Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that it is possible to fabricate blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor, and even to construct a sample of DNA to match someone's profile without obtaining any tissue from that person — if you have access to their DNA profile in a database. This undermines the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. 'You can just engineer a crime scene,' said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper. 'Any biology undergraduate could perform this.' The scientists fabricated DNA samples in two ways. One requires a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or a drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification. The other technique relies on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person's genome. The scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a phony DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, says the findings were worrisome. 'DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,' says Simoncelli. 'We're creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.'"
However complicated this may be it still means that the chain of evidence is important.
And if a case rests only on DNA it's never a strong case because we all leave traces of ourselves all the time. The best DNA can do is to exclude you from a location, because if your DNA is nowhere to be found it's likely that you weren't there (or weren't wearing those pesky gloves).
It is of course possible to frame someone by planting their faked DNA somewhere, but on the other hand there are other methods to do that too. A tazer and a syringe will allow you to get a good sample.
In most cases, they don't even have to say it in the first place. It's just a formality from a case where someone who actually didn't know their rights was railroaded. A good thorough law enforcement agent will read them as a matter of avoiding a technicality that could jeopardize evidence gained by your interview. In some jurisdictions, it's an automatic as a matter of policy.
However, if they do read it, and you do claim not to understand it, they can just place a public defender beside you during questioning and he can advise you on when to and when not to and how to answer. Outside of that, they should limit their questioning to what wasn't already known from outside entities (witnesses, evidence at the scene and so on). They do not have to limit the questioning to that though, it just means a possible challenge to anything gained that may or may not invalidate that portion of the evidence. The test would be a judge with some professional help determining if you actually did understand it or not. Very few people will not actually understand it unless the cops actually treat you like you do not have the rights as was the case in Miranda which lends it's name.
Yuppers, reading that just spoiled my afternoon. Thanks Slashdot for letting me know YET AGAIN that the PTB (Powers That Be) have yet again let me down and failed to stand/live up to my expectations.
This doesn't change much, it's still much easier for "them" to frame you by drugging you and leaving you at the scene of a murder, then anonymously tipping the authorities off. Just like they did to OJ to try to prevent another "Naked Gun" from being made.
("They" may be completely evil, but you can't fault their sense of humor.)
Our cartoon city [illinoistimes.com] is, of course, paying for the crooked cops' defense. The news that DNA evidence can be fabricated is frightening; they need to go back to fingerprints. Of course, if you want to frame someone, cocaine is a lot easier to plant than DNA.
With a fingerprint we have always had doubt because it could be planted.
But with technology and DNA we are 100% sure! Well you get the idea, right? We trust technology so much that common sense goes out the window and hence if the beeping gadget on the floor says true, well then it must be true!
Well, here in Germany, the police has searched quite some time for the "phantom of Heilbronn" - a women which apparently was involved with a lot of otherwise unrelated crimes at very different places. Well, after several years it turned out that the DNA was not from someone involved in the crime, but from someone involved in fabricating the cotton buds used to take the DNA probes.
yes...we have doubt about fingerprints NOW, but at a point in time people were 100% certain in fingerprint evidence. This a very logical procession of events. There will be nothing that will ever be 100% reliable.
Don't forget bullet matching [sfgate.com] which I'm sure there are plenty of poor bastards rotting in jail RIGHT NOW because some FBI guy got on the stand with a nice 3 piece suit and said "This test tells us with 100% certainty that the bullet found in the victim was from the box of ammo found in the suspects home".
That is why I hope this story about DNA gets plastered all over the news. Juries just love any kind of gadget that takes out the guesswork and lets them just not think. And anyone who has had dealings with the cops for any length of time knows that crooked cops and prosecutors that care more about using cases as a stepping stone to higher office instead of justice aren't exactly rare. cases should be built on a preponderance of the evidence, not on some magic tech that solves the case instantly, which is what DNA has been, like bullet matching and fingerprints before it.
I'm alarmed too. But this news is not entirely awful. It just means that DNA is no longer quite so useful in proving that a person is guilty. It is still perfectly useful in the much more important task of proving not guilty.
Yeah, insightful, I agree. However, let me point that people are supposed to be not-guilty until demonstrated otherwise. Of course, in practice, having non-guilty evidences is very important.
The important question is, how many innocents have been framed?
I've always been sceptical about DNA proof. Not because I knew that samples could be manipulated like this but the unwavering belief that DNA traces at a crime sceen were indicative of involvement.
Take this example: A man kills a woman. You happen upon the scene just as the murderer has left. The victim is in her death throes. Now I don't know about you people, but my first instinct would be to try and help. To do so, I'd have to get close and touch her. Now imagine her clawing at me. She is dying, after all.
Now police finds you with a dead woman, your DNA under her fingernails, the knife used is lying mere feet away from you without any fingerprints or DNA traces.
How do you talk your way out of this one? Nobody could prove that you were the murderer, but there are some damning clues there, wouldn't you say? That's what scares me about 'foolproof' CSI methods. For each one I could think of a scenario that would incriminate the wrong person. What I missed with DNA was a certain scepticism. People went "His DNA was on her? Well, he must be guilty then..."
You don't need a contrived example like yours. Prosecutors will make, and juries will believe, arguments based on DNA even when the supposed killer was married to the victim. How many times, on the news or on a show like Dateline (which interviews real prosecutors) have you seen a prosecutor claim, as if it was meaningful, "we found the suspect's DNA at the crime scene" when the crime scene was the house or car that the suspect and victim shared?
Anything that makes DNA look more fallible in the eyes of juries is a good thing.
No, that's not true. You START with the presumption of innocence. However, as the trial proceeds, the prosecution piles on more and more evidence. At some point during the trial, there may be enough evidence for the jury to remove all reasonable doubt from their mind and conclude that you did indeed commit the crime you are charged with. At this point in the trial, you are now guilty in their mind, and if you do nothing more, they will find you guilty. On the other hand, you can introduce evidence which creates reasonable doubt...or even better, proves your innocence.
So, while it is not necessary to prove the defendant innocent, it is necessary to defend him/her against evidence which would otherwise suggest guilt. You know the old saying...the best defense is a good offense.
LOL. You couldn't have picked a better time to make that assumption, since I served on a jury less than a week ago.
In our case it was pretty clear cut that the defendant was guilty based on the evidence. After hearing the testimony, I think we were all reasonably convinced. Yet, we took nearly an hour to come to a verdict. A number of the jurors wanted to look at the evidence, to see for themselves that the testimony seemed accurate, and whether what was testified about could reasonably be possible. We went over each element that defines the crime, to be sure we were in agreement that it was met. For one part, we discussed what the law meant exactly to see if the condition was satisfied. We asked the judge if she could provide further clarification on the law. In short, we did not just simply convict...we had a nice little discussion to see if we could come up with any way that reasonable doubt could be satisfied for any individual element.
It was actually a very interesting experience. I went in not expecting others to be very analytical about the process. In fact, my expectations weren't too far off from what you suggest, but I was wrong. I was pleasantly surprised by the character of the people I served with.
As far as everyone else involved, the prosecutor could not have been more professional, and the same for the handful of cops that testified in the case. At least based on my experience, your cynicism is highly misplaced.
Actually, a well written CSI episode on this could be rather valuable for public education. If they made the important ramifications clear: DNA evidence can still exonerate, DNA evidence is still useful but you should consider that it has been planted, especially if it conflicts with other evidence, and therefore take it with a grain of a salt, and there are probably other ones, IANAFS (I Am Not A Forensic Scientist).
Ok folks, don't get yourselves in a tizzy over this.
If you read the article (yeah, I know, it's against Slashdot rules, but give a try anyway) you'll see that all this hype originates from a company that has a product to detect faked DNA evidence, that they hope to sell to forensics labs.
The simple fact is that if someone wants to plant your DNA at a crime scene, there are many possible ways for them to obtain *real* DNA to use for that purpose. They aren't going to go through the hassle of creating fake DNA...
I was about to say that. If you want to frame someone, don't try to make sure you have an alibi while he doesn't. Collect his cigarette stubs, go through his comb and collect his hair, his chewing gums, his used condoms...
If you're a rapist, a trash bin next to a sleazy motel can be your getouttajail card.
All because we take DNA evidence as gospel. It's impossible to fail. Your DNA was there, so you were there. I don't even want to know how many innocent people are held behind bars (or worse, have been executed) based on planted DNA evidence.
All because we take DNA evidence as gospel. It's impossible to fail. Your DNA was there, so you were there. I don't even want to know how many innocent people are held behind bars (or worse, have been executed) based on planted DNA evidence.
Whats worse is people being executed on other planted evidence. Disgraced former Illinois Governor George Ryan stopped the death penalty here when DNA proved that half of the men on death row were actually innocent.
The scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a phony DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together.
Really? It's that easy? God, I'm an idiot. After I cloned the tiny snippets of the common variants, creating my library, I just sat there staring at them and thinking "What the hell do I do now?"
Convert any binary file to base 4 and then convert that to:
0 = A, 1 = T, 2 = G, 3 = C
Or something like that.
And then order a vial of it from one of these companies.
Now you can finally keep all the porn you want inside a tiny container much smaller than a hard drive.
Kind of impractical to access it, granted, but still.
Would it work, or would the "just mix it" part really mix it?
(please reply quickly, I'm running out of hard drive space)
Hey, I just had the craziest idea.
Convert any binary file to base 4 and then convert that to:
0 = A, 1 = T, 2 = G, 3 = C
Or something like that.
And then order a vial of it from one of these companies.
Now you can finally keep all the porn you want inside a tiny container much smaller than a hard drive.
If it were practical such storage devices would already exist. Probably as some sort of "cyborg computer". Would probably also have the entertainments industry frantically researching how to make an arti
Whole genome replication [wikipedia.org] seems to mostly center around Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). PCR is an incredibly versitile technology. PCR machines cycle test tubes through specific temperatures, the thermal cyclers are cheap compared to a lot of lab equipment but still in the thousands of dollars. To do a PCR also requires some type of polymerase, nucleotides, some solutions, and short primer oligonucleotides. These are all items that aren't prohibitively expensive but aren't household items either.
Maybe I'm being too ACLU/tinfoil hat, but I'm getting a sinking feeling that someone eventually is going to try to slap some regulations on PCR, or at some point in the future, having access to a thermal cycler and PCR materials is going to be seen by law enforcement as a reason to be suspicious of you. And I think that would be a real crime. I could see a future where thermal cyclers come down in price even more, maybe high school kids will start tinkering around with PCR as kids from yesteryear played with chemistry sets before we decided they could be used to make bombs and should be banned.
Maybe not. Anyway, I think we should nip it in the bud if there's any hint that law enforcement starts thinking you need to have a good reason to manipulate DNA, just so they can keep their evidence unquestionably true.
The technique has already been shown to be flawed. The only suspect charged with the Omagh bombing [wikipedia.org] has released after the trial collapsed because the DNA evidence has been amplified and was shown to have as much in common with his DNA as some random schoolboy living in England*.
Like fingerprints, it turns out DNA evidence is not some kind of magic irrefutable proof. CSI doesn't mention it much but any evidence which has to be interpreted or go through some process to produce a result is never going to be 10
By planting evidence in an actual crime, you don't have to arrest them under a controversial Orwellian law about "having the wrong books" or "looking at the wrong websites" where they become the new Leonard Peltier, Nelson Mandela, -- i.e. a political figure for people to wrap their cause around. They're just another rapist/murderer/bomber at that point. Nobody will want to be seen as a supporter of them because of being associated with a criminal, and the dissident will be written off as crackpot.
At the moment most (if not all) DNA profiling is done by examining STRs. STRs are specific spots in your DNA where a certain pattern of DNA is repeated a number of times. And the number of times it's repeated might be different for you from the STR at that spot from someone else.
So if you check many of these spots, you can make it extremely unlikely that someone else has all of these spots with the same number of repeats as you do. In the US they check 13 loci [wikipedia.org]. And this fake DNA (the stuff they advertise as being possible to make just by looking in the database, with no original genetic material) is just a load of these loci, with the correct number of repeats in there.
The reason it isn't much of a problem is that the technological bottlenecks that made the human genome project such a money pit are close to gone now. Taking a genetic sample and fully sequencing it shouldn't be that much of a problem in the next few years (I mean you can already do it [decodeme.com] for the price of a coat. To proof against fake evidence, many other SNPs or STRs can be checked instead, as a confirmation. Keeping a list of another 13 STRs to be used as confirmation would be a good start, having the loci known but not recording the results in databases to prevent this kind of counterfeiting.
You'd be surprised how much of this stuff can be done on the cheap if you know what you're doing.
I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to do this stunt when you consider it's been some time since they've created a synthetic duplicate of the genomes in a microbe. (In theory, they could have recreated any microbe they had the complete genome stored for, more or less.) It's only a small conceptual step from doing that stuff to faking DNA evidence.
Oh well, guess we know what surprise twist CSI will
Couldn't the defense though just demand that they test something else? Like mitochondrial DNA? It might be slower but if your conviction hangs in the balance then they could splurge on proving it wasn't your DNA. You might come up as a false positive as a suspect but then actually be cleared anyway.
That being said, just because your DNA was present doesn't mean you commited the crime. Especially in a murder trial. After all they could also obain your blood through other means and just directly plant r
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday August 18, @02:01AM (#29102267)
As a biochemistry grad student, I'd figure I'd need a month or so and could do it for less than $10,000 in materials not including a bit of a practice/training.
Materials - it costs about $0.15/base for small DNA strands, or $1/base for longer (>150 base) if you order from one of many companies. Enzymes run ~$100/enzyme good for about 50 reactions. You'd need about 5 or 6 critical enzymes. The PCR machine could be had for $500, or you could go old school with water baths and a timer. I bet I could get decent results with about $5-10,000 (not including labor, which would take a bit of time). ï
Once you've created a library of the 'snippets' it would be almost trivial to clone up large mixed populations with the right signatures. (Trivial meaning less than a week, and a few hundred dollars).
As for price going down in the future - VERY fast. The tools to make/reshape DNA are still a bit arcane but have recently become both flexible and robust. There is an entire sector of private companies devoted to making DNA encoding & manipulation easier, faster and cheaper. Ordering 10,000-base strand now costs $1/base, but I would bet it pushes $0.10 within 5 years. Building it up from smaller (~100-bases) sequences is currently a bit of an art, but is not 'hard'. I would bet that that process will become much less arcane and therefore much more automated/programmable within the next 10 years to make that a matter of days of robot incubation rather than a month of grad-student labor.
The really scary one to me is the possibility of mastermind criminals framing prior criminals whose DNA is on file. Imagine a bio-hacker pedophile who framed people on those handy state lists, leading the authorities directly to the very people they suspect most in the first place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation [wikipedia.org] makes it sound, to me, that it's probably do-able in a lab (very difficultly), or perhaps we can just get a way to bioengineer a strain of micro-organism to methylate certain areas and sequences as appropriate. Or, perhaps we can use enzymes in human cells that induce the appropriate methylation and find a way to make the enzymes function in vitro.
Either way, the methylation assay they've developed may be useful for now, but probably don't be for long.
So can somebody tell my WTF, if I already have some legitimate DNA from the person I'm attempting to frame, I wouldn't just place that at the crime scene instead?
You can also do it based on in the DNA information for the standard 13-site tests typically kept in databases. That effectively allows you to frame somebody without ever coming close to them. Which could be important if your target is a 250lb outlaw biker or a paranoid schizo with a criminal record. But as someone else pointed out, this isn't a sur
Back when I was in 2nd grade, I think it was, the police had a 'fingerprint day' at the elementary school. They brought in a 5 print card and offered to fingerprint every child 'just in case'. I asked my parents about it a few years back, they said the only reason they signed any form was that they got to keep the card, not the police. I think the police did offer to store all of the cards, again, 'just in case'. I mean, "what would happen if your child was kidnapped from the house and the kidnapper set fir
In order to 'engineer' a crime scene, to incriminate somebody by planting fake DNA, the first thing I need it a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or a drinking cup. Then I use that to fake some DNA, which I place at the scene.
So can somebody tell my WTF, if I already have some legitimate DNA from the person I'm attempting to frame, I wouldn't just place that at the crime scene instead?
It helps to have the right sort of DNA. Say you want to frame someone for robbery, and you have their semen -- I guess you could argue that they are obsessive chronic masturbators and that's why their semen is all over the crime scene -- but otherwise, it would arguably raise less suspicion to find other sources of DNA.
And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Funny)
Careful with that, you might leave an incriminating DNA sample.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
However complicated this may be it still means that the chain of evidence is important.
And if a case rests only on DNA it's never a strong case because we all leave traces of ourselves all the time. The best DNA can do is to exclude you from a location, because if your DNA is nowhere to be found it's likely that you weren't there (or weren't wearing those pesky gloves).
It is of course possible to frame someone by planting their faked DNA somewhere, but on the other hand there are other methods to do that too. A tazer and a syringe will allow you to get a good sample.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:4, Informative)
In most cases, they don't even have to say it in the first place. It's just a formality from a case where someone who actually didn't know their rights was railroaded. A good thorough law enforcement agent will read them as a matter of avoiding a technicality that could jeopardize evidence gained by your interview. In some jurisdictions, it's an automatic as a matter of policy.
However, if they do read it, and you do claim not to understand it, they can just place a public defender beside you during questioning and he can advise you on when to and when not to and how to answer. Outside of that, they should limit their questioning to what wasn't already known from outside entities (witnesses, evidence at the scene and so on). They do not have to limit the questioning to that though, it just means a possible challenge to anything gained that may or may not invalidate that portion of the evidence. The test would be a judge with some professional help determining if you actually did understand it or not. Very few people will not actually understand it unless the cops actually treat you like you do not have the rights as was the case in Miranda which lends it's name.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, fuck.
Totally agree. Well, fuck.
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Interesting)
Whom are you talking about? Given advances in bioengineering this was inevitable, sooner or later.
I've seen some awfully realistic-looking faked videos [youtube.com] lately, too. Technology giveth, technology taketh away.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it just means it comes down to the integrity of the people involved for the most part. [...]
Therefore the "Well, fuck.".
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Funny)
This doesn't change much, it's still much easier for "them" to frame you by drugging you and leaving you at the scene of a murder, then anonymously tipping the authorities off. Just like they did to OJ to try to prevent another "Naked Gun" from being made.
("They" may be completely evil, but you can't fault their sense of humor.)
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Informative)
It's usually the cops who do the framing. An example is right here in Springfield, where two cops were caught planting cocaine. Details of that one from the Illinois Times:
Springfield's worst nightmare [illinoistimes.com]
Man who beat cocaine rap sues the city; whistleblower's case survives [illinoistimes.com]
City's legal bills for ex-cops' defense expected to soar [illinoistimes.com]
LEGAL BILLS MOUNTING [illinoistimes.com]
Our cartoon city [illinoistimes.com] is, of course, paying for the crooked cops' defense. The news that DNA evidence can be fabricated is frightening; they need to go back to fingerprints. Of course, if you want to frame someone, cocaine is a lot easier to plant than DNA.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually it is worse than that!
Here is why...
With a fingerprint we have always had doubt because it could be planted.
But with technology and DNA we are 100% sure! Well you get the idea, right? We trust technology so much that common sense goes out the window and hence if the beeping gadget on the floor says true, well then it must be true!
This has always worried me...
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Informative)
Well, here in Germany, the police has searched quite some time for the "phantom of Heilbronn" - a women which apparently was involved with a lot of otherwise unrelated crimes at very different places. Well, after several years it turned out that the DNA was not from someone involved in the crime, but from someone involved in fabricating the cotton buds used to take the DNA probes.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
yes...we have doubt about fingerprints NOW, but at a point in time people were 100% certain in fingerprint evidence. This a very logical procession of events. There will be nothing that will ever be 100% reliable.
That's called progress.
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget bullet matching [sfgate.com] which I'm sure there are plenty of poor bastards rotting in jail RIGHT NOW because some FBI guy got on the stand with a nice 3 piece suit and said "This test tells us with 100% certainty that the bullet found in the victim was from the box of ammo found in the suspects home".
That is why I hope this story about DNA gets plastered all over the news. Juries just love any kind of gadget that takes out the guesswork and lets them just not think. And anyone who has had dealings with the cops for any length of time knows that crooked cops and prosecutors that care more about using cases as a stepping stone to higher office instead of justice aren't exactly rare. cases should be built on a preponderance of the evidence, not on some magic tech that solves the case instantly, which is what DNA has been, like bullet matching and fingerprints before it.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm alarmed too. But this news is not entirely awful. It just means that DNA is no longer quite so useful in proving that a person is guilty. It is still perfectly useful in the much more important task of proving not guilty.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:4, Interesting)
The important question is, how many innocents have been framed?
I've always been sceptical about DNA proof. Not because I knew that samples could be manipulated like this but the unwavering belief that DNA traces at a crime sceen were indicative of involvement.
Take this example: A man kills a woman. You happen upon the scene just as the murderer has left. The victim is in her death throes. Now I don't know about you people, but my first instinct would be to try and help. To do so, I'd have to get close and touch her. Now imagine her clawing at me. She is dying, after all.
Now police finds you with a dead woman, your DNA under her fingernails, the knife used is lying mere feet away from you without any fingerprints or DNA traces.
How do you talk your way out of this one? Nobody could prove that you were the murderer, but there are some damning clues there, wouldn't you say? That's what scares me about 'foolproof' CSI methods. For each one I could think of a scenario that would incriminate the wrong person. What I missed with DNA was a certain scepticism. People went "His DNA was on her? Well, he must be guilty then..."
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need a contrived example like yours. Prosecutors will make, and juries will believe, arguments based on DNA even when the supposed killer was married to the victim. How many times, on the news or on a show like Dateline (which interviews real prosecutors) have you seen a prosecutor claim, as if it was meaningful, "we found the suspect's DNA at the crime scene" when the crime scene was the house or car that the suspect and victim shared?
Anything that makes DNA look more fallible in the eyes of juries is a good thing.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's not true. You START with the presumption of innocence. However, as the trial proceeds, the prosecution piles on more and more evidence. At some point during the trial, there may be enough evidence for the jury to remove all reasonable doubt from their mind and conclude that you did indeed commit the crime you are charged with. At this point in the trial, you are now guilty in their mind, and if you do nothing more, they will find you guilty. On the other hand, you can introduce evidence which creates reasonable doubt...or even better, proves your innocence.
So, while it is not necessary to prove the defendant innocent, it is necessary to defend him/her against evidence which would otherwise suggest guilt. You know the old saying...the best defense is a good offense.
Parent
Re:And I'll be the first to say: (Score:4, Interesting)
LOL. You couldn't have picked a better time to make that assumption, since I served on a jury less than a week ago.
In our case it was pretty clear cut that the defendant was guilty based on the evidence. After hearing the testimony, I think we were all reasonably convinced. Yet, we took nearly an hour to come to a verdict. A number of the jurors wanted to look at the evidence, to see for themselves that the testimony seemed accurate, and whether what was testified about could reasonably be possible. We went over each element that defines the crime, to be sure we were in agreement that it was met. For one part, we discussed what the law meant exactly to see if the condition was satisfied. We asked the judge if she could provide further clarification on the law. In short, we did not just simply convict...we had a nice little discussion to see if we could come up with any way that reasonable doubt could be satisfied for any individual element.
It was actually a very interesting experience. I went in not expecting others to be very analytical about the process. In fact, my expectations weren't too far off from what you suggest, but I was wrong. I was pleasantly surprised by the character of the people I served with.
As far as everyone else involved, the prosecutor could not have been more professional, and the same for the handful of cops that testified in the case. At least based on my experience, your cynicism is highly misplaced.
Parent
I guess (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I guess (Score:5, Funny)
puts on sunglasses
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I guess (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, a well written CSI episode on this could be rather valuable for public education. If they made the important ramifications clear: DNA evidence can still exonerate, DNA evidence is still useful but you should consider that it has been planted, especially if it conflicts with other evidence, and therefore take it with a grain of a salt, and there are probably other ones, IANAFS (I Am Not A Forensic Scientist).
Parent
Or to phrase it properly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Company selling test to detect whether this has happened shows off a tech demonstration of why their product is necessary.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Take this with a grain of salt... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok folks, don't get yourselves in a tizzy over this.
If you read the article (yeah, I know, it's against Slashdot rules, but give a try anyway) you'll see that all this hype originates from a company that has a product to detect faked DNA evidence, that they hope to sell to forensics labs.
The simple fact is that if someone wants to plant your DNA at a crime scene, there are many possible ways for them to obtain *real* DNA to use for that purpose. They aren't going to go through the hassle of creating fake DNA...
Re:Take this with a grain of salt... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was about to say that. If you want to frame someone, don't try to make sure you have an alibi while he doesn't. Collect his cigarette stubs, go through his comb and collect his hair, his chewing gums, his used condoms...
If you're a rapist, a trash bin next to a sleazy motel can be your getouttajail card.
All because we take DNA evidence as gospel. It's impossible to fail. Your DNA was there, so you were there. I don't even want to know how many innocent people are held behind bars (or worse, have been executed) based on planted DNA evidence.
Parent
Re:Take this with a grain of salt... (Score:4, Interesting)
All because we take DNA evidence as gospel. It's impossible to fail. Your DNA was there, so you were there. I don't even want to know how many innocent people are held behind bars (or worse, have been executed) based on planted DNA evidence.
Whats worse is people being executed on other planted evidence. Disgraced former Illinois Governor George Ryan stopped the death penalty here when DNA proved that half of the men on death row were actually innocent.
A sword cuts both ways.
Parent
Much easier than I thought. (Score:5, Funny)
Really? It's that easy? God, I'm an idiot. After I cloned the tiny snippets of the common variants, creating my library, I just sat there staring at them and thinking "What the hell do I do now?"
Re:Much easier than I thought. (Score:5, Insightful)
It means that they didn't need to stitch them into one DNA chain, they "just mixed them".
That's quite important.
Parent
Re:Much easier than I thought. (Score:4, Funny)
Convert any binary file to base 4 and then convert that to:
0 = A, 1 = T, 2 = G, 3 = C
Or something like that.
And then order a vial of it from one of these companies.
Now you can finally keep all the porn you want inside a tiny container much smaller than a hard drive.
Kind of impractical to access it, granted, but still.
Would it work, or would the "just mix it" part really mix it?
(please reply quickly, I'm running out of hard drive space)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Convert any binary file to base 4 and then convert that to: 0 = A, 1 = T, 2 = G, 3 = C Or something like that.
And then order a vial of it from one of these companies. Now you can finally keep all the porn you want inside a tiny container much smaller than a hard drive.
If it were practical such storage devices would already exist. Probably as some sort of "cyborg computer". Would probably also have the entertainments industry frantically researching how to make an arti
Re:Much easier than I thought. (Score:5, Funny)
* or boyfriend or whatever floats your boat (within legal limit of your country of residence)
Parent
Re:Much easier than I thought. (Score:4, Funny)
Show me the girlfriend who demonstrates ALL the porn you want, and I'll show you the picture of Elliot Spitzer right beside her in the NY Post.
Parent
You can pry my TAQ out of my cold, dead cycler (Score:5, Informative)
Whole genome replication [wikipedia.org] seems to mostly center around Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). PCR is an incredibly versitile technology. PCR machines cycle test tubes through specific temperatures, the thermal cyclers are cheap compared to a lot of lab equipment but still in the thousands of dollars. To do a PCR also requires some type of polymerase, nucleotides, some solutions, and short primer oligonucleotides. These are all items that aren't prohibitively expensive but aren't household items either.
Maybe I'm being too ACLU/tinfoil hat, but I'm getting a sinking feeling that someone eventually is going to try to slap some regulations on PCR, or at some point in the future, having access to a thermal cycler and PCR materials is going to be seen by law enforcement as a reason to be suspicious of you. And I think that would be a real crime. I could see a future where thermal cyclers come down in price even more, maybe high school kids will start tinkering around with PCR as kids from yesteryear played with chemistry sets before we decided they could be used to make bombs and should be banned.
Maybe not. Anyway, I think we should nip it in the bud if there's any hint that law enforcement starts thinking you need to have a good reason to manipulate DNA, just so they can keep their evidence unquestionably true.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The technique has already been shown to be flawed. The only suspect charged with the Omagh bombing [wikipedia.org] has released after the trial collapsed because the DNA evidence has been amplified and was shown to have as much in common with his DNA as some random schoolboy living in England*.
Like fingerprints, it turns out DNA evidence is not some kind of magic irrefutable proof. CSI doesn't mention it much but any evidence which has to be interpreted or go through some process to produce a result is never going to be 10
It all becomes clear... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Pass "homeland security" type law requiring people to register and submit DNA for national database.
2) Keep an eye out for political dissidents.
3) When they appear, have covert government agents commit crimes and plant "teh incontrovertible DNS evidence" of the dissident at the scene.
4) Dissident is taken out of the picture in a way that looks completely legitimate.
5) Bonus: Add extra brutality to their crimes to make the dissident (and by extension any of their ideas) less attractive to anyone else.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It all becomes clear... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point.
By planting evidence in an actual crime, you don't have to arrest them under a controversial Orwellian law about "having the wrong books" or "looking at the wrong websites" where they become the new Leonard Peltier, Nelson Mandela, -- i.e. a political figure for people to wrap their cause around. They're just another rapist/murderer/bomber at that point. Nobody will want to be seen as a supporter of them because of being associated with a criminal, and the dissident will be written off as crackpot.
Parent
This is not a real problem (Score:4, Informative)
At the moment most (if not all) DNA profiling is done by examining STRs. STRs are specific spots in your DNA where a certain pattern of DNA is repeated a number of times. And the number of times it's repeated might be different for you from the STR at that spot from someone else.
So if you check many of these spots, you can make it extremely unlikely that someone else has all of these spots with the same number of repeats as you do. In the US they check 13 loci [wikipedia.org]. And this fake DNA (the stuff they advertise as being possible to make just by looking in the database, with no original genetic material) is just a load of these loci, with the correct number of repeats in there.
The reason it isn't much of a problem is that the technological bottlenecks that made the human genome project such a money pit are close to gone now. Taking a genetic sample and fully sequencing it shouldn't be that much of a problem in the next few years (I mean you can already do it [decodeme.com] for the price of a coat. To proof against fake evidence, many other SNPs or STRs can be checked instead, as a confirmation. Keeping a list of another 13 STRs to be used as confirmation would be a good start, having the loci known but not recording the results in databases to prevent this kind of counterfeiting.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to do this stunt when you consider it's been some time since they've created a synthetic duplicate of the genomes in a microbe. (In theory, they could have recreated any microbe they had the complete genome stored for, more or less.) It's only a small conceptual step from doing that stuff to faking DNA evidence.
Oh well, guess we know what surprise twist CSI will
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Couldn't the defense though just demand that they test something else? Like mitochondrial DNA? It might be slower but if your conviction hangs in the balance then they could splurge on proving it wasn't your DNA. You might come up as a false positive as a suspect but then actually be cleared anyway.
That being said, just because your DNA was present doesn't mean you commited the crime. Especially in a murder trial. After all they could also obain your blood through other means and just directly plant r
Re:If you have enemies... (Score:4, Interesting)
As a biochemistry grad student, I'd figure I'd need a month or so and could do it for less than $10,000 in materials not including a bit of a practice/training.
Materials - it costs about $0.15/base for small DNA strands, or $1/base for longer (>150 base) if you order from one of many companies. Enzymes run ~$100/enzyme good for about 50 reactions. You'd need about 5 or 6 critical enzymes. The PCR machine could be had for $500, or you could go old school with water baths and a timer. I bet I could get decent results with about $5-10,000 (not including labor, which would take a bit of time).
ï
Once you've created a library of the 'snippets' it would be almost trivial to clone up large mixed populations with the right signatures. (Trivial meaning less than a week, and a few hundred dollars).
As for price going down in the future - VERY fast. The tools to make/reshape DNA are still a bit arcane but have recently become both flexible and robust. There is an entire sector of private companies devoted to making DNA encoding & manipulation easier, faster and cheaper. Ordering 10,000-base strand now costs $1/base, but I would bet it pushes $0.10 within 5 years. Building it up from smaller (~100-bases) sequences is currently a bit of an art, but is not 'hard'. I would bet that that process will become much less arcane and therefore much more automated/programmable within the next 10 years to make that a matter of days of robot incubation rather than a month of grad-student labor.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh dear. I can just imagine it on Craigslist:
NEW PACKAGE for 2009! Contract hit + framing of your choice! Just $15,000!
Re:If you have enemies... (Score:5, Insightful)
The really scary one to me is the possibility of mastermind criminals framing prior criminals whose DNA is on file. Imagine a bio-hacker pedophile who framed people on those handy state lists, leading the authorities directly to the very people they suspect most in the first place.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation [wikipedia.org] makes it sound, to me, that it's probably do-able in a lab (very difficultly), or perhaps we can just get a way to bioengineer a strain of micro-organism to methylate certain areas and sequences as appropriate. Or, perhaps we can use enzymes in human cells that induce the appropriate methylation and find a way to make the enzymes function in vitro.
Either way, the methylation assay they've developed may be useful for now, but probably don't be for long.
Disclaimer
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can also do it based on in the DNA information for the standard 13-site tests typically kept in databases. That effectively allows you to frame somebody without ever coming close to them. Which could be important if your target is a 250lb outlaw biker or a paranoid schizo with a criminal record. But as someone else pointed out, this isn't a sur
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So let me get this straight. (Score:5, Funny)
In order to 'engineer' a crime scene, to incriminate somebody by planting fake DNA, the first thing I need it a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or a drinking cup. Then I use that to fake some DNA, which I place at the scene.
So can somebody tell my WTF, if I already have some legitimate DNA from the person I'm attempting to frame, I wouldn't just place that at the crime scene instead?
It helps to have the right sort of DNA. Say you want to frame someone for robbery, and you have their semen -- I guess you could argue that they are obsessive chronic masturbators and that's why their semen is all over the crime scene -- but otherwise, it would arguably raise less suspicion to find other sources of DNA.
Parent