Imagine a world where the government has your genetic profile on file before you’ve even committed a crime. This is a world where prevention trumps privacy and your most inherently personal data – your biological makeup – is on record for Big Brother to thumb through like a well-worn Rolodex. You’re indexed in a machine, cataloged and tracked long before you ever even had a thought of doing anything illegal. If it sounds some sort of rip-off of Minority Report, you may be a little disappointed to know that it’s actually not too far from reality. At this point, it seems like everybody knows somebody who has tried an ancestry-tracing service to track their genetic makeup. The appeal is obvious – modern science lets the average person peer centuries or even millennia into the past to find out the origins of the folks who came before them.  Even if the results seem largely inconsequential, people are curious. Who would turn away the chance to show that they’re related to Napoleon Bonaparte, Ramses II, or maybe even Wilt Chamberlain? DNA databases from genetic testing are growing every day to catalog more people to cross-reference and to provide the most comprehensive results for users. While there are plenty of novel reasons that make it pretty cool, DNA databases and their uses are expanding faster than the laws that should govern them. Now it’s one thing for a private company to have your information on file for their own commercial purposes, it’s less than ideal, but not entirely different from Facebook algorithms being able to identify when you might be shopping around for a funeral home. However, it’s considerably more menacing to imagine a government entity having access to your genetic data for the purposes of a criminal investigation, for example. In April 2018, authorities arrested Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer, and charged him with a string of murders related to the Golden State Killer. The Golden State Killer was a serial killer responsible for at least a dozen murders, more than 50 rapes, and over 100 burglaries from approximately 1974 to 1986. After the case went cold for over 30 years, investigators were recently able to find him based on a family profile created using an open-source genetic database called GEDmatch. DeAngelo did not submit his genetic data to GEDmatch – a relative submitted theirs and investigators constructed a profile to narrow the suspects down to a small group of people. In that CNN article cited above, Paul Holes, an investigator who helped move the case forward, is quoted as saying, “We only had to contact one or two people once we had all this information from GEDMatch.” The implications of such an approach to a criminal investigation are enough to make even the most cynical and jaded cyberpunk enthusiast let out an astonished, “Whoa.” Now, it’s not the intent of this piece to give you a Fourth Amendment argument on the potential problems in that sort of police probing. Realistically, it’s too far after the fact to un-squeeze that tube of toothpaste. At this point, it’s probably more practical for a person to be aware of the ubiquitous nature of DNA indexing in our daily lives so that he or she can make educated decisions. The life-and-death weight of DNA data isn’t solely confined to futuristic policing. In fact, it’s been in use for years in U.S. immigration law. Where a person’s birth certificate, photos, passport, or other identifying documents aren’t available, the Department of State or the Department of Homeland Security might use DNA testing to determine parentage or familial relationships. While this may sound like a sensible approach to the problem of identifying who qualifies, it becomes a little thorny when you consider (1) the circumstances in a country that would cause a person to no longer be able to get a copy of their birth certificate or license (i.e., war) and (2) the margin of error in genetic testing. That U.S. Department of State link boasts a “99.5 percent or greater degree of certainty” regarding the tests and perhaps that’s true if all other factors are equal.  But in practice, the occasional fallibility of the human component could create a margin of error that results in a qualifying person being refused entry into the country. For reasons relating to both human error and skewed statistical probability, genetic testing isn’t always the absolute truth. To complicate matters further, scientists have spent the last few years pioneering a technology called Crispr, which allows them to hack a patient’s DNA to correct genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia. As you can probably deduce, these hacks alter the original DNA chain’s resemblance to any potentially related ones. In fact, Professor George Church of Harvard University, who is at the bleeding edge of this new technology, stated that it is already possible for criminals to alter their DNA enough to disappear from forensic databases altogether.  Consumer DNA splicing sounds like something straight out of the pages of 2000 AD, but that same Telegraph article says home Crispr kits are available online for about £150. Have fun Googling that one. The exploration into DNA hacking has already started with some pretty interesting possibilities being raised. For example, researchers at the University of Washington have taken things a step further in the direction of bucking the system – they’ve demonstrated how an actual computer virus could be encoded into a strand of DNA itself. While innocuous (probably) to the host, the gene sequencing software reading it could potentially read a line of code from the biological material that runs a virus in the computer. Who knows, maybe there’s some way to use this technique to protect one’s own genetic code. Genetic testing is a powerful tool in criminal investigations (unless you’re chasing OJ Simpson) and its usefulness should not be understated. Even still, where there exists any margin of error, it doesn’t seem prudent to surrender all of our cards and rely on an authority’s good nature. The correct answer is not clear with the present information, but it’s a good bet that as the data in those genetic databases increases, so too will the demand for Crispr home kits.