Too much information

Changes to how DNA is collected are at the heart of Russia’s latest encroachment on civil liberties

Since the start of the year, Russians have no longer had to commit a serious criminal offence to end up on the country’s DNA database — this will now happen to anyone who commits even a civil misdemeanour. How might the overreaching Russian authorities use the valuable genetic information it increasingly has access to?

When Russia’s law on genomic registration was adopted in 2008, it led to the creation of a federal DNA database, and mandated that anyone found guilty of committing a serious crime should have their unique and immutable genetic information entered into it.

In 2023, mandatory registration in the DNA database was already extended from anyone convicted of committing a serious crime to anybody even suspected of doing so, but since the start of the year, DNA samples must be taken from anyone arrested for committing even a civil offence.

The recent amendments to the law have placed the responsibility for collecting and handling the biomaterial, which was previously the job of forensic laboratories, into the hands of law enforcement agencies.

There are approximately 30 offences in the Russian civil code punishable with administrative arrest. These include leaving the scene of an accident, the late payment of a fine, being drunk and disorderly in public, petty theft and petty hooliganism, but also — and, from a civil liberties point of view, most worryingly — disobeying the instructions of law enforcement officers, a misdemeanour charge that disproportionately affects those who organise or take part in demonstrations.

When the recently adopted amendments were first proposed five years ago, human rights activists warned that expanding the genomic database would create ideal conditions for a police state and that it would run the risk of officials abusing their access to the readily available information.

As DNA profiling presents an almost complete profile of an individual, there are important implications for personal privacy once genetic information is stored and used by the state. In most cases, countries are guided in their approach to bioethics by international agreements such as the 1997 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, the 2003 International Declaration on Human Genetic Data and the 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

Genetic information held on state databases must be stored anonymously, with each file containing only details of an individual’s sex, age and ethnicity.

As a rule, the genetic information held on state databases must be stored anonymously, with each file containing only details of an individual’s sex, age and ethnicity, while legislation should regulate who can access the identity of any individual in the database. By limiting access to data, it’s theoretically possible to ensure that one person’s genetic data is not simply substituted for that of another.

DNA samples can be extracted from any human biomaterial — tissue, cells, bodily fluids. Not all of an individual’s DNA is required for analysis, just small nucleotide sections called STRs — short tandem repeats — which are short stretches of DNA, typically 2–5 base pairs in length, which are repeated a variable number of times. Each individual has a unique number of repetitions in each stretch of their DNA, so these are used as genetic markers to create a DNA profile.

Typically, 16 STR markers plus a gender marker are used to create a multi-digit number. This is an individual’s genetic code.

“If the DNA of an unknown person is found at a crime scene or during a search, you can compare it and see if it’s a match with anyone already on the database,” Salt Lake City-based geneticist Dmitry Pruss explains. “However, in countries with weak judicial systems, problems may arise with the use of fake or contaminated results from a crime scene to help imprison an innocent person if a partial match is deemed good enough,” Pruss continues.

But the human biomaterial stored on a database can be used in other ways too. There is another important genetic marker in human DNA — a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, commonly called snips.

“Snips’ strength is that you can read millions of them at a time, unlike STRs, which can only be analysed in small numbers,” Pruss continues. “By analysing a million snips, you can check for more than just identity. You can see how closely the owners of different profiles are related to each other. You can do more than just confirm genetic sex. You can also predict nationality, where their ancestors were born, and many factors related to appearance, immune system and the individual’s likelihood of developing a number of diseases. Therefore, snips, not STRs, are used in medicine, research into somebody’s ethnic background and the search for unknown distant relatives.”

“At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking the current Russian law, which focuses on ‘fragments of DNA’, doesn’t allow the state to read snips,” says Pruss. “But if people’s biomaterial and DNA are stored for many years, you can always conduct further DNA analysis down the line when more modern technology comes along, unfortunately.”

“Modern snip chips contain about a million items of information, from which you can learn a lot. If, for example, an unknown person is related to someone in a genomic database, that will show up immediately. It will also show if there are several people from the same village in the database too. This will help disclose the identity of a suspect. But what if someone else’s DNA has been entered into the database, and relatives or locals end up being framed for a crime?” he wonders aloud.

As the glut of information contained in an individual’s genome reveals what diseases they are at risk of developing, a bad-faith actor could potentially use that information to determine which poisons or pathogens would be most harmful to them. The same genetic code would also allow a malevolent third party to identify a person’s relatives too. The scope for such sensitive information to be abused is enormous, as once a DNA sample has been collected and stored, it is almost impossible to track how that data is being used.