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To: Walts Ice Pick
This should benefit law enforcement in that it will assist the state in expanding its DNA database.

Actually that may not be the case. It may actually cause quite a bit of harm to all of us. Unlike a DNA test (in which the possibility of a false positive is in the millions to one), the odds of a false positive in the DNA database is about 1000 - 10000 to 1.

The reason is that for many crimes they do not find a complete DNA sequence so you have a partial piece of DNA that will match on many more people.

They have been finding matches in crime cases where the person has never been to that state and could have not possibly done the crime because of their storage of partial sequences. With all 300 million of us in the database, it could actually have them chasing down lots of false positives.
60 posted on 03/23/2011 6:00:03 PM PDT by microgood
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To: microgood

How should we go about distinguishing between cases in which you feel there is a false match and cases in which there exists a match that has been fraudulently created by planting evidence?


63 posted on 03/23/2011 6:04:06 PM PDT by Walts Ice Pick
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To: microgood
I'm with you here, the government and private employers are becoming too damn intrusive.

How about if they start testing for beer intake or cigar smoke. Or even high levels of lipids on Monday morning from that Sunday barbecue.

75 posted on 03/23/2011 9:07:18 PM PDT by jwalsh07
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