[liberationtech] Crack down on genomic surveillance

[Yosem Companys]

From: Greg Walton <greg.secure at gmail.com> via SURVEILLANCE at jiscmail.ac.uk

Crack down on genomic surveillance

Corporations selling DNA-profiling technology are aiding human-rights
abuses. Governments, legislators, researchers, reviewers and
publishers must act.

Yves Moreau [Yves Moreau is a computational biologist specialising in
human genetics and professor of engineering at the Catholic University
of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium. ]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03687-x

Across the world, DNA databases that could be used for state-level
surveillance are steadily growing.

The most striking case is in China. Here police are using a national
DNA database along with other kinds of surveillance data, such as from
video cameras and facial scanners, to monitor the minority Muslim
Uyghur population in the western province of Xinjiang.

Concerns about the potential downsides of governments being able to
interrogate people’s DNA have been voiced since the early 2000s1 by
activist groups, such as the non-profit organization GeneWatch UK, and
some geneticists (myself included). Partly thanks to such debate,
legislation and best practices have emerged in many countries around
the use of DNA profiling in law enforcement2. (In profiling, several
regions across the genome, each consisting of tens of nucleotides, are
sequenced to identify a person or their relatives.)

Now the stakes are higher for two reasons. First, as technology gets
cheaper, many countries might want to build massive DNA databases.
Second, DNA-profiling technology can be used in conjunction with other
tools for biometric identification — and alongside the analysis of
many other types of personal data, including an individual’s posting
behaviour on social networks. Last year, the Chinese firm Forensic
Genomics International (FGI) announced that it was storing the DNA
profiles of more than 100,000 people from across China (FGI, known as
Shenzhen Huada Forensic Technology in China, is a subsidiary of the
BGI, the world’s largest genome-research organization). It made the
information available to the individuals through WeChat, China’s
equivalent of WhatsApp, using an app accessed by facial recognition.

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