With a national DNA database in the pipeline, an advanced system of linking criminals to crime scenes, ZDNet decided to take a look at the technology backbone that will support it and the privacy issues surrounding the initiative.
The collection of DNA from "serious offenders" has already begun in NSW prisons, and the program will soon ramp-up with with profiles of other criminals, suspects and volunteers due to be stored on the national database and used as potential matches for crime scene DNA.
Crim Trac, the agency established by the Commonwealth Government to be responsible for the project, will lease capacity on a Defence Department Sun 4000 server to run an Oracle database on top of a Solaris operating system.
"We don't see ourselves in the business of managing hardware. We're not interested in owning our own machinery," Crim Trac's Ken Hood told ZDNet.
Crime scene DNA is encoded into a data transaction and forwarded to the national database by forensic laboratories Australiawide.
The transaction is automatically encrypted and sent to the central server across ISDN lines secured by the Australian Federal Police, according to Crim Trac.
Once received, the profile is decrypted, transferred onto the computer hosting the national database and automatically compared with all other records on the database.
An automatic match process is triggered and the forensic laboratory involved is notified electronically if a match occurs.
"It's a secure end-to-end network from forensic labs to a highly secure site in the Defence Department's computing bureau," Crim Trac CEO Kim Terrall said.
All access to the database is logged and all records are available for scrutiny by the Privacy Commissioner, according to Crim Trac.
"There's a high degree of privacy and security at the central level," Terrall said.
"Forensic labs are used to processing crime scene information to be used in courts. It's all part and parcel of maintaining a chain of evidence used for prosecution."
Furthermore, all transactions, records and log details are securely archived and all profiles have an automatically set destruction date that takes legislative requirements into account.
However the destruction of data is one issue that has privacy experts concerned.
"The key issue is if a sample is taken from a suspect and there's no prosecution or continuing investigation that DNA data should be destroyed," Tim Dixon of the Australian Privacy Foundation said. "If that power is abused it could have some pretty horrific consequences."
"It's very hard to find an appropriate balance between the interest of individuals and the law enforcement interest of the community," Dixon added.
Crim Trac will be responsible for the ongoing support and maintenance of the database but was circumspect about the cost of its development.
"We're not talking about a huge amount of money," Terrall said. "It's not really a large project, the database is not going to hold huge amounts of data immediately."
Although it could upload as many as 10,000 profiles, time restrictions on the aggregation of DNA means the database is something that will develop over time, according to Crim Trac.
A comparable national DNA database in the UK, where the population is three times as large as that of Australia, has collected 800,000 DNA profiles over six years, according to Terrall.
"If we could achieve 200,000 in the same period of time we'd be travelling fairly closely to what the UK has done," Terrall said.
Crim Trac anticipates that the national DNA database will be operational in the second quarter of the year.
