches makes false positives very common. (if you prefer, when the prior probability is extremely low, testing entire databases will tend to find a lot of false positives) DNA analysis is a powerful technique, but you still have to be careful to make sure you are asking the right question. [1] there is viability in how many which unfortunately are somewhat variable, but I'm ignoring that
• rmc 11y ago
  I think the point is that many murdered women or children are often murdered by spouse or parent. The type of case which can be hard to prove. Perhaps a better quote would be "cold cases which are usually hard to prove"