The Data Dragnet: A New World of Technological Surveillance
William C. Thompson does not ordinarily hunt for bugs, and his scrutiny of a type of computational algorithm that analyze DNA started out innocently enough. Investigators used software in a case from Southern California where, in March of 2016, police had pulled over a man named Alejandro Sandoval. The traffic stop turned into a criminal investigation, which ultimately hinged on what amounted to a single cell’s worth of evidence. Thompson, a professor emeritus of criminology, law, and society at the University of California Irvine, published a paper about the case in 2023, which ultimately resonated with a much larger issue: the bitter, public battle over genetic information, artificial intelligence, and the societal applications of computational tools that leverage large quantities of data. ….[READ]
