This week in California's first DNA conviction, a Ventura County woman was found guilty of murder in a case that rested largely on 15 hairs found at the scene of the crime that matched her DNA patterns. There are questions about the validity of DNA testing and about the standards that should be required for court use. An accurate match is no guarantee of legal guilt, and the tactic raises Fourth Amendment search and property ownership questions. Once a surveillance system is established, many factor extend it to new subjects, and new uses. Economies of scale are created that reduce the per-unit cost of such extensions.
Interest groups lobby for expansion.
The surveillance appetite becomes insatiable, both as a bureaucratic end in itself and as an insurance policy. To be sure, sometimes the camel's nose is pushed back from under the tent. Director William S. Sessions recently rejected a proposal to expand the FBI's automated criminal records system to include information on persons who were under suspicion but had not actually been charged with anything. But such cases of restraint are the exception. In the case of mandatory DNA fingerprinting, one can imagine its creeping from violent to nonviolent criminals, then to anyone having contact with the criminal justice system, and finally to everyone.