The Perspectives of Different Communities

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        The newness of Undisclosed DNA lies not with a fundamental reordering of physics or breaking some universal law such as the speed of light. Our methods do not rely on nebulous and untested quantities. We live in the realm of not science fiction but science reality.
        We have brought together the concerns of disparate groups and found solutions across various fields. We should not define the strength of human ingenuity in a specific tool, weapon, or formula. Undisclosed DNA combines the findings of multiple fields to create something that exceeds the sum of its parts.

I     Biologists

Research by Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel made possible any discussion of genetic code. Every lifeform carries its code for its own growth and for reproduction. Whatever the code is and however it is stored, some information on how to build another human is in each of us and carries to the next generation.
        Clever minds had already worked out that this code is separate from our bodies as a whole or life experiences. If a certain sparrow’s offspring flourished and reproduced, maybe it was thanks to the beak shape of that sparrow. If it matched the environment, it was advantageous.
        To have a certain beak shape or a certain color of plumage depended on an individual’s genetic code, not what it ate. Damage to a body does not impact your children in the same way. We see this with the man who lost an arm in war and later sires children who all are born with two arms each.
        Looking back, this seems obvious because we now know our genetic code lies in the DNA in the nucleus and the mitochondria of every cell of the human body. If we had only known about base pairs and the double helix and RNA at an earlier time, maybe our knowledge of genetic diseases and therapies as well as vaccines could be further along. In order to not fall behind, it is imperative to further our knowledge. Let’s sequence thewhole of the human genome and learn what DNA gives you red hair or good eyesight.

2     Law Enforcement and Detective Work

If the biologist is unbothered by the question of whether we even ought to know which DNA does what and whose DNA belongs to whom, then the detective inspector is positively against privacy. Think of how much faster we could solve crimes and apprehend culprits if we had a database of everyone’s fingerprints and DNA.
        In this ideal world, we would not have to wait until someone had a run-in with the law before we got their records. Forensics could visit any crime scene and compare any fingerprints against the fingerprints of every person on earth.
        DNA may break down over time if left out in the open, but you can take the cells, blood, hair follicles, and whatever else, and preserve them. Unlike fingerprints, DNA will never get smudged. If a bit of cells are there, then they are there. Early tests for DNA were like tests for fingerprints. If you only had access to a single right hand ring finger’s fingerprint, then that is all you had. It was likely that even if you nabbed the perpetrator and placed her in a pool of ten suspects, you would end up with two people whose right ring fingers resembled the sample fingerprint.
        A single coincidence is possible. Likewise, a simpler genetic test from the 1990s could also result in pointing to an innocent suspect. A full set of all ten fingerprints makes such a ‘collision’ practically impossible. Two fingers on two people could each bear a resemblance to a blurred fingerprint that Scotland Yard acquired. The odds of two persons sharing similar fingerprints across the same three fingers? Get out of town.
        Therefore, the best way to reliably find the ‘bad guys’ without missing one or accidentally fingering an innocent suspect is to get more information, be it more fingerprints or more refined DNA searches. No act of Parliament, however, has addressed exactly how this wonder-machine and DNA database would work. Computing resources are limited, and the UK police would benefit from the much more efficient processes of Undisclosed DNA.

3     Cryptographers

Cryptographic experts have usually formed the vanguard of the privacy advocates. They wanted to keep things secret, private, and secure. This meant they would often speak of plain text and encrypted text, or ‘cypher-text’ – and they also carried an antiauthoritarian bent. It is not for nothing that the people who implemented one certain communication protocol dubbed themselves ‘cypher-punks’.
        These mathematically gifted rebels naturally found the police approach distasteful in communication and in so-called biometrics, such as one’s genetic code. Differently from the biologists, they never wanted to map out entire things, be it a chromosome or a document. Breaking up messages, creating checks that never required one to know the original information, making the original information nearly impossible to recover, encrypting material so that only intended recipients could read it – these were the impulses of cryptographers.
        Along theway, they alsowanted to reduce computationalworkload – don’t we all! Fortunately for them and for us, maths and physics are on their side. You can make a key or a hash twice as long, which means twice as much work for the encryption, decryption, or act of hashing, but an exponential growth in difficulty for attackers. A key that is twenty digits long is harder to use than a key that is ten digits long, but it is over a thousand times harder to break for a spy.
        They also desired to make things unique. Making everything singular was an unalloyed good or had no negative impact – just implement it everywhere. This meant that no one would confuse two messages, two points of contact, or two conversations. The business and banking worlds also loved how advances in this field made many transactions and receipts impossible to forge.
        To the goals of Undisclosed DNA, however, the push for uniqueness added an exorbitant burden when analyzing genetic code. This required us to land on a two-step process.

4     Politicians

Legislators – be they members of Parliament, the Australian Senate, the US House of Representatives – have to balance the concerns of the citizens and the police with the need to lead in science. It is not uncommon for them to articulate impossible demands as a result.
        When it comes to digital communications, some have said that ‘we’ need to have unassailable encryption that keeps our communications safe and secure but to also have ways for government agents to listen in on the activities of the bad guys.
        This appears to make a certain kind of sense. When telephones were ubiquitous and before modern cryptography, we had a reasonable expectation of privacy on the telephone. Soviet agents could not pop in and record a conversation between you and your nan in Dublin. At the same time, it was possible for law enforcement to get a warrant and work with the telephone company to record calls between two suspected drug smugglers in Bristol.
        Digital security, however, is all or nothing. Because it relies on mathematical principles, an algorithm is either strong for everybody or weak for everybody. Other options also fail.
        Let’s say that we maintain strong algorithms, but include copies of every message sent or received and encrypt that with a special key that only MI5 possesses. This would double the computational workload and energy requirements of every communications device – and then where do we store these copies of messages? From a logitistics perspective, let alone an environmentally conscious one, this is a non-starter. Worst of all, having a single master key to unlock all communications in Britain would mean that one mistake, one leak, one hack, one accidental loss of the master key would expose every single Briton to espionage.
        In an effort to take advantage of the benefits for law enforcement, genetic research, medicine, and more, MPs in the UK have recently set out policies for recording the DNA of newborns. This presents a serious challenge to the privacy of an individual, sovereignty over one’s information, and protection from potential discrimination. In addition, we could end up forfeiting a powerful source of unique key encryption and still fail to give what the police may want, a usable directory of all persons in the UK.

5     Connecting the Groups

Undisclosed DNA uses two tools, the DNA Address and the private key, to satisfy both law enforcement and privacy advocates. Politicians can thread the needle by mandating the handling of genetic code in a way that protects the privacy of each person. Undisclosed DNA offers ways to accomplish this here and now so that a relevant law would be practicable.
        We use cutting-edge technology, but the underlying science has existed in the worlds of biologists and mathematicians for decades. As a result, our methods are not experimental or perpetually ‘just around the corner’.
        From biology, we know what DNA is, the various chromosomes, the mitochondria, and the four base pairs that form DNA. Genetic code is not a black box. We know exactly how each snippet relates to every other snippet. The downside is that it is more disastrous if someone can read your DNA code.
        With cryptographers, we have the know-how to make algorithms and formulas that tick the boxes we want. We can deploy maths that is easy in one direction but not another – i.e., not reversible – and at the same time we can speed up searches. Most significantly, we can differentiate near matches while still preserving privacy. Traditionally, cryptography has concerned itself with people who already know about each other or to conduct financial transactions or to be as unique as possible.
        The DNA Address brings us almost all the way there. It reduces the workload of matching millions of people’s DNA, an enormous computing burden. It is deterministic, needing only a single cell from your body to make a hash that will never change from birth to death.
        At this point, the computer whiz notices a serious and unaddressed obstacle: hash collisions. After whittling down the list of possibilities with the DNA Address, we have a shortlist of candidates, people who may (or may not) be related.
        Next, we look to the private keys of Undisclosed DNA. These will allow us to separate people who coincidentally share hashes.