The FBI is vastly expanding its collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The expansion, which will see a 17-fold increase by 2012 in the FBI's DNA database that currently has 6.7 million profiles, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent, the New York Times (NYT) reported. Law enforcement officials say the move will help solve more violent crimes, noting that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people. But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society. “DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends, told the NYT. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.” Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights. DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. “Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted,” the report said. As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government's power is becoming too broadly applied. “What we object to — and what the Constitution prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. Mitch Morrissey, the Denver district attorney and an advocate for more expansive DNA sampling said Britain, which has fewer privacy protections than the United States, has been taking DNA upon arrest for years. As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the British database, or about one-fifth, have no current criminal record. But in December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain violated international law by collecting DNA profiles from innocent people, including children as young as 10. As in Britain, expanding genetic sampling in the United States could exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law School professor who studies the intersection of genetics, policing and race. Greely estimated that African-Americans, who are about 12 percent of the national population, make up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the federal database, reflective of their prison population. He also expects Latinos, who are about 13 percent of the population and committed 40 percent of last year's federal offenses — nearly half of them immigration crimes — to dominate DNA databases. Enforcement officials contend that DNA is blind to race. Federal profiles include little more information than the DNA sequence and the referring police agency. Subjects' names are usually kept by investigators. Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man's DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.
