This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 26, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown. Courts have a hard time keeping up with innovative and sometimes

constitutionally dubious methods for solving crimes,

and yet the privacy implications often take years to discover.

Kendall Cotton of Montana's Frontier Institute says his state is often ahead of the curve when it comes to issues of privacy.

He details one instance where lawmakers were broadly ahead of entrepreneurial police and offers some advice to other states about where to look to put privacy

front and center. I say it all the time but law enforcement is typically way

ahead of the law when it comes to making use of new abilities and powers and technology

in order to, you know, we hope for laudable purposes to fight crime

uh... what has been the relationship between the uses of

dn a that is to say you know we lots of people have done twenty three and me lots of people have done 23 and me. Lots of people have contributed their DNA to

privately owned databases. What has been the relationship up to now between law enforcement and those DNA databases?

So if you ask law enforcement, law enforcement will tell you that this is just something that

they use every once in a while when it's needed.

They'll point to cases like the Golden State Killer case in California

where they were able to solve that long-standing cold case with a DNA database search.

In Montana they have the same story. They said that we don't use this but the one time

that we have that they could think of was solving a cold case murder of a young girl from Missoula, Montana, from 1975.

And so the stories can be very compelling.

Right.

And for law enforcement,

they might see nothing wrong with that.

...