Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 11 focuses on the ways DNA is now used as a mode of surveillance.

In 2009 the United Kingdom began a program using DNA to determine the nationality of asylum seekers. Specifically, the technology was used in the case of those seeking asylum from a war zone in Somalia, with the goal to determine whether those requesting asylum were Somalian refugees or Kenyans posing as Somalian. Yet this use of DNA dangerously conflated nationality with geographical ancestry. There is also a technology called DNAWitness that uses the same techniques as ancestry testing to predict the ancestry of criminals. Rather than fingerprinting that matches a print with an individual, this technology “predicts the race of an unknown suspect” (261) through DNA recovered from a scene. DNAWitness provides an “eyewitness” that claims to be more “scientific” than visual witnessing.

The assumption is that someone’s geographic ancestry assures a certain phenotype. Ancestry informative markers are used to provide phenotypic information (what a suspect looks like) that then enables racial profiling in the name of gathering DNA evidence; people who supposedly look like the phenotype that is associated with the ancestral profile of the suspect are often forced to provide DNA samples to police.