In a never-ending quest to distort the presumption of innocence and reduce privacy, CrimTrac — Australia’s law enforcement data coordination agency — is proposing to expand its DNA matching powers.
Currently CrimTrac checks DNA collected during investigations against samples collected from suspects and convicted criminals to find a match. CrimTrac plans to widen the scope of the matches to include familial links, allowing the agency to uncover relatives of the person whose DNA has been found[1].
“DNA, like fingerprints, is a unique identifier of individuals. While collecting DNA from suspects and criminals is a practice that has been extensively used, caution should be exercised when expanding the net,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “There are strong privacy implications for those who may be related to suspects, and to unfairly drag them into criminal proceedings would be a grave error of judgement.”
“It is obvious that there may be advantages in locating relatives of unmatched DNA samples and persons who cannot be located, however it may run the risk of creating a class of persons under increased scrutiny merely because they are related to a suspect or a convicted criminal. What is needed is a high degree of oversight, preferably judicial, to ensure that there is reasonable need to extend the scope of a particular query beyond exact matches.”