DNA is not viable as an identity verification biometric, says a June research paper from Rand Corp.

Even as the Defense Department must keep track of a large and ever-growing number of people, writes Rand's Douglas Shontz, DNA presents too many legal and technical issues for use as an access control identifier.

DNA has an advantage of being totally unique and unalterable (by today's technology standards). And a legal challenge to DNA as a biometric wouldn't necessarily succeed since "courts are generally willing to accept the government's assertion of what constitutes a compelling need to enhance or maintain security," Shontz writes.

However, DNA could potentially reveal information about people's health, a privacy argument that would be difficult to assuage, Shontz states. Also, were an individual's DNA information to be stolen, that affected individual would always be at risk.

Further, DNA testing currently requires three hours turnaround time. Even if advances shorten that to a half hour, that's too much time for access control purposes, which need to be immediate or nearly immediate, Shontz says. Even using DNA testing for random screening would be cost prohibitive, since DNA information would have to be stored, maintained and protected, he adds.

As an intelligence tool for identifying people outside the United States, DNA does have limited value, Shontz says. News reports indicate that the military has already created a database of DNA profiles for more than 80,000 people mostly located in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Collecting DNA samples in a warzone for comparison to a profile database presents challenges such as sample contamination and sample degradation. Further, analyzing DNA samples can cost anywhere from between $50 to $500, Shontz writes, and testing capacity is already squeezed. Nonetheless, DNA could be an attractive identifier under limited circumstances, Shontz concludes, even though it would not likely gain priority over better human intelligence collection methods.

For more:
- download the Rand report, "DNA as Part of Identity Management for the Department of Defense" (.pdf)

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