America’s True Crime Fix: Now You're Part of the Plot
The True Crime genre—our collective societal addiction. Who can resist? We devour it on commutes, binge it during long-haul flights, and even sneak in episodes during our kids' baseball games. We don't just consume it; we live it—streaming it into our very souls through every orifice.
Well, now everyone can join the fun because U.S. police are using commercial genealogy websites like GEDmatch to crack cases. And they aren't going to let a tiny legal obstacle like user consent block their progress. They're showing initiative by using ingenious loopholes to access all profiles, even of those good Samaritans who’ve opted out of sharing their genetic code with the authorities. Traditional police work takes a backseat as your family tree becomes the first stop in any investigation. It’s not exploitation. It’s innovation!
Justice is a slippery slope, and the police will use your DNA for crimes large and small. And who's to blame them? After all, they just want to hurry and finish their crime solving so they can listen to the next episode of Serial like the rest of us.
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- US law enforcement have reportedly been using controversial forensic genetic genealogical practices to solve cold cases, employing loopholes in the terms of services of private DNA database firm GEDmatch to trick the company’s system into showing profiles of those who had opted out of sharing data.
- Such data has been used even in cases that included non-violent crimes, before all other reasonable means of investigation had been exhausted, with the requirement of a court order bypassed.
- Critics say this is leading to a de facto national DNA database without public debate, arguing forensic genetic genealogy is “a search of all of us."
Sources: The Intercept, TechCrunch, and NBC News.
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