 The following contains discussion of graphic murder and rape. Viewer discretion is advised. At first, a single investigator worked the case full-time. Now, several people are involved. The pressure to catch this man has been mounting. White male, six feet tall, weighing 185 pounds. Tying up husbands or male companions. As she was bound, he raped her. When it happened in 1980, it was a murder in a small town. It was a sensational, God-awful murder in a small town. Lyman Smith was a 43-year-old attorney about to be appointed a state judge by California Governor Jerry Brown. His wife, Charlene Smith, was a 33-year-old interior decorator. They were found in their bedroom, bound and bludgeoned to death with a log from the fireplace. Charlene had also been raped. There was a lot of reason why you would think that someone they knew did this and it had a lot of feeling and emotion behind it. Lyman Smith's daughter, Jennifer Carroll, had just graduated from high school. I didn't necessarily believe I would be next on his list, but I did have a fear that there could still be somebody out there and that I knew that he watched and that he wasn't past catching up with prior victims. That was part of his MO, was to call people from the past or to be basically a terrorist. Detectives were flummoxed, but they did collect a semen sample belonging to the killer. In 1980, the technology necessary to match the DNA sample left at the crime scene with the killer didn't exist. 38 years after Lyman and Charlene Smith were murdered, investigators tracked a suspect to a Hobby Lobby craft store in Roseville, California, collecting DNA from his car door handle while he was inside. Later, they pulled another sample from a tissue found in his home trash. The sample matched the DNA that had been collected from the Smith crime scene. Tuesday, Sacramento County Sheriff's deputies arrested Joseph James DeAngelo at his home in Citrus Heights. I get chills just thinking about it. You know it's true, you can see it with your own eyes, but there's no way it could be true. Police had finally tracked down the Golden State Killer using a new tool in crime fighting, an online genealogy database. He did leave behind his genetic code, the final piece of the puzzle for Sacramento County District Attorney Ann Marie Schubert and her investigators. I believe very strongly that it's the greatest tool ever given in law enforcement. The Golden State Killer's capture became a sensation in magazines, newspapers, books, podcasts, television shows, and an HBO series. But the methods used to catch DeAngelo also meant digging through the lives of a significant portion of his family tree. It's revealing the information of everyone else related to them closer or distantly. Presenting profound implications for a constitutional right to privacy. We have to revisit the legal doctrines that apply. The kind of data sifted through to find the Golden State Killer may be the most personal to ever come along and the most difficult for an individual to control, putting secrets about our family, health, and biological future and the hands of powerful entities. They could start testing for things that we can't even conceive of today. The capture of the Golden State Killer was the culmination of a technological big data movement that has been growing since the turn of the century without many of the traditional legal safeguards for privacy. The methods used to catch the Golden State Killer made it significantly easier to find suspects in horrendous cases, but it may be just as easy for the government to track innocent citizens via their DNA. You know, it's 1980 and I was just 18 and I had graduated high school early and I'm very grateful because the folks at Buena High let me come back and hang out there. Problem solving around that my dad had been murdered and Charlene had been murdered, but also just figuring out a way to insulate myself from the kind of madness that was going on. A small town double murder not only confounded investigators, but the entire Ventura California community. But Jennifer Carroll felt supported by the people around her as years dragged on without any charges in the case. I've always had bells on my exterior doors so I could hear if somebody's coming or going. I've always slept with an Oakland A's mini bat even though I'm also a Giants fan, but I had an Oakland A's mini bat and then I've always kept a bottle of perfume by my bed. I would be willing to fight to the death to protect my home and myself before I would just give up an acquiesce. As leads in the Smith case went cold, a new tool in crime fighting was beginning to turn the criminal justice system upside down. DNA evidence is now used with such frequency that genetic fingerprinting has become routines. In the late 1980s, before the advent of genealogical databases in crime fighting, DNA samples from crime scenes had to be large in quantity to be tested, meaning big pools of blood or large quantities of semen or saliva. Back then, samples were manually analyzed and required a lot of analysis, the way someone might look at an out-of-focus photograph and try to interpret what they see. This new scientific tool was enough to upend the criminal justice system, allowing investigators to catch perpetrators and exonerate the innocent. In 1994, the federal government created a database called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. Before the system could launch, the FBI had to come up with standards for what level of detail to store in the database. Dr. and Murphy is a former public defender and the author of Inside the Cell, The Dark Side of Forensic DNA. There's this need to develop a DNA profile that is discriminating enough among people to identify them, but not so discriminating that it invades their privacy or costs too much to do. Law enforcement decided on a portion of the genome, just 13 places at the time. They each have two pieces of information, one from mom, one from dad, so that means you'll have essentially 26 discrete pieces of information. Part of the benefit of that method is that it doesn't really tell you very much about someone's health or their physical characteristics, or anything like that. Regions that are non-coding don't signify anything. That's where you get this idea of junk. It's just junk DNA. That stays and is still the mainstay of DNA testing. As the turn of the century came, police thought DNA matches would be the future of solving the most heinous crimes. Investigators from counties up and down California were investigating what seemed to be rapes and murders contained to their own communities from the 1970s on, though there was some speculation that they could be connected. In 2000, my daughter was pretty young, new. She was about a year old. We were going back down to Ventura to visit old friends and show off the kid and that sort of thing. And I thought, I'm going to stop by the police department and just see if there's been any progress. It's been 20 years. Has there been something? And the man I went in to see, the officer that I saw said, I think you need to sit down. OK, that's a little condescending. And I said, yeah, probably not. And then he said, well, your dad's murder has been linked to a set of other murders in Southern California. We believe he's the victim of a serial killer. Yeah, I didn't need to sit down. Investigators couldn't find a match in the FBI's CODIS database, but they did find matches between a series of rapes and killings across Southern California, then an even bigger revelation. It was just a couple of years later. I was driving here in the Bay Area and listening to KGO. And I heard them announced that a series of rapes in Northern California had been connected with murders in Southern California. And my intuition just said, I bet that's us. The killer's mayhem was more widespread than anyone had thought. Oh, hell, yes. DNA connected all of them. And that for me was everything. To me, I almost felt like we had caught him without knowing who it was. But I knew when we got the person whose DNA matched, we were done. Police believe the same individual was responsible for at least 10 murders and 44 rapes up and down the state. And the total number grew from there. The revelation of a serial killer seemed like it was just a matter of time before police would find the suspect in a law enforcement database. Little did they know that it would be a completely different DNA database developed outside of law enforcement that would lead to the front steps of the killer. The eventual search would be so potentially shocking to the public that investigators would lie about what they did for years. Human Genome Project has no lesser goal than to map every bit of information contained in the human genetic blueprint. In 1990, the Human Genome Project promised to map the entire genetic makeup of the human body for $3 billion within 15 years. While the task had to be completed manually in the beginning, the project got ahead of its time horizon after the arrival of automated DNA sequencers. By 2001, there was a working draft of almost the entire genome. In coming years, doctors increasingly will be able to cure diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, and cancer by attacking their genetic roots. The genetic basis for most diseases turned out to be far more complicated than scientists had assumed, but the technology did create a brand new market for consumer genetic testing. Ancestry.com announced that it was teaming up with a genetic slab to offer you a handy-dandy home DNA test kit. There was an opportunity to gather information about people, which they could monetize. I analogize it to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. Bicca Barlow studied genetics and developmental biology before becoming an attorney specializing in DNA cases. You are being provided the service. In an exchange, you give them all of your genetic data. Vances in technology now make DNA testing affordable for anyone. Some call it genealogy to the extreme. It's DNA testing. New startups promise to let customers understand their familial roots in ways they never had before. I used a sperm donor to have my daughter. And so DNA is a big part of our life. I don't know much about him other than what he shared as part of the sperm bank information. And I thought it would be really helpful to understand what markers might come up if we use 23andMe. I think there's real value in people being able to learn about themselves and being able to manage their health and manage procreation by having DNA information that can help them make informed choices. A lot of people have found that they're carriers for things like cystic fibrosis and they had no idea. Okay, so you call this? Well, this is a spit party. A spit party. In the spit lounge, guests provided a sample of their DNA for decoding. The spit collectors work for a website called 23andMe. It's like looking in the mirror for the first time. If you'd never looked in the mirror before, you would want to look. It's actually looking for things that we as consumers really have no grasp of what they are at this moment. And that can change. They can start testing for things that we can't even conceive of today. While the FBI's DNA database tested for a teeny tiny portion of the genome, these companies were testing for much more. It's a huge amount of genetic information. It's also a different kind of genetic information. It's not this junk useless stuff. It's the key to all of these questions people want to answer through genomics. Companies like Ancestry, etc. use a method that's known as SNPs, single-nucleotide polymorphism. And when they're looking at these SNPs, they're not looking at 13 places, 20 places. They're not looking at 1,000 of these SNPs. They're looking at hundreds of thousands, millions. Companies encouraged customers to compare their results online. The genealogy industry experienced a renaissance with conferences, community-run Facebook groups, podcasts, and YouTube how-tos. By 2018, 23andMe had collected the DNA of 10 million users. Ancestry.com had 15 million. Smaller companies like MyHeritage DNA and Family Tree DNA also collected profiles. Many users downloaded their raw genetic data and uploaded it to an open-source website called JetMatch. By 2013, investigators across California had started calling their suspect the Golden State Killer. But DNA collected from the crime scenes didn't produce a match when checked against law enforcement databases. When genealogy companies started gaining traction, investigators took notice. Perhaps the Golden State Killer, or more likely a family member, had willingly handed over the DNA code of their family tree. Detectives began to dig with the help of genealogist Barbara Raventer. JetMatch.com seemed like a particularly useful resource because anyone could upload analyzed or genotyped DNA data to check for comparisons. What happened next would be retold to newspapers, TV programs, podcasts, an HBO documentary, and victims' rights groups. Law enforcement says they were able to link this DNA using an open-source genealogy website called JetMatch. JetMatch. JetMatch. It turns out that story wasn't true. Federal and local law enforcement conducted a much more invasive and widespread search than was originally thought, tiptoeing around privacy policies and misleading the public with a story about JetMatch. Their path to finding the killer shows why guidelines for law enforcement to respect the civil liberties of citizens is important. Without them, they could make up the rules as they go, which is exactly what happened. We've had the Golden State Killer's DNA up in CODIS since 2001. No hits. We've done familial searches here in California every single year in which it's been legal. No hit. We've done international searches. We did everything without success. Paul Holes was the longtime investigator of the Golden State Killer case. He was the one who saw opportunity in the blossoming world of online genealogy databases. The old former, the classic former forensic testing is like taking a picture of someone's house and the new form is moving in, is just living there, is squatting forever. Genetic genealogy isn't just revealing the information of the person who shared their genome. It's revealing the information of everyone else related to them close or distantly. According to a 2018 report in the Journal of Science, in the near future, any one of European descent could be identified through genealogical databases because of the ability to infer familial relationships. A lot of people don't consent. They're now basically discoverable. And that's just not how we've operated in this country. That's why we have the Fourth Amendment. It's because we value privacy. 23andMe and Ancestry.com had promised to protect their customers' privacy, stating that they would only provide information to the government under a court order, and they published transparency reports about the police requests they received. There was no way to analyze the Golden State killer's DNA without the company's consent. Customers are asked to submit plastic vials full of saliva. In February 2018, Barbara Ray-Venter, the genealogist assisting the FBI, uploaded the killer's genetic data to an online DNA database, and that search gave her the names of a series of second cousins. Filling out the family tree she was constructing and ultimately leading police to the killer. All the people who are in the Golden State killer's family tree outside of that immediate family, they have no idea that was them. They were the one. It's their family tree that is now sitting on a hard drive somewhere in a computer in California, or their personal financial history records, et cetera, birth records, death records, marriage records that are sitting in a folder labeled GSK investigation. Fenter was able to narrow down the suspect to six people. One had blue eyes, matching the description many gave of the Golden State killer. A man who terrorized neighborhoods throughout California during a raping and killing spree in the 70s and 80s may now be in custody. I don't even think I ate that day. It wasn't until the end of the day that the emotions really flooded in. And you feel relief and horror and compassion and too many feelings at once. It's almost like crashing feelings. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was MyHeritage, a privately owned DNA database ReVenter used that provided the hit that would find the killer. Unlike Ancestry or 23andMe, MyHeritage allowed customers to upload genetic data generated by third parties for analysis on its site. So, Venter was able to upload D'Angelo's data which had been genotyped by police and pretend it was her own. Jedmatch, a genealogy site being credited as the missing key. But investigators had claimed that ReVenter had tracked down D'Angelo using Jedmatch, an open source genealogy database. So, why did they lie? The FBI told Sacramento investigators to keep the involvement of MyHeritage a secret, saying they needed to protect the names of confidential sources. Holes told the Los Angeles Times, we were entirely confident that it would pass legal muster, but we understood that there could be a fallout in terms of public perception. The search of MyHeritage existed in a legal gray area, while the privacy policy assured users that their information would only be released if required by law. It also didn't account for a covert genealogical law enforcement search. The company didn't even know the search had happened until late 2020. Law enforcement's willingness to mislead the public afterward points to an uncertainty that the public will ever know all the details about these types of searches. According to the Times report, many different databases were used up until the MyHeritage hit, including Y-Search, Jedmatch, and the private site Family Tree DNA, which willingly ignored their privacy policy so police could search their database without a warrant. Searching through multiple databases on their way to finding Joseph DiAngelo meant investigators may have come into contact with the lives of possibly thousands of innocent people, considering the mapping of family trees over a long period of time across multiple DNA databases. You're going through the lives of thousands of people to find your guy. Rifling through the lives of thousands of innocent people, people you know are not the perpetrator of the crime, is a pretty serious thing to encourage law enforcement to do. The methods used to catch DiAngelo invert the traditional approach to search and seizure as sanctioned by the Constitution. The idea is not that police are supposed to indiscriminately kind of rummage through the lives of citizens looking for crime. They're supposed to have probable cause, targeted suspicion to believe somebody is involved in criminal activity, and then from that suspicion, perhaps develop reason for arrest or prosecution. The FBI and local investigators have always maintained that what they were doing was within legal bounds. The arrest of the Golden State Killer led to an explosion in the use of genealogical databases as a crime fighting tool, but the practice may violate the privacy of many individuals found along the way to finding a suspect. The arrest of the Golden State Killer was a triumph of justice, but it also emboldened investigators and could easily be abused in the years to come. I've thought a lot about DNA because of course it was responsible for his arrest and I had banked on it for years, decades knowing that that's how we would catch the bad guy. At the same time, I feel like I straddle this ethical chasm because DNA is probably the only thing that if I choose to share, it is not just my privacy that I am giving up. I'm kind of regretting that I put my kid on 23 and me because now based on what's happened, I kind of wish I had waited with her so she could make her own decisions about that. It's interesting because yes, I've lived with DNA my whole life, not knowing what I'm getting or what I am getting. Civil Liberties advocates worry about the uncertain future of using DNA databases combined with sensitive DNA testing, changing the traditional ways investigations are brought about. When DNA first entered the criminal justice system, large quantities of DNA were needed for testing. Traditionally it was big blood stains that were being tested, so you knew what you were looking at and you knew there was a story behind a stain like that, but now we're testing things that have no necessary relevance to a crime. DNA methodology has always been moving towards more sensitive test methods. These tiny samples are called touch DNA. They could look for things that people had touched because the theory is that what we touch, we leave some of our DNA behind on. Humans shed DNA wherever they go and at varying rates as well, meaning a killer's DNA may end up on the murder weapon or they may never leave a trace. Conversely, an innocent person might have marginally come in contact with a murder weapon and shed a lot of DNA on it. You can get cells that belong to people who may not have ever even come in contact with that item. They might have come in contact with another person who came into contact with that item or they might have walked by and sneezed near that item but they never actually physically touched the item. Crime scene samples can often be mixtures of multiple people's DNA, making it hard to decipher. So the result of that is that there can be sort of so much information in the sample because it's so many different people's DNA that you can start to kind of see what you want to see. Similarly, a sample may be of such low quality and quantity that it may not be a full profile. And when you only have part of the sample that ability to kind of Rorschach test it to see what you want to see is even greater. This problem is particularly acute given the growth in DNA databases. Without a DNA database, if you have a sample from a crime scene and you want to match it to a perpetrator, you need circumstantial evidence suggesting someone may be responsible. Perhaps they were seen near the crime scene on video or there was a history of violence. With the DNA database, the temptation for prosecutors is to find a match in the database and work backwards. If you have 17 million people's DNA and you're doing this kind of Rorschach testing, you sort of have this huge pool of people to suspect and often there will be no other evidence or often the other evidence will be kind of accumulated later. And although it might support the finding of guilt like oh, they live in the same state or oh, you know, they have a prior record of some kind, really what you're doing is you're saying this partial profile matches and that's what I'm kind of building the scaffold of the case on and these other coincidental factors just help support my finding. And so databases make that ambiguous quality of some of these samples much more potentially pernicious because they allow police to take those incomplete samples and sort of find perpetrators who seem to match but may in fact not be the actual perpetrator of the crime. And we will all see the unbelievable capacity of humanity to be noble. This is a great day. Thank you very much. As the human genome project was coming to a close, scientists worried about the possibilities of being able to quickly sequence genes. Today in the wake of the Golden State killer's capture, genealogical databases have also forced us to confront the possibilities of allowing the government to know so much about citizens' biological makeup without any guidelines. But the dark turn of DNA collection and databaseing has already begun. While DNA can catch serial killers, it can also be used against citizens in horrific ways. While U.S. law enforcement was trying to catch the Golden State killer, Chinese law enforcement began to collect the DNA of its population to crack down on future crimes. The act is a lesson in what's possible in a world where the government has few restrictions on how they can use DNA databases, as well as the larger role biotech companies have begun to play in law enforcement all over the world. In China, a group of minority Muslims called Uyghurs were targeted by police in the DNA dragnet. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell, Uyghurs outside of China saw liberation in places like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. But Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang province did not. As Uyghurs in China began to protest, Beijing began to see them as a threat to statehood and met the resistance with violent retaliation. In recent years, the Uyghurs have been the victims of discrimination, and any protest has been swiftly crushed. Over the next 25 years, Chinese police took a proactive approach to controlling Uyghurs using technology. Uyghurs saw their lives become a living surveillance state full of cameras tracking their every move, police checkpoints and key cards that controlled where they could travel, software that monitored messages on their phones, and a grading system that determined how often they would receive visits from the police at home. Beijing also put Uyghurs in work and reeducation camps and blamed the entire population for the acts of extremist terrorists. Today, it's not uncommon for Uyghurs to disappear without a word to family members. Some Uyghurs are never heard from again. Now, with DNA, Chinese law enforcement has begun sorting Uyghurs and other minorities by their ethnicity under the guise of preventing future crimes. The information could help authorities dramatically tighten their control over Uyghurs' lives, excluding them from public education and healthcare, forcing them to live in ghettos or sending them to internment camps based on their genetic makeup. In a world where DNA technology is rapidly revealing information about health, genealogical makeup, as well as information that leads to the capture of notorious criminals like the Golden State Killer, it's also giving us a world where authoritarian regimes can even more effectively succumb to horrific impulses. When you see it in terms of this constant surveillance thing that's around your head, then it's very powerful because it tells you, we know everything you're doing, we know who you are, we kind of know what you're thinking. Type something on the internet, I have to worry who's reading this. I'm calling someone, I have to worry who's listening. All these issues, even if they're not real, even if it's not happening, you can feel how that makes this machine that controls people. Even Rowe is a professor who studies human clinical genomics at the University of Luven in Belgium. So we think that it's all law enforcement wanting more and more toys. In fact, when you look deeper, you see something much more complicated. After a terrorist attack in 2014, Chinese law enforcement began to use preemptive efforts in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory in northwest China populated by Uighurs. What seemed to have happened is in 2014, the Chinese government panicked and then they went full force against the entire population to contain a potential terrorist threat that was really quite minor. Obviously, there were some separatist ideas. There was a bit of Muslim radicalism, not more so than what we, for example, see in some parts of Europe. But they panicked and they said, we have to change this. According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, Xinjiang authorities collected fingerprints, iris scans, blood types, and DNA samples from all residents between the ages of 12 and 65. Particle samples, blood in particular, was collected in a way that was actually suitable for DNA profiling. The DNA profile seems to be on the lower end of places on the genome. However, these samples, they remain available. So as technology progresses, nothing prevents five years from now to rerunning all these biological samples, potentially with new technology. Chinese police bought equipment and had technology tailored for them by a U.S. company named Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the world's leading makers of DNA technology for law enforcement all over the world, including the United States. The Huaxa Platinum System, tailored for Chinese police, could effectively identify Chinese ethnic groups. Scientists from Thermo Fisher Scientific and the People's Public Security University of China, which works under Chinese law enforcement, talked about how successful the technology was in the 2016 scientific reports paper published by the Nature Research Journal, noting it was effective at investigating if a DNA sample belonged to someone of Han, Tibetan, or Uyghur descent. Every citizen knows, oh, my DNA is there. People are very concerned about defining ethnicity. So putting you in bins, saying you belong to this family, we don't like that family. This is not possible, telling you you're a real Uyghur, you're halfway, or you're not. These DNA database can do that. In 2019, Thermo Fisher Scientific said it would stop selling DNA sequencers in Xinjiang after pressure built up over years from human rights groups and politicians. But the company's work with Chinese law enforcement extended beyond Xinjiang. A June 2020 report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute detailed that since 2017, the company, along with dozens of Chinese companies, also helped China's Ministry of Public Security expand its DNA dragnet across China. Authorities collected saliva and blood samples from men and boys, who are thought to be most likely to commit the majority of crimes. And they're deploying this database across the entire country. So now they are just a couple years away from having a DNA database that would cover the entire male population of China. Chinese police have said citizens hand over their DNA voluntarily, but human rights groups have scoffed at the suggestion. Thermo Fisher Scientific did not respond to our interview request, but the Australian report estimates that the Chinese government has accessed a somewhere between 100 million and 140 million profiles making it the largest DNA database in the world. It may seem like a fantasy for any country to entertain the idea of a universal DNA database of people on the scale of what's happening in China, but in a world where even just a portion of the population is available to law enforcement through the invasive testing done by genealogy companies, police could simply infer familial relationships, sending the United States barreling towards a future where everyone may be identifiable by the government, adding a pair of surveillance eyes to law enforcement's arsenal that go far beyond data collection of what you think, do or say. It's a future where the government could expand their power to control human behavior, targeting people over perceived bad genes, going after genetically linked families deemed to be unfavorable by an administration, exposing secrets about health and family lineage. When privacy stops being a social norm, authoritarian power slowly creeps in. Detectives in the Golden State Killer case entered the 21st century seeking to bring justice to victims' families with cutting-edge DNA technology. They thought they could do it themselves by searching the combined DNA index system, CODIS, a law enforcement database of people linked to the criminal justice system. But a private online DNA database would end up providing the clue that would lead to the killer. A cousin's genetic code was close enough to the Lyman and Charlene Smith crime scene DNA left by the Golden State Killer. D'Angelo eventually said he was guilty in late 2020. Yesterday in Sacramento, a 74-year-old retired mechanic and former police officer admitted to being the serial rapist and murderer. His name is Joseph D'Angelo Jr. and he pleaded guilty to 13 murders and rapes. The suspect became known as the Golden State Killer. The new method in crime-fighting went on to be used to name suspects and dozens of other cold cases across the United States, ushering in a new technological leap that the law is still catching up with. There's been through our history moments in time where technology develops that just changes the way the world works, so fundamentally that we have to revisit the legal doctrines that apply. And I think we're in one of those inflection points as regards technology. Year after year, scientists discover new details about DNA, sometimes in the most surprising ways. It's still an evolving technology that we don't really know what it holds, but we do have some indiscia of what's there. And I think we have to say is total genetic transparency by law enforcement really something we should tolerate in our society even at the expense of not catching all crime or even stopping some of the most serious crime. Lawmakers could restrict the scope of searches so they aren't as intrusive. Some of the standards required for a sample's inclusion in the FBI's combined DNA index system may be a helpful path for the lack of genetic genealogy rules the U.S. has for law enforcement. So the rules and restrictions that govern the quality and type of samples that are allowed to be uploaded into the national database would be, in essence, applied to genetic genealogy in this way. You're not going to be able to do a genetic genealogy sample to find the witness of a crime as opposed to the actual perpetrator. You can't do it in a laboratory that isn't qualified and validated to do the kind of testing they're claiming they do. They should be limited to the most serious kinds of cases and they should only be allowed to be engaged by qualified and trained personnel and they should be limited to crime scene samples that were first tested and checked against the national forensic database. Basic common sense restrictions on how it's done. Big data has guided humanity into new more efficient ways of living since the turn of the century. But it's also given us a world where law enforcement is that much closer to our daily habits, whereabouts, and at least when it comes to DNA, our genetic makeup. This big data movement, this technological moment in time really requires rethinking these fundamental questions about how people and the police relate. We can't move through the world keeping ourselves from shedding DNA and more importantly, we can't stop other people to whom we're related. So distantly, we may not even know them from making decisions about genetic transparency that are different from the ones that we would make. And so I think the law needs to come to recognize that the genome and its enduring quality, its infancy, we don't know exactly what the genome's secrets will tell us. That it's a different kind of piece of information that deserves better protection, both from the decision making of your relatives and also from prying police eyes. Maryland has a bill in the governor's desk that limits the use of genetic genealogy by police to serious crimes and requires police to ask a judge's permission before it begins a search. It may be a framework other states will look to. Joseph James DeAngelo was convicted of 13 murders and 50 rapes and he'll spend the rest of his life in prison as a part of a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty. As a part of the agreement, he admitted to committing more rapes where the statute of limitations had run out. I suspect there's a function of age involved, but it has maybe remember a lot of things I'd forgotten or put away for whatever reason. If you had asked me when I was 18, when they catch the guy, will this change your life? I would have thought, no, it has no impact on me. And in fact, maybe because it's been 38 years, it's had a tremendous impact.