Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect's Face – and Tried Facial Recognition on It (opens in new tab)

"The detective’s request to run a DNA-generated estimation of a suspect’s face through facial recognition tech has not previously been reported. Found in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, it appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face algorithmically generated from crime-scene DNA."

"It’s really just junk science to consider something like this," Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells WIRED. Running facial recognition with unreliable inputs, like an algorithmically generated face, is more likely to misidentify a suspect than provide law enforcement with a useful lead, she argues. "There’s no real evidence that Parabon can accurately produce a face in the first place," Lynch says. "It’s very dangerous, because it puts people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit."

We may not be there yet but hardly a week goes by without a cold case being solved in Europe (don't know about the US).

There are judges, for example in France, who are now forcing cases to be re-opened due to greatly advanced and also greatly lowered costs for DNA testing.

So cases where DNA was collected decades ago is now usable.

A case has been solved a few days ago (forgot which one it was) but the one that impressed me the most was a cold case where the killer was a serial killer and... a cop. Once, 20 years after the last crime or so, a letter was sent to all the cops that could have been in Paris (they suspected a cop was the killer) at that time was sent to ask them for a DNA sample, that cop, now retired cop due to his age, committed suicide.

He knew it was "gg".

Bad times for bad guys who committed crimes a long time ago: at any point now the cold case may be solved.

These cold cases being solved also make it to the news, frontpage: constantly reminding those who got away with their crime that they cannot sleep tight.

It may be sci-fi, today, to use DNA to predict a face and then to run facial recognition on it but...

It's not sci-fi to use new science discoveries to solve cold cases. And I'm very happy that motherfuckers are getting caught.

TL;DR:

police combines unproven technology in criminal investigations without oversight.

"what precedent they'd argue allows this. Is this same as grabbing small part of fingerprint, using AI to complete fingerprint, then looking for match against fingerprint database? Or is this reaching beyond that? What are odds of a false positive in this case?" -- https://nitter.cz/KimZetter/status/1749504703371862452

honestly, as long as DNA is used to confirm the suspect, I'm ok with it.

I understand DNA isn't 100% perfect, but we convict based upon it so it doesn't seem unreasonable to try and generate a face and then run it through a facial recognizer to gather a list of suspects.

Now how they approach those suspects is a different matter. If you ask me, THAT is where the problems arise, not from the use of the tech itself. Although, having said that, I think it's clear this technique isn't all that useful.