Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: pablo84 on November 01, 2012, 01:09 pm

Title: DNA
Post by: pablo84 on November 01, 2012, 01:09 pm
Just got a package of some tablets the other day with what looked like the vendors arm hair in it. Just curious is something like that not very risky as if it was ordered by LE that DNA could be taken from the piece of hair and possibly come back to haunt you. I know in my country DNA tests are very uncommon but there are/was some as far as I know that your DNA  was taken when arrested and even when there was no charge your details were still kept indefinitely.
Title: Re: DNA
Post by: CoolGrey on November 01, 2012, 01:28 pm
It's a good practice to wear a hairnet and prevent hairs from falling into your shipments. However...

It is not at all that easy to find someone if you only have one hair.

First of all, hair does not contain DNA. If a hair falls out (or gets pulled out), some cells from the hair follicle stick to the end of it. Only those cells contain DNA. That is not much material to work with, and it happens that the lab fails to extract DNA from a hair. It doesn't matter how long it is, only the end of contains DNA. A hair that is cut off doesn't contain DNA at all.

Second, as far as I know, LE does not have a database of all citizens, only of those who have been forced to surrender DNA in a criminal investigation. And even if they did, it would take forever to find a match with the millions of profiles in it. I doubt they would go through all this trouble to locate a small time drugs dealer.

That said, if they do manage to extract DNA and they arrest a suspect, they can use it to verify by comparing the DNA from the suspect with the DNA on the hair. It can work against you as evidence, but I don't expect they will use it to find you.

Disclaimer: I'm not a forensics guy. This is all just my understanding of it, not an expert's opinion.
Title: Re: DNA
Post by: pablo84 on November 01, 2012, 02:14 pm
Cheers CG. I just thought it was interesting. I remember reading an article a while back. Possible a year or 2 ago that police in the UK were taking DNA swabs from anyone that was arrested even if no charge became of it and that all DNA was stored. But as far as I can remember there was a lot of people going mad over this so the practice has possibly stopped since. As this was a UK vendor I was curious more than anything else as to what risk this vendor could be exposing him/herself to. Also it was a long while ago since I read the article so am open to correction by anyone.