Small pinpricks of blood are used to screen newborns for serious health conditions—but this genetic data can have legal uses too.
born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby’s heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases. Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens.
Crystal Grant, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the case represents a “whole new leap forward” in the misuse of DNA by law enforcement. “It means that essentially every baby born in the US could be included in police surveillance,” she says. Privacy activists have also raised alarms about what they see as similar misuses of other kinds of DNA collection. In a recent case, police in San Francisco used a sample collected during a woman’s rape exam to. Chesa Boudin, who was then the city’s district attorney, called this use of the woman's DNA a violation of her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, and ultimately dropped the charges.
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