The Queensland, Australia police have used DNA phenotyping for the first time ever in hopes of leading to a breakthrough for a 1982 murder. 

The department partnered with a U.S.-based company called Parabon NanoLabs to create a profile image of the murder suspect, a Caucasian man with long blonde hair. Police claim that this image was generated using blood samples found at the scene of the murder of a man from 40 years ago; according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this is the first time "investigative genetic genealogy" has been used in Queensland. 

This image does not factor in any environmental characteristics, such as tattoos, facial hair, and scars, and cannot determine the age or body mass of the suspect. However, Queensland investigators have published the image online and are offering a $500,000 reward and indemnity from prosecution to anyone who might have information about the suspect. 

The image is a vague rendering of a man that does not provide any more information than the sketch that the department already has of the suspect. This further perpetuates the hyper-surveillance of any man who resembles the image. Parabon NanoLabs has already been criticized by criminal justice and privacy experts for disseminating images that implicate too broad a pool of suspects.

“Broad dissemination of what is essentially a computer-generated guess can lead to mass surveillance of any Black man approximately 5'4", both by their community and by law enforcement,” Callie Schroeder, the Global Privacy Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Motherboard in October in regards to a suspect profile created by Parabon that was released by the Edmonton Police Department in October. “This pool of suspects is far too broad to justify increases in surveillance or suspicion that could apply to thousands of innocent people.”

The Queensland police department said that the DNA sample from the case generated a genealogy tree of “15,000 ‘linked’ individuals” and they have not been able to find a close match yet. 

Instead of facing the possibility that DNA phenotyping may not be an effective tool for narrowing down a suspect, the police department’s strategy is to ask the public for their DNA samples. Criminologist Xanthe Mallett said in a press release that to help police find a match, people can “opt-in” to share their own DNA samples with investigators through DNA services such as Family Tree and GEDMatch.

These DNA databases raise questions about the privacy violations of DNA phenotyping. Though Mallett encourages people to voluntarily submit their DNA to help police investigations, many users who submit their samples to free DNA researching sites may not fully understand how their data will be used. 

“People should know that if they send their DNA to a consumer-facing company, their genetic information may fall into the hands of law enforcement to be used in criminal investigations against them or their genetic relatives. None of this data is covered by federal health privacy rules in the United States,” Jennifer Lynch, the Surveillance Litigation Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard. “While 23 and Me and Ancestry generally require warrants and limit the disclosure of their users’ data to law enforcement, other consumer genetic genealogy companies like GEDmatch and FamilyTree DNA provide near-wholesale law enforcement access to their databases.” 

Parabon claims it has worked with hundreds of law enforcement agencies to use its Snapshot prediction tool to create composite sheets from DNA samples that include the suspect’s gender, skin color, eye color, and hair color. Those characteristics are often the only similarities between the predicted and actual photo of the suspect, with the actual photo showing a person with completely different facial features and age. 

The image of the generated face alone, without the rest of the DNA composite information including the confidence percentages of each characteristic, strips the image of necessary context. “Many members of the public that see this generated image will be unaware that it's a digital approximation, that age, weight, hairstyle, and face shape may be very different, and that accuracy of skin/hair/eye color is approximate,” Schroeder said.

DNA phenotyping is especially harmful to people of color, specifically Black and Latino communities, which are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Sharing the suspect images created by Parabon will only heighten the public’s suspicion towards certain demographics of people. 

This article is part of State of Surveillance, made possible with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. The series will explore the development, deployment, and effects of surveillance and its intersection with race and civil rights.

Activision Blizzard is asking the National Labor Relations Board to stop a union vote at its Diablo quality assurance (QA) department in Albany, NY because, it claims, game development is unlike any other form of labor, making years of NLRB precedent irrelevant. Following a successful union organizing drive, the company has requested that the votes be impounded until a review is completed.

The company’s Request for Review revolves around a few key points: first, that existing legal precedent fails to account for the uniquely collaborative nature of game development; second, that a QA workers union would lead to a fractured unit, caused by the shared interests of QA workers and other developers; and third, that the spectators engaged in “Impermissible Digital Picketing” by having profile pictures with the phrase “ABK Stop Union Busting” during a virtual hearing.

The company hopes to expand the voting body to the more than 100 employees at its Albany office, shifting the potential union from a QA workers union to a more mixed unit—forcing a second election in the process, which the company could have another, potentially better, shot at winning. Earlier this year, the Amazon Labor Union claims Amazon forced its workers attempting to unionize in Albany to hold a 1,000-voter election by inflating its voter list to "pack the unit." The vote failed. 

Activision Blizzard's basic argument relies on the idea that video game production is so fundamentally different from other forms of production with which the National Labor Relations Board is familiar that previous precedent should be disregarded. Activision Blizzard’s lawyers point to the collaborative nature of video game development, in which employees and contractors across departments work together towards the common end of producing the best game possible, even including screenshots of diverse Diablo 4 environments in their filing. Activision Blizzard makes this argument in spite of the fact that the collaborative mode of production which they describe clearly resembles that of the mostly unionized American entertainment industry.

Screenshot by Activision Blizzard.

Activision Blizzard goes on to argue that employees within the QA department do not share common interests, because some of them work on different games than others. The Albany offices are home to the Diablo QA team, who are divided between Diablo 2 Remastered and Diablo 4. Furthermore, QA employees are further divided into specific teams, directly working with other departments within the company. The company argued that this division prevents QA workers from sharing common interests, as they work with different people and the duties of their roles are fluid. Activision Blizzard cites a specific case in which a QA member was temporarily re-assigned to a UI design role, without any change in his pay, as evidence for the uniquely collaborative nature of the games industry.

Instead, Activision Blizzard claims that QA workers do share common interest with members of the development team in other departments, citing their mutual drive to achieve the same end and the similar tools they utilize in their day-to-day job. The company’s claim pulls on established legal precedents in which QA workers on factory floors were prevented from forming their own union because their work was closely integrated with that of other factory workers.

Finally, the Request for Review ends with Activision Blizzard, in a bizarre argument for pausing the union election, taking issue with the profile pictures of spectators in a virtual NLRB hearing. It claims that “ABK Stop Union Busting” profile pictures are an act of digital picketing that "intimidated" the company's witnesses, and which should not have been allowed at the hearing. Activision Blizzard addressed this in the hearing itself, but their complaints were dismissed outright by a labor board official.

"Sadly, it's no surprise that a company that has repeatedly tried to silence its employees, including by hiding reports of sexual violence, would want to muzzle workers' voices once again by trying to stop them from voting in a union election. Workers have concluded that they need to protect themselves from this abusive employer by joining together into a strong union," the Communication Workers of America said in an emailed statement to Waypoint. 

"Instead of staying neutral, Activision's management continues to present the same failing arguments in a desperate attempt to interfere with workers' legal right to make their own decisions about forming a union and negotiating a collective bargaining agreement," they added "It’s clear the company's executives feel threatened by workers organizing in New York, Wisconsin and across the country. We are confident in the NLRB’s response to these frivolous requests, and we will continue to push for Activision Blizzard employees’ right to organize without delay.”

Activision Blizzard’s approach to this case is nothing extraordinary. It dovetails with  the strategy laid out in a blog post on the website of law firm Duane Morris LLP, which explicitly lays out the danger of so-called "micro-units" and how to stop them. The article encourages “blurring of the distinctions between the micro-units and the broader group as a whole,” says employers should “focus on the interdependence and interlocking nature of the manufacturing of the product,” and even uses the exact same argument regarding quality control workers in factories: “quality control employees who spend most of their time interacting with the production employees on the floor and who participate in problem-solving have a better chance of being included.”

This is all to say that Activision Blizzard’s strategy is not particularly clever, nor is it unique, but that doesn’t really matter. If the NLRB throws out this request after a short deliberation period, it's still a success for Activision Blizzard, because the delay is the point. Exhausting the resources of a nascent union is easy for a company at the scale of Activision Blizzard, as is quickly reorganizing itself to better prevent future organizing drives if unionization efforts at the Albany offices go on to fail.

Debris from China’s most powerful rocket crashed down to on Earth on Friday. It’s the fourth time that an out-of-control Chinese rocket has fallen down to Earth in recent years, an event called an “uncontrolled re-entry.” These present a potential risk to people and infrastructure across a huge swath of our planet, though the odds of any rocket parts hitting a populated area are extremely low.

The out-of-control spacecraft was estimated to potentially fall on a wide range of locations between the northern latitudes of New York and the southern latitudes of New Zealand, according to projections by the Aerospace Corporation, a research nonprofit. At 6:33 a.m., U.S. Space Command confirmed that the rocket body had reentered the atmosphere somewhere over the south-central Pacific Ocean.

If you feel some deja vu about all this, it’s because every time China has launched their biggest rocket, known as the Long March 5B, its main stage—which is a towering 175 feet tall and weighs in at 21 metric tons—has ended up falling back to our planet on an uncontrolled trajectory, a pattern that has provoked criticism from other space leaders. 

Rockets are made up of stages, or boosters, that are jettisoned once they have done their part to blast a payload into space. Most of these spent parts will then maneuver themselves into paths that end up with atmospheric reentry over the oceans, to minimize the risk of striking a populated area.

For whatever reason, the main stage of Long March 5B is apparently not designed to conduct these controlled reentries, leading to uncertainty over its time and place of impact. The rocket has flown four times, including its most recent launch on Halloween. Debris fell on villages in the Côte d’Ivoire after its first flight in May 2020, causing property damage. The next two stages fell into the Indian Ocean, in April 2021, and into the Pacific Ocean, in July of this year.  

NASA administrator Bill Nelson recently expressed frustration with the rocket’s string of uncontrolled reentries, which are the biggest pieces of spacecraft debris that have fallen on Earth in several decades. 

“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth,” Nelson said in July. “All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property. Doing so is critical to the responsible use of space and to ensure the safety of people here on Earth.” 

While it is very unlikely that this individual rocket harmed anyone, a team of scientists have also warned that there is a 10 percent chance that someone will be killed by falling space debris sometime this decade. 

“Those national governments whose populations are being put at risk should demand that major spacefaring states act, together, to mandate controlled rocket reentries, create meaningful consequences for non-compliance and thus eliminate the risks for everyone” the researchers said in their study.