Your DNA is probably
already in a database. You didn't have to provide
a sample or give consent but the unique sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs that make you you are searchable nonetheless. So if you committed a heinous crime and left a bit of your DNA, law enforcement could
search it in a database and identify you. This video includes a
discussion of serious crimes which may be disturbing for some viewers so I wanted to let you know that upfront, but I think it's necessary to talk about these crimes in some detail for reasons that will become apparent. In the small town of Visalia,
California in the mid 1970s, one of the state's most prolific
criminals got his start. He repeatedly broke into
houses and stole small items like cash, coins, and jewelry. He was dubbed the Visalia ransacker but soon his crimes escalated. - Six months later in 1976, he moves up to Sacramento and over the course of the next three years, he's moving all across Northern California committing numerous sexual assaults, over 50 sexual assaults. - Here, he was called
the east area rapist. - [Male Reporter] The police
are saying lock up tight. Sacramento's infamous east area
rapist may still be in town. - And then in 1979, he moves
down to Southern California, starting in Santa Barbara
and starts killing. And he was known as the
original night stalker in Southern California. - [Reporter] Variously known
as the east area rapist and the original night stalker, these were brutal
meticulously planned crimes that spanned numerous California counties between 1976 and 1986. - Police believed that all of these crimes were committed by the same person now known as the golden state killer. How was it known that these were committed by the same person? - Investigators were relying on MO. MO, modus operandi is basically how a criminal will commit a crime. - He was wearing some
type of a mask or a hood. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. - The golden state killer
had a very distinctive MO - What he would do is he would break into a house with a gun, a house with a man and a woman. He would tie them up tell the man I'm gonna
put plates on your back. If I hear those plates move, I'm going to kill your
wife and then kill you, take the wife into another
room and sexually assault her. Then he would go through the
house for however much time, eating, stealing stuff, stealing
little things or whatever and then he would leave. - How was he not caught based
on fingerprint evidence? - Well, he didn't leave his fingerprints. He always wore a mask. He always had gloves on. This was an offender that did everything to prevent himself from being caught. - [Reporter] The golden
state killer has been linked to at least 12 murders, 50 rapes and a string of burglaries
throughout California. - All right, how's it going? - How you doing?
- Good. - So we supply DNA sequencing solutions to the forensic laboratories
that process crime scene DNA. At a crime scene, there's
typically less than a nanogram of DNA left and it's
usually degraded, right? So it breaks down.
- Why is there so little? at a crime scene? A nanogram? - Yes. - That's insane. - Yes. - There's no accident
that he stops in 1986. 1986 is when the first
DNA case of a murder case is actually solved with DNA and he's, I think he's following that
and he's saying, you know what, what I'm doing here, I'm leaving my DNA. I can't do this anymore. - [Reporter] Investigator
Paul Holes tracked the golden state killer for decades. - He couldn't it account
for DNA technology and that really was his big mistake. That was the critical mistake. He left his DNA all over California. And it turns out that in three of the cases, I had three sexual assault
kits and that's where I got the golden state killer's
DNA from Northern California. - But having the unknown
killer's DNA wasn't enough. They needed to match it to a known sample. In 1990, the FBI started work on what would become a
national genetic database. It mainly stores DNA profiles from convicted criminals
and persons of interest. It's called the combined DNA index system or CODIS for short. In each of your cells, there
are 23 pairs of chromosomes, one from your mom and one from your dad. And at particular places
on some chromosomes, there are short sections
of DNA that repeat like A A T G, A A T G, A A T G, and so on. These are called short
tandem repeats or STRs and different people have
different numbers of repeats. Forensic labs produce STR profiles by counting up the number
of repeats at each location. Initially, there were
only 13 places on the DNA where STRs were counted, but in 2017 that was expanded to 20. It feels to me like that's
not that much information. - It isn't. - But the chances of two people having the exact same number of
repeats at all locations is incredibly small. The CODIS database now contains over 18 million STR profiles. - The golden state killer's
DNA profile has been up at the national DNA database that's run by the FBI
called CODIS since 2001 and has been searching
ever since with no hits. We did Interpol searching, trying to search other
country's DNA databases thinking well, maybe he came from
a out of the country that's why after all this time we have yet to be able to identify him and obviously we didn't get any hits. - But genetic sequencing
technology was advancing rapidly. - [Female Reporter] The
genome project was completed. Since 1986 scientists had
been mapping and sequencing the three billion nucleotides contained in the human genome. It's anticipated that - Soon private companies
began offering genetic tests directly to consumers and they
provide far more genetic data than what's in the CODIS database. I traveled to Houston, Texas to visit Family Tree DNA headquarters. - We'll go in the lab
and we'll start talking about the life cycle of a sample. There you go. - Thank you. These samples, what are they? - So they're cheek cells.
They just scrape the inside of their cheek,
they put a cap on it and they send it back to us. - It's like a robot ballet. - Yes, so for DNA extraction, we need to remove all of the
protections that are on the DNA and just separate it by itself
so we can do testing on that. - Instead of looking at
20 places on your DNA, these tests examined 700 to 800,000. - The Family Finder test is based on what's called a micro array and this is what a micro array looks like. Each one of those boxes is an individual. We can fit 24 individuals on here. And within that box is
about 710,000 positions of your DNA, that we're measuring,
we're getting data for. - 710,000? - Yes, and they're called snips. - So hang on, that's like 710,000 individual bases, like ATGC? - Yes. - For each person, you can
measure 24 on that single chip? - Correct. - The human genome consists
of three billion bases. All people share about
99.9% the exact same DNA, which means on average, only
about three million basis differ from person to person. These individual letter changes are known as single nucleotide
polymorphisms or SNPs. So on there, are there a whole bunch of like little pieces of DNA then? - Yes, so what we have
is a short piece of DNA that is specific to one SNP. So it's one position in the genome where we know there can be a difference. - Okay. Is there any example of a simple SNP that confers some sort of? - Actually blue eyes is
a single base change. - Really? - Yeah. - So everyone with blue eyes
has this one letter change? - mm hmm - You can see now it's
starting to scan the first box. - The results of your
710,000 SNPs can tell you about your geographic ancestry or possible medical conditions, but they can also quantify how related you are to someone else. The genetics of having a kid are a bit like cutting two
decks of cards together. The resulting deck will share about half its cards with each parent and there'll be long sequences of cards which match identically
sequences in each parent. Now, if this deck has a
kid, well then its offspring will share only about
a quarter of its cards with each grandparent and the
sections of identical cards will be shorter, and this
is how it works with DNA. The more closely you're
related to someone, the more DNA you share and the longer the blocks of identical DNA are. But to compare the DNA of two people, you don't need to read every letter. The snips are sprinkled throughout the DNA roughly every 2000 bases. So if you find long sections
where the snips match up, you can bet that the DNA
in between is identical too by comparing hundreds of
thousands of snips sprinkled throughout the DNA, you can see where these
identical blocks start and stop and so how much total DNA is shared. - Everywhere that is highlighted in blue is where I share DNA. - With your father?
- With my father which is exactly what you expect because I should share
DNA with him everywhere because he gave me 50% of my DNA. So this is a second to third cousin. I have no idea who this person is. And you can see here, we are definitely not as
closely related as me and my dad because where the blue is, those are the only
regions of the chromosome where we share DNA. - We all know that these genetic tests can help identify our
relatives but the question is, can you do the same thing with
law enforcement databases? Can you identify family members
using the CODIS database? - You can and it's only limited to really first order and
second order relatives. - That means if I'm looking
for the golden state killer, I'm looking for either his
father, his brother or his son. We did that over and
over again with no hits. - Why is it so limited? - Because you've only got 23 loci. If you wanna do proper kinship analysis, you need to have more points
assessed on that genome to see how related you really are. - We know the answer
is behind a locked door and the answer is behind the locked door of 23andMe and Ancestry.com. We know that they have
millions of profiles. Somebody related to him, a
second cousin I would guess, would be in there. - Sure. - And that was very hard to deal with. You know, that the answer is
there behind this locked door. - Law enforcement is not allowed to search the databases of 23andMe and Ancestry.com but luckily for investigators,
there was another way. An independent website called
GEDmatch had been set up to allow people to connect with relatives. You can upload the raw data from any of the big
genetic testing companies and search for matches. - So when we initially
search the GEDmatch database, our best hits come back at third cousins which means they shared
you know, our top hit, I think shared about 1% of the DNA. It's very little DNA that's shared but that's a starting data point. And theoretically, by taking
multiple of these individuals that share DNA and
building their family trees using traditional genealogy
and public source documents like census records and obituaries and newspaper articles and findagrave.com, you build this family tree back until you get two of these relatives of the golden state killer,
you get them to intersect where now you see, oh, they've got, they share great-great grandparents together. Theoretically the golden
state killer is a descendant from those same great-great grandparents. So once I identify that common ancestor, it's now identifying
every single descendant from those great-great grandparents and this becomes a huge process. People in the 1840s would
typically have 15 kids. You have to identify each of those kids and then all of their children and then all of their children. So now we have this exponentially
growing family tree. - How wide did that tree get? - I think we had over 1000
individuals in that family tree but we knew a lot about our offender. We were confident he was
born between 1940 and 1960. We knew he was a white male. We knew he was 5'8" to 5'10". You know, he's in California. He's up in Sacramento in 1976. He's in Southern California in the '80s and we basically narrowed
it down to about five males and then it's just investigations. - With a suspect at their fingertips, this spring, they followed him to a Sacramento area Hobby Lobby store and took a DNA sample
from his car door handle. Days later, investigators
recovered another DNA sample from one discarded tissue
which registered a match to DNA evidence left at
one of the crime scenes. - Investigators in California
say DNA evidence led them to one of the country's most
notorious serial killers. Former police officer
Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested yesterday and he is believed to be the so-called golden state killer. - For 44 years, countless
investigators have worked it and have failed to solve it. Within four and a half months,
a team of six were able to figure out who the
golden state killer was and that was Joseph DeAngelo. - After the golden state
killer was identified, the flood gates opened and
we were seeing every week not only single killers,
but multiple killers, serial killers, every
week were being identified from cases in the '70s and the '80s. - 'Cause, there's been over 70 cases now that they've solved this way and they continue to solve
them at a fairly regular rate and I think - Presumably that rate's
just gonna increase. - Yeah. - And there's gonna be
more because it's working and we are going to
help find these people. - But the scary thing is in the US, you have 100,000 cold
case murders with DNA. You have more cold cases
but the ones with DNA is estimated about 100,000 There's roughly about
650,000 sexual assaults, cold cases with DNA.
- With DNA? It seems like a real paradigm shift. - It is. Multiple law enforcement agencies has said that this is the most
revolutionary tool they've had since the adoption of the fingerprint. - With traditional DNA, it
required getting a sample from the actual individual. It's a one-to-one type of process. And so these offenders who let's say they have committed crimes
and haven't been caught and they're just living their
life and they're thinking, well, my DNA has never been taken from me. I may have left DNA in the case that I committed back in 1975, but they've never gotten
my DNA, they won't find me. But now we don't have to rely upon that. Somebody distantly
related to that offender has put their DNA into a database and they have to start getting nervous because that's outside of their control. They can't account for a third cousin or what that third cousin is doing. And so they start getting nervous. And I've kind of wondered how many of these individuals recognize that law enforcement is eventually gonna be knocking on their door as a result of a third cousin putting
their DNA in the database? - Each person who uploads
their information to a database illuminates the identities of hundreds of other people around them, parents, siblings, aunts,
and uncles and cousins. A study by ancestry DNA found
the average person in the UK has 175 third cousins and
it doesn't stop there. The DNA in one person will be shared by hundreds of people yet to be born. Children, grandchildren,
nieces, and nephews, and cousins once or twice removed. Realistically, each person
shares identifiable DNA with nearly 1000 people past and future. So it doesn't take many
people uploading their data to reveal the identities of
everyone living in a country. Back in 2018, a study found
that using an existing database of just 1.3 million people,
they could identify 60% of all Americans of European descent. And they estimated with
a database containing just 2% of the population,
you could find a third cousin or closer match in 99% of cases. - DNA storage is one of
the things that we have that is really unlike anything else. If you look inside, this is
at minus 20 degrees Celsius. - That keeps the DNA good for a long time? - We have DNA samples in here that are probably about 15 years old. - How many samples are stored in there? - Just over 2 million. - Wow.
- Yeah. So the capacity is just over 2 million. - 2 million people's DNA
stored in this one small room? - Correct. - Wow. By 2021, over 30 million people worldwide have taken a direct consumer genetic test, the majority of which are
through Ancestry and 23andMe, which do not currently
work with law enforcement but Family Tree DNA does. - If you ask Americans, should
we have a national database where everyone's logged in it? - As their DNA? - Yeah by their DNA and their name, most Americans will be
somewhat uncomfortable or potentially very
uncomfortable with that. But we're kind of sleepwalking
into that scenario. - There are some people who
are concerned with privacy. If anyone chooses or decides that they do not want their results to be used for law enforcement matching, they can remove themselves from that. - I do worry about genetic
information being used to discriminate against someone. - My biggest thing is health insurance. I worry about if you have
somebody's DNA profile and some laws enacted, it
gets in the wrong hands and they say that this
person has a proclivity, they're headed towards Parkinson's, they're headed towards
this, headed towards that and then rates skyrocket. That's the biggest place that
I see as a privacy concern. - Once your genetic
information is out there, it's out there. It's not like a credit card
where you can get a new one. Yeah you're giving away something that you don't know what it can do. - Well, yeah our information isn't ours in the first place.
- Right. - Our information is shared. - Yes with your relatives. - Yes.
- And although you may be adverse to this sort of thing, if they've already done it, if it, you know, in a way you're out there. - In society today, you have
very clearly had two camps. There are those that are very comfortable having their genome available
to be able to be searched for law enforcement purposes and there are others that
are not comfortable at all and that's okay. - The problem is of course, those people who don't want
theirs to be searchable could have their DNA
uploaded inadvertently by their relatives. Do you know what I mean? So like, if I don't want my DNA to be searchable by law enforcement but my sister uploads hers,
- Yes. - It's almost as good
as me doing it myself. - Right now, Family Tree DNA's policy is we only accept samples
from law enforcement under certain circumstances. It has to be a sexual assault,
identification of remains, DNA recovered from the
scene of a homicide. And we also do child abductions. So if there's a child that's kidnapped and there's DNA evidence,
we will process the DNA so that they can try to find
out who the abductor is. Those are the only cases
that we will accept. - Got it. - Unfortunately now GEDmatch
has flipped off the switch and GEDmatch has actually
said that you don't all have to have your information
searched without opting in. - Right. - Was that decision by GEDmatch a direct result of this
golden state killer case? - No, it wasn't.
- No. - Wanna tell the story? - You know, it had to do with a Utah case. - Where an elderly woman was
playing the organ in a church. - And there was an individual who broke in and assaulted her. - But it wasn't a sexual assault,
but it's a serious crime. - I think believed, tried to strangle her and left her for dead. I believe he thought that she
was obviously dead and left. The police I believe approached GEDmatch because that they were concerned that he was going to
recommit other crimes. - But GEDmatch's terms of service said they would only help law enforcement in cases of rape or homicide. - Her problem was that she didn't die. - 'Cause if she died then? - If she died it would
have fit the conditions and then they would
have uploaded the sample because it met the terms of service and everything.
- So what happened? They didn't take that case? - They did. - They subsequently caught the individual from that search that they
performed on GEDmatch. - But people within the
genealogy world kinda got their passions and flame
saying that is stepping outside of what this tool should be used for and they ended up putting a
lot of pressure on GEDmatch. - They flipped the switch
because they got freaked out. - But at the end of the day, it was a violation of terms of service. And I think ultimately
led to a good thing. Everybody got zeroed out and then everybody gets to sign back in. - Subsequently GEDmatch
was sold to Verogen. - I can tell you a new user today when they sign up for
GEDmatch, about 73% of them are signing up to allow
law enforcement to search. We're pretty happy with that. - Yeah I mean, that's, it's a high number. - It's a high number. - And it suggests that
people want that innocence. - How many second cousins
or third cousins do you now? You know what I mean? You don't know that many of them. Without even knowing it,
you're helping justice. You're helping a victim's family
get a little bit of peace, not closure, but a little bit of peace and why not?
- They get an answer. - Partly, you could make an argument that if you wanna be an activist
helping catch criminals, one of the best things you can do is encourage everyone
you know to be tested and put in the database. - Correct and you know, there are millions of people who have
tested at other companies that are not working with law enforcement. And if they want to
help, all they have to do is download their raw data and
they can upload it for free into our database. - I absolutely believe in a
person's right to privacy. But I also absolutely
believe we have a right not to get murdered or sexually
assaulted or it will be part having violent crimes
committed against us. There has to be an equal balance. - That scale of my privacy has been taken because of a third cousin
has been identified versus a mother who's talking about her daughter has been murdered, that scale is way the hell like this. - We're at a point now where
in many ways technology has kind of outstripped
where the laws are. I truly believe that
ultimately this tool and the, all the concerns with
it will probably end up in front of the nation Supreme Court and there will be a decision. My bottom line message, if
you're gonna make a decision, if there's gonna be laws
restricting law enforcement to use it, make sure that you're
making an informed decision and not assuming what it is based on its DNA and genetics and law enforcement because it really isn't
what you think it is. - I gotta keep a couple
of million people happy so that I have access to the
identities, kind of in a sense. - In a sense, right?
- Of millions, of hundreds of millions of people. - Right. - And that's a pretty selective sample. These are people who are willing to give up their information
- Give up, yes. - To find their ancestors.
- Yeah. - There may be many others
who are militantly private but they don't get a say in the decision of whether they're gonna be searchable through that person or not. - True, that's the choice you make. - That's the choice you don't make. - It's a choice you
don't make but it's also it's the choice we have
to make as a society, is what's that balance. There is always gonna be winners and loses in my mind, right? And I don't wanna use losers
in the negative sense there but in a decision at the end of the day, you have to balance in my mind the public safety with the public privacy. - Is DuckDuckGo, is that good? - I use it. I'm a little paranoid. So it's supposed to not track
you as much I guess, but yeah. - I have been working on this
video for a couple of years so I really wanna thank
Brilliant for sponsoring it. I appreciate their willingness to support me tackling
complex and important stories. Brilliant is a website, an app that teaches you all
kinds of stem concepts in an interactive and in-depth way, if you wanna learn more about DNA or solving mysteries
with deductive reasoning, I would recommend their courses on computational biology and logic. Check out this interactive logic puzzle. You have to figure out if
the light is on or off, knowing that some of the
characters may be lying to you. And instead of just
telling you the solution, Brilliant allows you to try
different configurations and discover the answer for yourself. And if you get stuck,
there are helpful hints to guide you along the way. In this instance, the light is on, see if you can figure out why. Now Brilliant is offering 20%
off an annual subscription to the first 200 people to sign up. Just go to brilliant.org/veritasium. I will put that link
down in the description. So I wanna thank Brilliant
for supporting Veritasium and I wanna thank you for watching.
Lost privacy by proxy. Spooky!
Even if you don't have a facebook, facebook knows who you are. Based on your face in their pictures, or your number in their phone, or the conversations it's heard.
Claiming your privacy is not really that big of a deal because you need to "protect the children" so to speak seemed a bit manipulative.
Cool shit, also super creepy that I have no control over who has the data that makes me... "me". This is a data privacy nightmare, because someone in my extended family doesn't care about it they compromise me, who knows who gets their hands on that DNA and what they do with it?
It's cool that we use it to solve crimes, but what if companies start buying up this data and start discriminating based on it for example? This crap along with facial recognition are one of the creepiest things of the 21st century
Wow, only 2 % of the population needs to upload their DNA to be able to find a match 99% of the time.
I would never send my DNA into some sort of database, but I also support anyone's decision to do so. But that means that my DNA is pretty much already exposed if anyone related to me uploads their DNA to the database.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Nuremberg_laws_Racial_Chart.jpg
This is a chart drawn up by Nazi Germany to determine who was and was not considered Jewish based on what fraction of their ancestry was of Jewish origin. If they had had a national genetic database which included even a fraction of the German population at the time, a simple search would have easily produced a list of every person in Germany who fits into each category.
What uses will the governments of the future come up with for this data?
interesting.
woman uses duck duck go to keep her privacy as much as possible but want people to give up theirs.
I trust science. I don't trust any law enforcement agencies not to use my DNA for whatever nefarious reasons they choose to persecute me. Maybe because there's no law against the police lying to obtain "evidence" in the US? No thank you.
Not gonna lie the thought of health insurance companies looking up my possible medical conditions I'll have later on in life to hike up my rates scares me to hell.
And you know they're doing this shit behind closed doors.
Imagine if you do something a government doesn't like and the government just easily kills every single person related to you. Pog.