The TPS announcement that they have found a suspect in Christine Jessop’s murder using genealogical DNA testing raises questions; this seems like a similar tool to the one used by the police to identify the Golden State killer in the US.

1) The TPS said they used a lab in the US that is accredited for law enforcement use. But accredited by whom and for what purpose? There is a patchwork approach to accreditation of forensic labs in the United States and not all accreditation is the same.

2) What sources of genealogical material did that US lab use to generate results? Was a sample uploaded to a consumer service like http://Ancestry.com  by the police? Was the lab using open-source data or data from less-than-scrupulous genealogical websites?

3) Did the police use some other method of gathering DNA data that we don’t know about yet? Either they used open source info, violated the terms of service of genealogical website, got a production order for DNA databases, or used some new tool: we should know which.

4) The TPS eventually matched DNA from their suspect that was coincidently at the Centre for Forensic Science. Why did the CFS have a sample? Why was it not matched before? (There are legitimate reasons why; the CFS can’t compare every sample they collect to cold cases)

5) The TPS says they got a judicial authorization to use this technique. Did they explain to the authorizing judge the privacy implications of their request? Did they clear the technique with the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario before using it?

These police techniques are very powerful tools for solving cold cases. But we need to make sure we don’t let the police use tools that have far-reaching privacy implications without appropriate scrutiny. Given that there will be no trial, the TPS should answer these questions.