U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling

U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling

By JULIA PRESTON

The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected.

The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in a little-noticed amendment to a January 2006 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections and assistance for victims of sexual crimes. The amendment permits DNA collecting from anyone under criminal arrest by federal authorities, and also from illegal immigrants detained by federal agents.

Over the last year, the Justice Department has been conducting an internal review and consulting with other agencies to prepare regulations to carry out the law.

The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.

The law has strong support from crime victims’ organizations and some women’s groups, who say it will help law enforcement identify sexual predators and also detect dangerous criminals among illegal immigrants.

“Obviously, the bigger the DNA database, the better,” said Lynn Parrish, the spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, based in Washington. “If this had been implemented years ago, it could have prevented many crimes. Rapists are generalists. They don’t just rape, they also murder.”

Peter Neufeld, a lawyer who is a co-director of the Innocence Project, which has exonerated dozens of prison inmates using DNA evidence, said the government was overreaching by seeking to apply DNA sampling as universally as fingerprinting.

“Whereas fingerprints merely identify the person who left them,” Mr. Neufeld said, “DNA profiles have the potential to reveal our physical diseases and mental disorders. It becomes intrusive when the government begins to mine our most intimate matters.”

Immigration lawyers said they did not learn of the measure when it passed last year and were dismayed by its sweeping scope.

“This has taken us by storm,” said Deborah Notkin, a lawyer who was president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association last year. “It’s so broad, it’s scary. It is a terrible thing to do because people are sometimes detained erroneously in the immigration system.”

Immigration lawyers noted that most immigration violations, including those committed when people enter the country illegally, are civil, not criminal, offenses. They warned that the new law would make it difficult for immigrants to remove their DNA profiles from the federal database, even if they were never found to have committed any serious violation or crime.

Under the new law, DNA samples would be taken from any illegal immigrants who are detained and would normally be fingerprinted, justice officials said. Last year federal customs, Border Patrol and immigration agents detained more than 1.2 million immigrants, the majority of them at the border with Mexico. About 238,000 of those immigrants were detained in immigration enforcement investigations. A great majority of all immigration detainees were fingerprinted, immigration officials said. About 102,000 people were arrested on federal charges not related to immigration in 2005.

While the proposed rules have not been finished, justice officials said they were certain to bring a huge new workload for the F.B.I. laboratory that logs, analyzes and stores federal DNA samples. Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said they anticipated an increase ranging from 250,000 to as many as 1 million samples a year.

The laboratory currently receives about 96,000 samples a year, said Robert Fram, chief of the agency’s Scientific Analysis Section.

DNA would not be taken from legal immigrants who are stopped briefly by the authorities, justice officials said, or from legal residents who are detained on noncriminal immigration violations.

“What this does is move the DNA collection to the arrest stage,” said Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman. “The general approach,” he said, “is to bring the collection of DNA samples into alignment with current federal fingerprint collection practices.” He said the department was “moving forward aggressively” to issue proposed regulations.

The 2006 amendment was sponsored by two border state Republicans, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and Senator John Cornyn of Texas. In an interview, Mr. Kyl said the measure was broadly drawn to encompass illegal immigrants as well as Americans arrested for federal crimes. He said that 13 percent of illegal immigrants detained in Arizona last year had criminal records.

“Some of these are very bad people,” Mr. Kyl said. “The number of sexual assaults committed by illegal immigrants is astonishing. Right now there is a fingerprint system in use, but it is not as thorough as it could be.”

Ms. Parrish, of the rape victims’ organization, pointed to the case of Angel Resendiz, a Mexican immigrant who was known as the Railroad Killer. Starting in 1997, Mr. Resendiz committed at least 15 murders and numerous rapes in the United States. Over the years of his rampage, Mr. Resendiz was deported 17 times. He was executed in Texas in June.

“That was 17 missed opportunities to collect his DNA,” Ms. Parrish said. “If he had been identified as the perpetrator of the first rapes, it would have prevented later ones.”

Immigration lawyers said the DNA sampling could tar illegal immigrants with a criminal stigma, even though most of them have never committed any criminal offense.

“To equate somebody with a possible immigration violation in the same category as a suspected sex offender is an outrage,” said David Leopold, an immigration lawyer who practices in Cleveland.

Forensic DNA is culled either from a tiny blood sample taken from a fingertip (the F.B.I.’s preferred method) or from a swab of the inside of the mouth. Federal samples are logged into the F.B.I.’s laboratory, analyzed and transformed into profiles that can be read by computer. The profiles are loaded into a database called the National DNA Index System.

The F.B.I. also loads DNA profiles from local and state police into the federal database and runs searches. Only seven states now collect DNA from suspects when they are arrested; of those, only two states are authorized by their laws to send those samples to the federal database.

Mr. Neufeld, of the Innocence Project, said his group supported broad DNA collection from convicted criminals. But, he said, “There is no demonstrable nexus between being detained for an immigration matter and the likelihood you are going to commit some serious violent crime.”

The DNA amendment has divided women’s groups that are usually unified supporters of the Violence Against Women Act, which was adopted in 1994.

“We were stunned by the extraordinary, broad sweep of this amendment,” said Lisalyn Jacobs, vice president for government relations at Legal Momentum, a law group founded by the National Organization for Women. Ms. Jacobs recalled that the amendment had been adopted by a voice vote with little debate. She said many lawmakers eager to renew the act, which enjoys solid bipartisan support, appeared unaware of the scope of the DNA amendment.

“The pervasive problems of profiling in the United States will only be exacerbated by such a system,” Ms. Jacobs said, because Latino and other immigrants will be greatly over-represented in the database. She noted that the law required a court order to remove a profile from the system.

Many groups warned that the measure would compound already severe backlogs in the F.B.I.’s DNA processing. Mr. Fram of the F.B.I. said there had been an enormous increase in the samples coming to the databank since it started to operate in 1998, but no new resources for the bureau’s laboratory. Currently about 150,000 DNA samples from convicted criminals are waiting to be processed and loaded into the national database, Mr. Fram said.

He said the laboratory had added robot technology to speed the processing. But in the “worst case scenario,” where the laboratory receives one million new samples a year, Mr. Fram said, “there is going to be a bottleneck.”

Police chief Beheading plot being used as distraction from Blair woes

UK Daily
The senior policeman leading the investigation into an alleged plot to behead a Muslim British soldier believes the inquiry has been "hijacked" by the Government.

Assistant Chief Constable David Shaw was "seething" when he discovered Whitehall officials leaked sensitive details of Operation Gamble to the media in an apparent attempt to divert attention from the problems engulfing Tony Blair.
And he is said to be increasingly frustrated that the anonymous briefings may be impeding his officers' efforts to gather evidence.

A source close to Mr Shaw said: "He is angry that while he had played a straight bat there are others in Government departments who, without asking him, briefed the media about his inquiry."

Last Wednesday morning, only a few hours after the dawn arrests of nine men in Birmingham, Mr Shaw watched despairingly as details of the operation he hoped would remain secret flashed up on TV.

The source said: "He said through gritted teeth, "I haven't said any of those things - it has all come from London."

At one point, to the bewilderment of senior officers, details of the operation were being broadcast while one of the suspects had still to be found.

Mr Shaw never intended for the public to know, at least not yet, the existence of the alleged beheading plot, fearing the huge publicity would only further inflame Birmingham's Muslim communities at a time when he needs their assistance.

Following the leaks, senior officers were sent to try to pacify community leaders and explain that the police were not to blame.

Mr Shaw, a married father of two, is a highly espected figure among the city's ethnic minorities and is understood to be dismayed at the rancour in the Muslim community that the interference from Whitehall has produced.

The source said: "He feels the inquiry has been hijacked by those who don't have to live - as he does - with the direct consequences of what they say publicly.

"To my knowledge, he hasn't speculated as to what motivated these people to brief the media but it's really rather obvious that there are various agendas at work here."

Mr Shaw had released only scant information about the arrests, not operational details.

But the unofficial release of lurid detail about an alleged beheading plot - and an accompanying account of how two soldiers were used as "live bait" to try to flush out the suspects - dramatically raised the interest in the story.

Conveniently for the Government, it replaced the prisons crisis as the story of the week - and took the sting out of the cash-for-honours row that saw Tony Blair questioned by police for a second time.

Mr Shaw felt it necessary to spell out his discomfort in a news conference on Friday.

Referring to Birmingham, he said: "I am acutely aware that members of the community are confused and bewildered by what is being said by the media."

The Home Office said: "We have only released factual statements on the matter and the Secretary of State and the Attorney General have reminded media not to do anything that would prejudice the operation."

Top secret army cell recruiting Iraqi insurgent double agents

telegraph uk
Deep inside the heart of the "Green Zone", the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq. It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG), and it has proved to be one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror.
Its members - servicemen and women of all ranks recruited from all three of the Armed Forces - are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents.

Working alongside the Special Air Service and the American Delta Force as part of the Baghdad-based counter-terrorist unit known as Task Force Black, they have supplied intelligence that has saved hundreds of lives and resulted in some of the most notable successes against the myriad terror groups fighting in Iraq. Only last week, intelligence from the JSG is understood to have led to a series of successful operations against Sunni militia groups in southern Baghdad.

Information obtained by the unit is also understood to have inspired one of the most successful operations carried out by Task Force Black, in November 2005, when SAS snipers shot dead three suicide bombers.

The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq up until his death in June last year, followed intelligence obtained by the JSG, as did the rescue of the kidnapped peace campaigner, Norman Kember.
"The JSG is the coalition's secret weapon," revealed one defence source. "Their job is to recruit and run covert human intelligence sources or agents - we never use the term informer. The Americans are in awe of the unit because they have nothing like them within their military."

During the Troubles, the JSG operated under the cover name of the Force Research Unit (FRU), which between the early 1980s and the late 1990s managed to penetrate the very heart of the IRA. By targeting and then "turning" members of the paramilitary organisation with a variety of "inducements" ranging from blackmail to bribes, the FRU operators developed agents at virtually every command level within the IRA.

The unit was renamed following the Stevens Inquiry into allegations of collusion between the security forces and protestant paramilitary groups, and, until relatively recently continued to work exclusively in Northern Ireland.

The JSG recruits men and women of any rank from all three services up to the age of 42. Volunteers attend a two week pre-selection course where those not in possession of the unique set of skills required to handle agents successfully are weeded out.

Candidates who get through pre-selection then spend the next four months at the Intelligence Corps headquarters at Chicksands, Bedfordshire, being taught driving and close-quarter battle skills - operators must be capable of using a wide variety of weapons but must be expert shots with a pistol.

But most important of all, -volunteers must be able to befriend people they may actually despise, win their trust and persuade them to become agents, which in some cases will mean getting them to inform on friends and relatives. Those who eventually pass the course can expect to be posted to Baghdad, Basra and Afghanistan.

Sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that in Baghdad intelligence is obtained in a variety of ways. Some of it comes through phone calls to a confidential hot-line where callers can either talk to a member of the JSG or arrange a meeting inside the "Green Zone". It is too dangerous for operators to meet agents at a secret rendezvous in other parts of the city.

With so many Iraqis entering the zone every day, those who want to pass on information can do so with a certain amount of anonymity. But a risk still remains. All potential agents are warned that anyone suspected of being a coalition spy will be tortured before being murdered. If he is married, his wife will be gang-raped in front of their children, who will in all probability also be murdered, they are told. Despite the risks, JSG operators deal with dozens of Iraqis every week who are -prepared, for a variety of reasons, to become informers.

"Some Iraqis come to us because they are simply fed up with the violence," said one source. "They may have had -members of their families -murdered, tortured or kidnapped. Unlike much of the middle class which has already fled the country, they may be too poor to leave and so they come to us to see if they can make a difference.

"They may have a little bit of information or detailed knowledge of a planned attack. We also have to deal with terrorists and that presents us with a difficulty. We are happy for them to pass us information but it is made absolutely clear to them that as a member of a terrorist group they are criminals and they should cease all activity immediately - we have had cases where Shia or Sunni men have provided us with information and as part of the debriefing process we have discovered that they are terrorists themselves. We warn them that they are running the risk of being killed or captured and that they should get themselves into a position within the organisation where they will not be directly involved in murder."

To senior American officers in Baghdad, the JSG is playing a vital role in the most important theatre of the war on terror.

"In many respects, Afghanistan is a side issue and that is something the Americans understand better than British politicians," said a source. "Ask any senior officer in Baghdad, given a choice, which war would they be prepared to lose and they will say the war in Afghanistan.

"In many respects the war in Iraq has redefined insurgent warfare. Think of the very worst of Northern Ireland combined with the very worst of the Balkans and you are coming close to life on a daily basis in Baghdad. The situation is chaotic and bordering on being hopeless. The Iraqis have absolutely no faith in their army or police force because they are all or nearly all linked to militias.

"Only the coalition forces can bring real security - if the war is lost chaos will reign and the whole of the region will be dragged into a bloody and catastrophic ethnic war."