> In a statement posted to the Facebook group, Pam Lauritzen, the project’s communications director, said the loophole was an artifact of changes GEDmatch imple

> In a statement posted to the Facebook group, Pam Lauritzen, the project’s communications director, said the loophole was an artifact of changes GEDmatch implemented in 2019, when it made opting out the default for all profiles. “While we knew that the intent of the change was to make opted-out users unavailable, some volunteers with the DNA Doe Project continued to use the reports that allowed access to profiles that were opted out,” she wrote. That use was neither “encouraged nor discouraged,” she continued. Still, she claimed the access was somehow “in compliance” with GEDmatch’s terms of service — which at the time promised that DNA uploaded for law enforcement purposes would only be matched with customers who’d opted in — and that the loophole was closed “years ago.” Huh? > In July 2020, GEDmatch was hacked, which resulted in all 1.45 million profiles then contained in the database to be briefly opted in to law enforcement matching; at the time, BuzzFeed News reported, just 280,000 profiles had opted in. How rather convenient. Realistically, I think there’s likely a bit of parallel construction going on too, likely making up flimsy excuses to hide the fact that some crimes were solved with the use of surveillance programs that have not been revealed to the general public. I’d be extremely surprised if the CIA doesn’t have a secret copy of all major commercial DNA databases. If they were using Mitre to try to build a database of [actual, physical] fingerprints by scraping social media images, there’s no way they’d leave such low hanging fruit… hanging.