Kaden: Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Civil LiberTrees. I'm Kaden. 

Anya: And I'm Anya. And today we're with Dr. Paul Burow. Dr. Burow is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Earth Systems at Stanford University. As an interdisciplinary social environmental scientist, his work examines the cultural dynamics of environmental change in North America, exploring the social dimensions and institutional effectiveness of collaborative forest stewardship with federal agencies and native nations in California. Dr. Burow's scholarship highlights the impacts of land use practices and settler colonialism, shaping how people relate to land, substantiate their place on it, and make claims to territory.  Broadly, his research program addresses Indigenous environmental justice and rural social inequality across North America. Dr. Burow is also engaged in community based participatory research projects with tribal nations to expand Indigenous led land stewardship  and protect cultural landscapes from degradation  for the benefit of future generations. 

Paul, thank you once again for joining us today. We're so excited to have you here on Civil LiberTrees. For our listeners who are unfamiliar, could you briefly describe what environmental justice is and how your work relates to that concept? 

Dr. Burow: Thank you for having me. First of all,  I'm glad to be here. To answer your first question, I think people  will often define environmental justice in different ways, but for me, it's very much a  focus on communities and people being able to share in the benefits of the environment.

That includes both  environmental amenities, like a healthy and clean environment, as well as not being disproportionately impacted by environmental harms. And something that I might add to this is now some people frame this issue of epistemic justice, so thinking about the lived experience of communities, the knowledge that people have, and that's something that's also really important to environmental issues that we take seriously. People can speak to what's important to them and also speak for themselves about the kind of environmental inequalities they face.

Kaden: Thank you so much for sharing. We know that a part of your work as a postdoctoral scholar involves work in the field and recently you shared that you were participating in some of this field work. Could you tell our listeners a little bit more about your work and the experience of being on ground and interacting with indigenous communities firsthand?

Dr. Burow: Sure. Yeah. So that most recent trip is for projects called the opinion community climate action project. This is a project that involves researchers from here, Stanford and UC Berkeley. As well as four different tribal nations: the Washoe tribe of Nevada, California, Bridgeport Indian Colony, the Bishop Paiute tribe and the Big Pine Paiute tribe.

And we're working with a couple of local NGOs as well, the Eastern Sierra Land Trust Friends of the Inyo, and the Sierra Business Council and we're working collaboratively to help build more resilient forests in the face of climate change. There's been a lot of, Issues with loss of forests, degraded air quality and many of these dryland ecosystems in this eastern Sierra region of California where we work are being impacted by drought and wildfire on a large scale.

So when I say field work it usually means we go out and we're interacting directly with our partners on the ground. So in some cases we are having project meetings and doing work in person is really important. I know in the Zoom area we're used to doing a lot of things but really I think for community based work there often is no substitute for being there in person.

And because we're talking about things that are happening on the land, it's also really important that we're out there on the land as well. Because our partnership has a pretty  broad base of organizations involved the work looks a little bit different in our engagements with each of them.

But in this early stage we're having conversations about what we want to have for this from the summer's field season. And so we are both ecological and. More social sides of the project, but one of the big things we're going to be working on is doing a household survey across the Eastern Sierra Nevada.

And we actually are hiring students to help us go out and talk to people by going door to door, going to community events, and trying to get a much deeper understanding of how people are using forests. The different values they have that shape their preferences for stewardship work.

And this has a lot of Important direct implications for how forests are managed, right? The, and so it's not just climate change isn't the kind of only thing that matters on the landscape, it's also about land use and land management and what that looks like. So we're very keen to to learn from talking to people firsthand on the ground and that's information that that we'll be able to share publicly and broadly in the area as as we  Institutions that do a lot of land management, many of them federal agencies, are making plans for how they manage forests into our climate change future. 

Anya: Thank you, that's so interesting, especially your work regarding land use. I think there's definitely a lack of discussion about land use in terms of climate change in mainstream media.  So I was wondering, could you talk a little bit about how the disproportionate impacts of climate change felt by marginalized and specifically indigenous communities translate into disparities and civil liberties? 

I think one of the  central issues in the central Sierra has to do with land and who controls it, who claims ownership over it. Because of settler colonialism and, that's basically a term that just references the fact that, our country was founded on land dispossession and displacing and taking land away from communities that were already living here.

And that's still an enduring structure that exists today because those communities still exist. But many of them aren't on their ancestral lands. Or the actual lands that they have control over have been greatly diminished. So that's one of the fundamental features of what's happening in a lot of landscapes in the western United States is most of the land is owned and controlled by the federal government.

And it creates some like tensions with what communities would do if they would, were to to manage it itself. And it also changes, how climate change is refracted through these landscapes and how it impacts communities. So for example forest landscapes are Often really important sources of indigenous traditional foods.

And that's something we think about a lot. We're doing a lot of work related to a particular ecosystem called pinion juniper woodlands that are found across over a hundred million acres of the Southwestern U S. And one of the traditional foods that they come from this forest are pine nuts from a particular species of pine.

And so when you have these huge stand replacing wildfires, you're eliminating the opportunity for people to, to care for trees, go out and collect pine nuts. But it's also not just that the fires are destroying trees. It's also that drought is interacting with insects and other diseases that are  impacting the health of trees.

And so you have these large areas where there's a lot of tree die off or the trees aren't as healthy and they aren't producing cones frequently. So all of these things are, you would just basically offer an example of how climate change is impacting communities very directly. There are also other ways that communities use forests.

People will,  there's all kinds of different cultural practices that are important in forests. Many of which, communities don't necessarily just disclose to the broader world. But having a healthy ecosystem is an important part of that, right? When a forest is completely wiped out by wildfire that often has a negative impact on community's ability to use it  for some of these different practices. With climate change, there's also the comparison you can make between the ability, communities to adapt on their ancestral lands, which are often more expansive and included a much more sort of, diverse base of ecosystems.

And so when people are when their land base is because of disposition shrunk down to something very small, it affords less ability to go somewhere else for something different to maybe get away from some negative impact. So again, you could think about forests in this case. If you have a large land base, if an indigenous nation has a large land base, if they lost some trees to a fire, you would have other trees that you could use on the landscape.

However, if the community it's only a few hundred acres, right? If something happens like a fire, of course, to that landscape, you've lost all ability on your own lands to be able to to confront that. And so that question of scale becomes really important.  What kind of land base people have and I think that is important because it illustrates that returning lands to communities is often a really valuable way to make communities more resilient to, to climate change.

And also address this injustice that was created by settler colonial land dispossession. I wanted to get a circle back to the last part of your question about  these disparities and the relationship to civil liberties and I think that, this is where I would talk about the kind of benefits that, that a clean environment provides, and I mentioned traditional foods, but people, collect other plants for other purposes, there are other foods on the landscape there are important places to, to, to communities or even particular families.

That are important. And I think, people have rights to, of access to these places in unaltered conditions that don't degrade their ability to to engage with them in the way that, you know, that they have over a long period of time. And so I would highlight that as a  civil liberties issue that these environmental changes are abrogating those rights of communities to these particular places. 

Kaden: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. I think especially when we have mainstream discussions about civil liberties, we tend to neglect that there are a lot more insidious impacts and nebulous impacts that are felt by communities not necessarily centered in the conversations.

And I think that's why your work with indigenous communities is so important that it like really brings to light some of their grievances. And I was wondering if you could share what some of the opinions and thoughts that you're hearing from indigenous communities on ways to move forward when it comes to environmental justice and civil liberties. 

Dr. Burow: I think communities have an interest often in having some of the land that was taken from them returned. So I think there are lots of opportunities to do that, certainly with public lands, another term used for federal controlled lands. Because often these are vast undeveloped lands, right? They actually can quite easily be transferred, ownership can be transferred into a community. Another thing that people talk a lot about is expanding opportunities for co stewardship, which basically means when you have federal lands that they would collaboratively work with tribal nations to be able to develop plans for stewarding those areas.

This is certainly something that's been highlighted as a priority. And federal agencies like the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture. But I think it really remains to be seen how effective these co stewardship projects are and whether they are really giving communities a strong voice in land management.

So this is the current sort of mode of federal tribal engagement on a lot of issues on federally controlled land. So whenever a project is proposed there's a legal requirement under various statutes where they would have to consult with tribes because there's the potential for it to impact tribes.

The agency's term is cultural resources or other cultural uses of these landscapes. But the way it's set up is it's not a consent based system. It's a system of consultation.  And so what's basically been happening for the last several decades is that often agencies will plan a project. And then they will reach out and say this is what we're doing and they'll hear something from the community and sometimes the community says, we would like to see some changes in these projects.

But often the agencies say, okay no, we heard you, but we're going to go ahead and move forward with what we've planned. So consultation doesn't actually require any kind of community consent. So it merely becomes a box to check, a process to go through without sort of a sincere desire to come to some kind of understanding about how a particular project should be conducted. So I've heard from a lot of communities that  they think this consultation process is broken and that they're very frustrated by it. And that they would really prefer to see a more consent oriented system, which really is like when you think on a global level, what the gold standard is for engagement with indigenous peoples, it is free prior and informed consent.

And that is not at all the system that we use in the United States. And so I think that's something, maybe more than anything else that I've heard from from communities that I've worked with over the years is a desire to come up with a better system where where they're being involved in land management or land stewardship in a much more in depth way, in a way that really respects their rights to these landscapes. 

Anya: Thank you for that. It's definitely very interesting to hear about a kind of culturally inclusive approach that we could take to climate change. And I'm wondering as students or our listeners as individuals, what is something that we can do to help that movement ? I think that one step is being informed.

Dr. Burow: That's necessary, but insufficient on its own. We should always strive to do more. But I think a lot of times, we don't, I'm saying this, as a non Indigenous person, we don't think about this for the history of the lands that we stand on. So I think there are always opportunities for us to learn about the lands that we're on and the history of it and the communities that often still exist and still have strong connections to these landscapes.

And it's not uncommon that there are ongoing political struggles that where communities are seeking the return of lands or more meaningful involvement and and, different policy issues. And so no matter where you are, this is going to be something. That a community cares about, and so if you can find out, where, where you are and what this conversation is, including in places like here at Stanford University I think there's an opportunity to be more informed in what's going on, and then it might also reveal opportunities for action and involvement.

I think there's a lot of social movement building that's happened, and it's like an important part of pushing for change and there's often, I think really pretty incredible like indigenous, non indigenous alliances that I've seen develop around different issues, particularly environmental issues.

So for example, in Nevada, something that we've seen lately is that there's been a lot of activism against lithium mining projects, which are seen as quote unquote green. But are actually very destructive and often are occurring on sensitive lands that indigenous communities are connected to.

And so there've been cases where ranchers non indigenous ranchers are really worried about what's going to happen to water in these landscapes and their way of life. And so they built these alliances where you have indigenous communities and ranchers and sometimes environmentalists coming from other areas who get together to try and organize and prevent some of these these industrial projects that really threatened the health of the land. And so that's another thing to think about is where this alliance building is possible. I think there's some powerful opportunities where people can learn to be allies and contribute to some of these struggles for environmental justice. 

Kaden: Thank you for sharing. Again, like just bringing the conversation back to our responsibilities as students at Stanford university. I know a big like topic of contention is. surrounding the Doar School of Sustainability and a lot of conversations about it, labeling it as the School of Greenwashing and a lot of its approaches to environmentalism.

And we just wanted to know if you had any input on the way that the environmentalism approached by the Doar School might have any differences with an environmental justice movement that takes into account more marginalized communities a more justice focused approach. 

Dr. Burow: I would say I've been really inspired by a lot of really incredible students here who are thinking really critically about these issues. I think the school hasn't caught up yet. I think community-based research is something that's really important, and I think there's a lot of interest in this kind of work and not necessarily the infrastructure to support it yet. I think that's something that's still developing, and so I would love to see more partnerships where the school and its affiliates are able to partner with communities. And there are some good projects that are going on, so I don't want to say that they aren't happening, but I think there's an opportunity for those projects to really be expanded and be thinking about  the kind of benefits that a university can bring to communities.

Instead of corporations I think there's a lot, there's a lot. As our project's all about creating benefits for communities and the community partners are part of the, the committee that, that really It steers that project and so every step of the way they're weighing in on, on, the work we're doing, how we're doing it, and ultimately the nature of the products we produce to make sure that they are created in a way that's going to serve community interests.

And we're, of course, always opening up opportunities for students to come and get involved. And I think that helps offer some opportunities for students to learn more about this kind of work. And maybe see, maybe envision themselves doing something like this in whatever capacity, whether it's researchers or maybe activists. I worked as an environmental activist  and indigenous rights activist for many years after college, and that was like something very formative in informing the research that I do. And so I think, creating opportunities for students to explore those opportunities, I think will be important. 

Kaden: Could you tell us perhaps more about your work in activism and how that translated specifically into your eventual transition to academia? 

Dr. Burow: Sure. Yeah. So I  worked with an indigenous rights group, an environmental group called Amazon Watch worked with indigenous communities in the Amazon basin often once they were fighting oil and gas extraction on their ancestral lands, and so that really introduced me to these indigenous rights struggles, something I really didn't know a lot about before I started doing that work.

But as I was doing that work, I began to ask myself: to what extent are these same issues present at home, where I grew up? I grew up here in California. I'm doing work way over here. What's going on in California?  So that was really the motivation  to come back home and do more work here. And so I transitioned into doing some land conservation work in the Sierra Nevada. But something that was really missing from those projects was engagement with Indigenous communities.

And I know today there's a lot more of that, 10 years ago there was none. And so that was the motivation to go to school, was basically those two sides. This exposure to this Indigenous rights activism on an international scale. There's a lot of solidarity between communities  across the world. Often, being organized in the face of oil and gas projects and companies based here, like Chevron over in the East Bay and then coming back home and doing some work here and feeling like there was this real gap in conservation work and how communities were being engaged. Basically those experiences on the ground with indigenous rights work and conservation issues, basically brought up all these questions I was interested in exploring. 

And so going back to school was a chance to think about that, where I could learn about concepts like settler colonialism, for example, and begin to understand the way that might factor into conservation in places like the U. S. West. And I knew I always wanted to do something community based. And so that was an important part of my practice as a researcher was you start by going to a community and meeting people and building relationships and understanding what they see as priorities. So take a lead when you're developing a project, take a lead from what partners you're working with share with you as being important. It doesn't have to be.  Sort of someone else providing a question. I think oftentimes building connections with the communities can offer the potential to, to basically illuminate what these important projects are that matter.  

Anya: I was wondering if you could share a little bit about I know you do a lot of field work with these communities and we've been talking about that today, but coming into those communities as an outsider and as an academic, how do you build trust with these communities who have had oftentimes a lot of really  experiences with academics or the government or just outsiders coming in and trying to have an input on their community. 

Dr. Burow: Totally. It takes time to build relationships and not every community wants to welcome anyone in. And so I think you'd have to listen to say. And sometimes you might meet someone or engage with a community and you might hear, we're not interested. And then you leave and  think about other places that you might work.

 I had spent a lot of time in this region, the Eastern Sierra. And when I started my doctoral program I went out there one summer and I had a free summer to just go out and meet people and talk to people. I didn't have, I didn't have some pre structured project that I had to do.

It was pilot field work. So I went out and I started attending meetings and I, so one of the first meetings I ended up attending was one of these local area working group meetings about sage grouse conservation. A sage grouse is a ground dwelling bird that's threatened, and there's been a lot of management work organized around this bird, including a lot of cutting of pine trees that were important to communities.

So I went to that meeting and was talking to people there, and I met somebody from Bridgeport Indian Colony, a community I've worked with for many years and so that was the beginning of my conversation about issues around pinion and how that was really important. And that basically became my dissertation project, it was built out of that. It takes a lot of years to build trust with communities. So the kind of stuff we're doing now for this opinion, community climate action project was based on seven years of working with people, and I couldn't have done that any earlier. So it was seven years of work until we were able to do some of these bigger scale projects.

So I think you just have to be in a position to, to take time with things. And let your partners really provide guidance on how to do things and when not to do things.  And then the other thing is oftentimes there's opportunities to get involved and support communities in ways that are not directly related to one sort of research program, so I have a lot of projects I work on that are not for research. They use research skills, but they're serving certain community goals, right?

So the oftentimes the skills we have as researchers are actually really useful to communities, right? I have a lot of training and doing archival research. I want training and doing interviews, social research. I had a really in depth knowledge of historical records about how communities have used forests in, in the region.

And so, when the community was wanting to protect this important cultural landscape, it was useful to have somebody who could bring some of these resources to bear because when you have to make an argument to the government.  This place matters to this community to secure a certain type of federal protection.

You have to have evidence you use to support your case. So I had things, information I've learned about are resources I've collected over the years as a researcher that were useful for that. And that's not, none of that will be public ever, but that was something that community identified as a goal and that was somewhere where I could plug in and be useful to the community.

With my research skills. And so I think a lot of times these opportunities crop up. And I think it's important for people to make themselves available, to serve some of these other community driven goals that sometimes aren't like, it's not, not to my benefit to do that. It's just part of the time that I contribute to, to, broader community aims.

Kaden: Thank you so much for sharing. And just as we reach the close of this episode,  I was wondering if you could share maybe some things that give you hope for the future of the environmental justice movement and what as the future of the movement going forward.

Dr. Burow: Certainly, I have been very inspired by students that I met here on campus and I was off campus for a long time. I was in the field for a long time. for three years of field work and then stayed there for many years after. So I've just been back on campus the last few months, and so I get to engage with a lot more students on account of that.

And I've just been really impressed with the new generation of leaders that are coming up. And so I think that gives me a lot of hope to see that. There's a lot of environmental justice work that's happening at Stanford, and the working group and all, and students are doing a lot related to that, more, more so than it's happening in any program on campus.

And I hope the campus can catch up to that because clearly it's really important to people. So that gives me a lot of hope. I think, out, out where I work in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, I I've seen communities getting back out on the land more, more than they have in recent years.

And I think that I think some of these opportunities that are opening up to give communities a much bigger say in how lands managed some of these co stewardship projects have a lot of potential and give me hope that we can see more cases of lands being returned, more cases of communities being given the primary role in leading and shaping stewardship and forests.

And so seeing some of that incipient work emerging on the ground also gives me a lot of hope and it motivates me to keep trying even as we have these a lot of ongoing challenges and continuing climate impacts.

Anya: Well, thank you, so much for taking the time to speak with us today. We've definitely learned a lot, and  thank you for another great episode of  Civil LiberTrees. 

Dr. Burow: Thanks so much. 

Catherine: And thank you to you, our listeners, for tuning in to Civil LiberTrees. See you at the next episode!

Guest: Zeena Khazendar

Hosts: Catherine and Kaden

~~~

Intro music begins.

Catherine: Before we start this episode, we'd like to quickly note that it was recorded back in November 2023, so some details may have changed since then. Thanks for tuning in!   

Catherine: Welcome back to another episode of Civil LiberTrees! I'm Catherine. I'm Kaden. And today we're very excited to be here with a new guest! Her name is Zeena, and she's a refugee health researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine.  She's Palestinian, and her primary area of focus is refugee mental health in Palestine and Kenya. Zeena, we're so excited to be here with you today. Thank you so much.

Zeena: Thank you so much for having me here today.   

Kaden: To start off this podcast, I want you to tell us a little bit about the history and the events that might have led us to the situation that we're facing today.   

Zeena: Yeah, that's a really important question. I think it's important as people see what's happening, they realize that this is not the start of anything and it's  something that's been happening for 75 years. 

So the UN marks the day of Israel's founding in 1948 as the massacre and forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Before Israel's founding, Palestine was under British colonization.  And then after the devastating Holocaust in World War II, many Jewish people were displaced. Then in 1917, Britain signed the Balfour Declaration to create Palestine into a national home for Jewish people. And so my grandparents, who were from Jaffa, Palestine at the time, which is now known as Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Israel, Had Jewish neighbors, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish people lived amongst each other in Palestine. 

And then, on the day of Israel's founding, May 15th, 1948, known as the Nakba, which translates to “the catastrophe,” almost 800, 000 Palestinians were forced to flee to neighboring countries, 15,000 were massacred. And that day, my grandfather watched his parents get shot in front of him and fled 200 miles to a refugee camp in Jordan. 

So when people call this a war, I urge them to check the UN agency for refugees to see that there are 6 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA. And there are no Israeli refugees and wars have refugees on both sides. Colonization has refugees only on one side. And so the West exploited Jewish people to do their military labor so that they could have control over resources in the Middle East.

Under this rhetoric of providing a national home for Jewish people. But with the complete disregard that there were already people living in Palestine, and so Israel was built on top of Palestine, and continues today to expand its borders at the expense of Palestinian lives. It follows a pattern of colonization on the backs of indigenous people that we have seen repeated in history hundreds of times, but the overcomplication of this colonizing has been used as a silencing tactic to make people disengage in learning about the history. 

And so Zionism, this idea of the right to create an all Jewish state named Israel, is a version of what we did here in the U. S., Manifest Destiny. The idea that White Europeans had the right to expand their borders at the expense of indigenous people. And so history has shown us that the creation of a state of one ethnicity, if that's an Aryan state, or if that's an all Jewish state, is typically built on the suffering of another ethnic group.

And so over the past 75 years, Palestine has been shrinking and shrinking as the state of Israel colonizes more, and even popular Palestinian foods such as falafel, hummus, dates, have now been rebranded as Israeli. And you may have seen the popular Hummus brand Sabra in grocery stores. It's an Israeli brand of Hummus named after a massacre of Palestinian refugees. And so now all that remains of Palestine are two condensed areas, Gaza and the West Bank. 

Kaden: I want to thank you  for sharing that insight and that extremely fleshed out history. I think one of the things that really resonated with me was how you brought up all of these examples of how this conflict has permeated itself into  different aspects of our society that we don't even think about. So when you brought up the example of the hummus and the cultural aspects of the Palestinian people that have been colonized, it wasn't something that ever crossed my mind. And so it was very insightful to hear that. 

Catherine: We've also heard a lot about your work as the founder of an organization that works on pediatric health research infrastructure in the West Bank. And so I'd love it if you could share a little bit more with us about what life is like in the West Bank.

Zeena: Yeah, that's a really important thing to talk about right now because I think a lot of the media focus has been on Gaza and has been turned away from the West Bank, which has also faced decades of, of really brutal treatment. 

So both the West Bank and Gaza are under Israeli occupation, but the main difference is that the West Bank has Israeli troops surrounding and within cities at all times while Gaza is a city under a blockade. So Palestinian deaths in the West Bank are usually due to being shot directly by Israeli soldiers, while deaths in Gaza are usually from bombs being dropped. 

And so when I was in the West Bank this past summer, I couldn't use Google Maps because I might accidentally stumble across a road that Israel has decided to take control of that week and put snipers on so that If you have the Palestinian license plate, which is the white license plate, that indicates that if you drive on the road, you will be shot on the spot. 

And so checkpoints are put up between cities to restrict the movement of Palestinians. Last summer, I was doing a drive in Ramallah that should take about 10 minutes and instead takes around two to three hours because you have to move around the roads that have been taken over by Israel. And so all of these cities have been very systematically separated from each other and broken apart and weakened.

And so Israel continues to grow as these areas of the West Bank shrink with the Palestinians in them. And so how that happens is through the formation of settlements, which is when the Israeli military comes into the homes of Palestinians and removes them from their home and replaces them with an Israeli family uh, known as settlers.

And a big piece of this colonizing and continual growth of the Israeli state has been dehumanization. Currently, Israeli military prevents anyone from entering their fields in the West Bank, their olive fields. And if anyone dares to harvest olives, they're killed on the spot. And it's thought of as a crime to access your olive trees, and olive trees that are hundreds of years old are very often uprooted as a very systematic way to destroy the morale of Palestinians and destroy the cultural importance and symbols of resilience and peace that olive trees symbolize to the Palestinians. 

Another piece of dehumanization and destruction of morale is that sometimes the Israeli army will take the, the bodies of people that they kill so that the families don't say goodbye. They will run over them with bulldozers, they will hold them up on sticks, they will mutilate them. Really horrific things that we couldn't imagine, and you'll see these things on videos, celebrated. Palestinian  bodies on the ground being kicked after they have already died. Really inhumane looking situations. 

Right now, medical staff working in bigger cities like Ramallah that don't live in the city that they work in, they can't get home because they aren't being let through checkpoints. So many of the medical staff have been living and sleeping in the hospitals so that they can continue to work and save lives knowing that they will be trapped there. And even ambulances on their way to the hospitals are being shot. So they have to take extremely long roundabout ways. And it's impossible to know what the Israeli army will and won't let you do that day, which roads you can cross, if you can get to the grocery store, so people in the West Bank have created telegram group chats to tell each other, “Hey, someone just died here. It's dangerous. Don't go here right now.” And as Palestinians pass into the checkpoints across the West Bank to, to get even in their own cities, the military will do things like ask them, “Where are you crossing into?” And if you say Palestine, you were, you're beaten, and they make you say Israel, and civilian settlers who live in settlements have all been armed with authorized weapons from the Israeli army and have been authorized to shoot at Palestinians. And this past summer, I was talking with a family friend and he was showing me scars from when he was tortured by the Israeli army and telling me how it's not an uncommon thing to happen. 

Kaden: Looking at this issue and how Palestinians are currently being treated, it's really an issue of human rights. And so, as we're witnessing, I think, a growing awareness of the treatment of Palestinians worldwide, and expressions of solidarity, I think there's also a clear display of silencing and a limited support in the capacities at which people can actually express the solidarity and support for the Palestinian people. And so, as a student here at Stanford what is your perspective on this issue and some insights that you can provide on the silencing?

Zeena: Yeah, that's a great question. Silencing has been a really big part of, of the past 75 years and of right now. I would actually say this is the most that people in the West have heard Palestinian voices, even though we have been speaking for 75 years about all of this. I mean, most of my life I was afraid to tell anyone I was Palestinian, and I, I didn't start speaking about it even until college.

And, you can take a look at the death rates and see that deaths throughout Israel's colonization of Palestine have been almost exclusively Palestinian until October 2023, which was the first time that Israeli lives were also taken. And so you'll notice that it was not until Israeli lives were affected that media coverage was given. 

You have to remember that Israel is the 34th richest country in the world. And highly supported and funded by the West both when it was built and in 1948 and now. It's been one of the hottest spots for tourism. It's considered a very safe and beautiful country, and you can go without seeing a single trace of Palestine.

And the truth is—the reason that Palestine and the West Bank are not considered safe is because there's Israeli military there making sure that it's dangerous, making sure that the occupation is, is keeping all parts of it separate and under heavy Israeli control. The Israeli government has  linked Judaism, a diverse faith of thousands of years, to Zionism, this idea of the right to create an all Jewish state, which has only been around  a hundred years. And it's a silencing tactic, and that's why we see so many groups have to pop up, like Jewish Voices for Peace, and all these very Jewish-led voices, fighting and supporting the pro-Palestinian movement and separating this idea of anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. 

A big piece of silencing has been through the way that the media portrays Israel and Palestine U.S. President Biden gave a speech about Palestinians beheading babies and started crying during the speech, and then immediately after, the White House sent out a statement redacting that claim, but the media had already clung onto it.

CNN had released so many articles about Palestinians beheading babies. And although these claims are redacted, they've already spread to people and people hold onto them. If you watch how CNN or other media news outlets portray Israel and Palestine, if you see any, any sort of violence in Israel, it's going to be very close up, you hear individual storie,s but when almost 10X the number of people die in places like Gaza, the media shows very distanced videos of, of buildings being bombed from afar. Personal stories are not told as much. Headlines say things like “Israel Hamas War,” as if Palestinian civilians are not involved 

Israel has committed war crimes of bombing humanitarian aid, schools, hospitals, using white phosphorus, which is a chemical weapon, bombing refugees who have nowhere else to go. Ahmed Manasra, who was taken as a hostage by the Israeli military when he was 14, was kept for seven years and for the past two years, he's been in solitary confinement.

He's now been diagnosed as clinically insane, and solitary confinement more than 15 days violates international law. But Israel has been able to put themselves above  international law all of this time. And a big reason for that is, is their western relations. Israel and the U. S. have very strong economic relations. The U. S. played a big role in the creation of Israel and, and now in the continual funding. They send 3. 8 billion dollars in military funding every year to Israel. And a, a big piece of all of this has been fear and the idea that this is two sides against each other.

And it's the same kind of fear that was used in South African apartheid to hide the oppression of an entire people. Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X were all huge advocates for the liberation of Palestine because they understood that even in their own movements of black liberation of South African apartheid, they were regarded as terrorists by the West for a long time, Nelson Mandela up until 2008. And resistance of genocide has historically been displayed by the media as terrorism. And I would even go as far as to say as right now the amplification of incidences of Islamophobia and antisemitism have really taken away attention from the colonization of Palestinians and painted this portrait of a religious war that has nothing to do with religion, and only has to do with the expansion of the borders of Israel and, and money and power.

For, for 26 years, the Palestinian flag was banned in Palestine. So people started using watermelons and would hold up watermelons and people in Palestine were beaten and killed for holding up watermelons. I was just talking to my friend a couple of days ago in the West Bank and, and she was saying how they speak and, and they have no voice. They have all these experiences of incredible traumas that they can't speak about because anyone who speaks in Palestine not only will they be killed, but their entire family will be killed.

And this silencing translates into the U. S. too, and big institutions that are funded by Zionist lobbies. In Florida, pro-Palestinian groups have been banned from universities which is a direct infringement of freedom of speech. Countries like France and the UK have all at some points banned symbols of, of Palestine and protests for Palestine. And it's a, a big, umbrella silencing of an entire nation of people that have been suffering colonization and genocide for 75 years.

And only now, because Israel was affected for the first time, people started to watch. And so they also have ended up watching what is happening in Gaza and, and even through the silencing through the media of what's happening, and the rewording, and the huge focus on this is all about Hamas and this rebel group, that deters from the absolute, like, inhumane treatment of 2.3 million people in Gaza and many, many more millions in the West Bank. So I think it's just important that we make sure we make space to speak as, as voices for the Palestinians, because not only are they not able to themselves but we are facing direct infringements to the rights of freedom of speech right here in the U. S.  

Catherine: I really appreciate you sharing your insight on all of the direct and indirect ways that freedom of speech is being restrained and oppressed both here and overseas as well. I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about what's going on right now, 

Zeena: Yeah, so, a lot of the media has presented it as some sort of retaliation when in reality, these bombings have been happening for 75 years. Gaza has been under blockade by the Israeli military for 20 years—it's been basically the world's largest open-air prison. Sometimes in Gaza, fake warnings are dropped of bombs. So basically a lot of times before Israel drops a bomb, they'll drop little leaflets saying, “Oh, we're going to drop a bomb,” but it, it doesn't tell you any information about the bomb. So, so you're just basically sitting there terrified for, for hours before the bomb is dropped.

Sometimes those warnings have been fake in the past just to incite fear and be part of the tactic of really destroying morale. In 2020, the UN stated that Gaza was uninhabitable. And yet, 2.3 million people were there and not just there, but unable to escape. Israel has kept their blockade on Gaza very strong and people are unable to, to flee anywhere.

Palestine doesn't have a military or a navy or an air force,  o they have rebel groups formed like Hamas to try to combat against this blockade. In, in 2018 thousands of people peacefully unarmed sat at the border of Gaza to call for an end to this blockade, and the Israeli military shot 8, 000 of them with live ammunition.

This was called the Great March of Return. And so, peaceful protesting has not worked for the people of Palestine and the people of Gaza. So the truth is anyone who lived in such atrocious situations for so many years would start to form rebel groups too, because resistance becomes the only option and what, what Israel is doing now by bombing so many more families is what they're doing is creating more Hamas because they're creating more people that have lost family members that have lost children and siblings and become more radicalized and become feeling like, oh, “Our only option must be violence.”

So putting people in atrocious situations is what fuels these kinds of attacks. And so, it's important for people to realize that to end, end the violence, what you really have to do is, is end the atrocious situations that you're putting Palestinians under and the blockade and siege of Gaza and the occupation under all of Gaza and the West Bank. 

And what we've seen in social media is for the first time, we're seeing videos of what it looks like on the ground. We Palestinians have been drowned in blood and death and videos like this for our entire lives, but media hasn't covered it. And, and now that we have social media, a lot of these videos are being spread and people are really horrified.

Water is not just so scarce and has been completely cut off now, but 97% of the water in Gaza has been undrinkable for the past 20 years. You will see these amazing videos of Palestinians being very communal. In reality, they don't deserve our pity. They deserve our admiration. 

And it's easy to look at the situation and blame the oppressed for any sort of violence because that's how the media has been portraying it. But it's, it's important to realize that this has started way, way before this month and way before the media started showing a lot of these, a lot of these atrocious situations and, and now the equivalent of two nuclear bombs have been dropped on Gaza, and we still don't have the bare minimum of a ceasefire, let alone an end to the, the blockade, to the bombing, to the siege. 

So I think I just hope from all of this that people can take away that we have been suffering a slow and painful genocide for three generations and have been forced into silence about it on top of that. So what I try to say to people is that it's really important to disrupt the silence about Palestine in your communities. It's important to be messengers to the Palestinians who if they speak are killed.  

We have the privilege, I have the privilege, of a U.S. passport to be able to show my face and  speak up for, for many Palestinians that aren't able to share those stories. And even now, people in the U.S. that have been talking about Palestine, they've been doxed, they've been put on do not hire lists. It's all part of the methods to, to force people into silence.

So I don't think people realize how important it is to initiate conversations about Palestine. It's not a very complex history. It's, it's just a pattern of colonization that we have seen many times. And, and talk about that and take away the taboo of discussing Palestine and discussing Palestinian human rights.

I, I'm a humanitarian and I will always stand up for the rights of people that are facing  extreme atrocities, and I would hope that many people, and especially non-Arabs, would do the same because as Palestinians, many of our voices have been discarded right now, have been put to the side. But in reality, they should be uplifted the most, and people should be listening to those that have the experience of what's been going on firsthand. So please, please share on social media talk to your friends about Palestine, question things that you see on the media, follow accounts that have been directly live from Gaza, from Palestine. Please initiate conversations about Palestine and just be a messenger, and be a messenger for all the voices that have been silenced for the past 75 years. 

Catherine: Thank you so much, Zeena, for being here with us and for doing your part in disrupting the silence, and for being just so open with us about your own personal experiences and all of your knowledge and insight. We really, really appreciate you being here, sharing your voice, sharing your name, and sharing your story. Thank you.  

Zeena: Thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate it, and it's been great to be here.

Outro music begins.

Catherine: And thank you, our listeners, for tuning in to another episode of Civil LiberTrees. Stay on the lookout for the next episode!

Outro music fades out.

Catherine: Hello, and welcome to part two of our conversation with Professor Hank Greely! If you haven’t already, be sure to go back and listen to part one, where we discuss the Fourth Amendment and the case of the BTK Killer. In this episode of Civil Libertrees, we’ll pick back up with Professor Greely explaining how family searching, as in the case of the BTK Killer, has wide-ranging implications for your privacy. 

~Music fades out~

Professor Greely: So there are a lot of cases like that. Where you get DNA from relatives, and you can use it, you collect DNA surreptitiously from suspects. That's one class of cases. Then you can try to take crime scene DNA and connect it to relatives. That's another class of cases. And the culmination of this is genetic genealogy where there are a number of companies, three big ones, Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA, which have been selling people information about their DNA, mainly people who are looking for relatives. And so somebody had the bright idea of trying to solve a cold case by taking  DNA, crime scene material, sending it to one of these companies, and then sending that information to someplace else and searching to see if  there were any relatives.  

And I think the first case started with a third cousin or a third cousin once removed, not close relative to if there's a parent or child or a sibling relationship. And there’s now been probably, maybe, a hundred or more cold cases around the country that have been solved this way. Now there are a lot of cold cases; a hundred isn't a big number. But they're very dramatic. 

The Golden State Killer, the GSK. It was one from California. That was one of the very earliest and achieved a lot of notoriety. There are companies that will help do this. The problem that has stalled some of the genetic genealogy is you still need a big database. Two of the three companies who've said, “No, we're not going to make our databases available for this”: Ancestry and 23andMe.   

And then there's this thing called GEDMatch, which allows you to take the information you get from one of the three companies and put it in a broad database. Right now, if you've done Ancestry, and you've got a relative on 23andMe, you won't see them because their databases are combined. But if they send theirs to GEDMatch, and you send yours to GEDMatch, it'll work. 

GEDMatch policy originally was anybody could look at anything. They actually weren't a for-profit company. They were sort of a hobby. Then when this broke, they said, okay, we'll let people opt out. And if you've opted out, we won't make your DNA available for forensic uses. And then they changed again and said, no. Only make it available if you've opted in. And I think they've got several million profiles, and I believe the last I saw, majority had opted in, but not all of them. So the limiting factor for genetic genealogy is the database.  

Last point. What are these databases, and where else can you find DNA information? Well, right now, if you've been convicted of a felony in the U.S. or you've been arrested for a felony, some immigration situations will take DNA save it for various purposes. It's authorized by federal law. 

A few counties and other smaller law enforcement areas have collected their own DNA. Orange County, California has a huge county database that can't be in the federal one because it doesn't meet the federal standards. 

Catherine: The federal standards in that, like the data wasn't collected?

Professor Greely: The federal standards are it has to be authorized by a statute that authorizes collection of DNA from people who are convicted of a felony or charged with a felony.  

If you're arrested for a misdemeanor in Orange County, and it's not a very serious one, for over a decade or so, Orange County has been saying, “Okay. We'll dismiss the charges if you voluntarily give us a DNA sample.” And they have over a hundred thousand DNA samples that were obtained this way. 

Andrea Roth, a law professor at Berkeley, has written really shocking stuff about that. I think that's the worst of the current methods. But—this is not a big deal yet. But I think soon, almost all of us will have DNA information that's in a database. Some of us already do from taking part in research. The federal government has something called dB gap, the database of genotypes and phenotypes that has, I think, 2 million DNA samples in it for research purposes only. 

I'm a member of the Kaiser health care system. I get my health care through Kaiser right now. They don't have genetic information that they've data-based on me. But at some point it's going to be in our health records because our DNA is going to be important for health, or are we going to believe it's important for our health, but at that point, you could go, maybe even get a court order a warrant and say, “Pretty sure this crime was committed in Northern California. We have good reason to believe it was committed by somebody who lives in Northern California. 50% of the people in Northern California get their health care through Kaiser. And 80% of those have some DNA evidence in the Kaiser databases. Let us search the Kaiser database.”  

So as DNA becomes more useful and more data-based, all those databases are one court order, or maybe just the voluntary agreement of whoever runs the database, from being used for forensic purposes. I think that's troubling.  

One of the most troubling things about CODIS—the one that collects people who have been convicted of a felony or have been charged with a felony—is the ethnic disproportion.  African-Americans are very heavily overrepresented in that database because they get arrested and convicted of felonies at a higher rate. The reasons for that are complicated and controversial. But it's a fact like something like 40% of the felony convicts in America are African-American, and they're only about 13% of the total population. Hispanic Americans are overrepresented, Native Americans are overrepresented. The various different kinds of Asian Americans tend to be underrepresented in the databases. So there's an ethnic bias there. 

You're more likely to be caught if you're black, and if that database is being used for family connections, you're more likely to be caught if you've got a family member who's been arrested if you're black than if you're white. One sort of wild solution to that, which I'm not sure the ACLU would like—and I think which raises serious constitutional questions—you can avoid the discrimination if you put everybody in the database.  

And putting everybody in the database also makes the family searching go away. You don't need to search for the family if every adult or teenager is in the database. There are downsides to that.  The country of Kuwait proposed that, and it seemed interesting. And then I read a little bit more about it, and there was real interest there in using that to figure out whether the husbands of women who had given birth to children were the fathers of those children, which in a heavily patriarchal society like Kuwait could lead to bad things for the women and the children involved. 

And Kuwait has this large population of non-citizens. Using the DNA to determine citizenship could end up prompting discrimination. So a universal database gets rid of some kinds of discrimination, but it may enable others. One last issue along those lines, the People's Republic of China has been collecting DNA from a lot of people in China. And particularly Uyghurs from Shenyang, Xinjiang, in Western China, and Tibetans, two populations where there  has been resistance to the Chinese government. So, there are certainly implications of all this for civil liberties in the United States and around the world.  

On the other hand, it's a really useful crime fighting tool. And defense attorneys initially hated it, until they realized it actually got a lot of their clients off. Most of the time when somebody does a DNA analysis here, not a match. And that's pretty good evidence that you didn't commit the crime. 

So it has, to the extent it makes the criminal justice system more effective, that helps people both who are innocent not be prosecuted and not be convicted as well as  helping convict people who really are guilty.  

Catherine: What do you see as the way forward to address the systemic issues with collecting people's data, especially for people of color who, like you said, are disproportionately represented in the datasets?

Professor Greely: Some colors. But not at all. Everything's complicated. 

I don't know what a good way forward is because it almost certainly at this point involves legislation rather than judicial decisions. There are exceptions. There are some state courts that might be willing to cut back on some of the uses. The U.S. Supreme Court certainly has only gotten more conservative since it approved collection from people who were charged but not yet convicted.  

A better response would be legislative action. But, right now, Congress couldn't agree on what two plus two is, let alone something as politically charged as anything about crime. Some states have limited genetic genealogy—a couple of them, not very many—some family searching, things like that, but I do think it would be good for there to be broader dialogue between civil liberties groups and groups interested in minority rights and the police and the prosecutors and pro-law enforcement groups to try to figure out and bring the stakeholders together and see if there are limits that can be broadly accepted. Otherwise I worry that we're going to back into a situation, particularly through things like the medical databases, where we get a universal database without ever realizing that's what we were doing. 

Catherine: So it seems like we really need some sort of active effort, not just passivity and trying to stop things, but also an active effort to make sure that these unconsensual databases don't arrive. 

Professor Greely: I think that would be a good thing. Although again, to put it in a broader context, DNA is not the privacy issue that I think is. Most immediate and most pressing for all of us—that's the internet and our cell phones. There are a lot of privacy issues, and I am not terribly optimistic it will come to good solutions for them.  

But it's also the case that people's use of privacy changes over time. They're different from culture to culture. In Iceland, people's individual tax returns are public information, so you can look up your neighbors tax return.  I don't think that would work in the U.S., I think there'd be a revolt. And people say that younger people are less concerned about privacy than older people… I'm not sure it's really true. I remember when my kids, who are now in their thirties, discovered that their grandmother was using Facebook. They apparently did a lot of changing of what was on their Facebook page. 

But it is true, concerns about privacy vary from person to person and culture to culture. And maybe our culture is just going to end up changing and accepting that there's less privacy than there used to be. Or maybe it can be successfully fought. 

Time will tell. 

~Outro music~

Catherine: Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Civil Libertrees! Stay on the lookout for our next series on environmental justice, where we discuss land sovereignty and indigenous rights. See you at the next episode!

Catherine: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Civil Libertrees! Today, I'm here with Professor Hank Greely. Professor Greeley teaches here at Stanford Law School and by courtesy at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he specializes in examining the legal, ethical, and social ramifications of emerging bio-science technologies. Professor Greeley also directs the Law School Center for Law in the Biosciences, and he chairs the steering committee for the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Professor Greeley graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in political science in 1974. So we're so excited to have you here with us today, Professor Greeley. Thank you for speaking with us. 

Professor Greely: My pleasure. I like to talk. 

Catherine: So with the tremendous advancements in technology and data collection that we've seen in the past years, to begin, I was wondering if you could briefly outline some of the current forensic uses of DNA and how they interact with and potentially infringe on the Fourth Amendment. 

Professor Greely: Sure. This is such an interesting field. I would note first though that we do tend to focus on DNA because it's exciting, and it's sexy, and it's the code of life and all those things, but the cell phones that we carry around are probably a bigger source of risk to our privacy than anything in our genes. 

DNA though has been used in forensic purposes for just about 30 years. In those 30 years, it's come a long way. The very first use was actually in the late 1980s in the UK, but it wasn't until about the mid nineties that it became regularly used. In those days you needed a lot of blood or a lot of body fluids or body parts. It wasn't easy to get DNA from a sample. 

Since that beginning 30 years ago, our ability to find and analyze DNA has gotten infinitely better. So now the problem isn't you need a large pool of blood in order to get DNA. You can get DNA from anything. So much so that the desk that you are currently leaning your elbow on has DNA from probably scores of different students. 

And some of it will still be viable. So in a way, our increased sensitivity means we're getting mixed samples more. Which makes life more complicated. 

We're also able to get samples in situations where we couldn't before—DNA that had been out in the snow, in the sleet and the rain, or baked by the sun, or in a fire. And now those things are becoming available. That also pushes back the timeline. 

We're getting DNA from humans who lived a hundred thousand years ago. The technical side of getting and analyzing DNA has gotten much better. On the forensic side, what's important is not just being able to get the DNA and analyze it. And also, something that's gotten more complicated, making sure you're looking at one person's DNA rather than a mix of a bunch of people. 

In the United States for again, just about 30 years. The main database has been something called CODIS: the Combined Operating DNA Information System run by the FBI. That has DNA profiles, not whole genome sequencing that serve as a fingerprint of your DNA identity.  Originally, those were only collected for some very serious crimes. Some come from federal crimes, the federal government. But states can choose to participate in. 

Eventually every state has chosen to participate. But initially many of them just said rape and murder. That's it. But then it became rape and murder and assault, and then it became rape and murder and burglary or robbery, and then it became all felonies. And then it became felonies and serious misdemeanors or felonies and juvenile offenses, which are technically criminal convictions. And the biggest recent step, from about 20 years ago, the state slowly began adopting this—DNA samples compelled from people who have been arrested for a felony, but not yet convicted. So the database has gotten bigger. The CODIS database now has a bout, it's probably closing in on 20 million different individual DNA profiles. They have the pairs of numbers, and they have a coded identity, and they do gender as well. 

And so if you are a police department and you've got crime scene DNA, or for that matter, if you've got a body that you're trying to identify, you do the CODIS markers, you submit it to the FBI, and they search their database, and they say, “No matches,” or, “Yeah, there's a match here.” 

Or sometimes they'll say, “This isn't a perfect match, but this is a really awfully good match here. You might want to rerun your DNA to see if you made a mistake in your analysis.” And then that gives you a lead and the police department then tries to follow up on the lead. That's the classic forensic uses of DNA as the database gets bigger. More people get implicated. Our ability to get DNA from artifacts, from crime scenes, from dirt, from the air, has gotten bigger. 

It used to be you couldn't get DNA from hair unless you had the whole root of the hair. It was plucked out. Now we're able to get DNA from the strand of hair. So you go to the barbershop, they don't pull your hair out. For the most part, they cut it. That cut hair didn't used to be able to provide DNA. Now it does. So those have made this more broadly useful. Also means if you're worried about people stealing your DNA, it's gotten a lot harder to prevent.  

Catherine: Thank you so much. That's really interesting—I had no clue that you could collect DNA even literally from the hair. So then could you just explain a little bit how these new and advanced methods of collecting DNA and other data could potentially infringe on the Fourth Amendment?  

Professor Greely: So the question there of course, is what does the Fourth Amendment mean?  It's a pretty short version. The government can't do an unreasonable search or seizure, which usually means at a first level, they can't search you or seize your, your body, your property, your effects. If they get a warrant, it's reasonable, and they can do anything that they've convinced a judge that they have probable cause to look for evidence. 

So the Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. If it's a search and a seizure pursuant to a warrant, where a judicial officer has said, “Yes, you have probable cause to believe there's relevant evidence there,” that satisfies the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment is one of those things where the exceptions are much more important than the basic rule, because there are hundreds of different kinds of exceptions in different circumstances.  

One of them is for stuff that you've abandoned. So if you've thrown stuff out in the trash, the police can search that, and it's not an unreasonable search and seizure because you've thrown it out. If you leave things at a crime scene—you left the gun there, you left the knife there—no problem searching and seizing that and doing the analysis of it. Fingerprints—you've left some of the oils on your fingertips on something at the crime scene—that's been okay too. 

DNA is a physical thing. It's a molecule, usually in cells. You have left it at the crime scene. And normally it wouldn't be a Fourth Amendment issue because you've left it someplace. You've abandoned it in a way. And what makes it unreasonable, I think, is you don't have a choice unless you live in a moon suit. You're leaving DNA with every breath you take. 

You can't help but give off DNA. It's not like trash where you intentionally made the decision to throw it out. You can't help it. And the courts don't really focus on that. And so you get cases where people are surprised to discover that their DNA gets matched. So one set of issues is who's in the database and how big the database is. 

The other issue is where do you get crime scene DNA, or where do you get DNA about a person? And as I noted, technically we're able to get it better than we did before. But one possibility is you don't necessarily need to go to the database. If you've got a suspect, get the DNA from the suspect. If you have probable cause to arrest somebody, you can search them for DNA. 

You can get their fingerprints, you can take their mugshot once they're arrested. There are things you can do. What if you don't want to arrest him yet, you don't think you've got probable cause? So you don't want to alert them. Then there's a whole issue of surreptitious DNA, where you get DNA from something that the person has thrown out or touched. 

They didn't know they were giving you DNA, but they were. And then you can see if that matches the crime scene DNA. If it does, do you arrest them? Because now you've got probable cause you've made a connection. And you can get a DNA sample directly from them and check to see if it actually matches. Should that be constitutional? 

Should the surreptitious collection of DNA be allowed? Courts have, basically universally. Does that make it right? I don't know, but there's another twist to it: this is a case out of Kansas called the BTK case. BTK is what this killer called himself. It was short for bind, torture and kill. 

Raped and killed 11 or 12 people in the late nineties and then went quiet. No more crimes. And then in something that you'd have to think is only true in fiction, he started writing taunting letters to the police. Bad idea. Criminals listening to this—don't write taunting letters to the police. And you remind them of your crime and you give them some clues. And so the taunting letters led them to discover that the letters had been printed on a printer that was located in a church in Topeka, Kansas. How exactly did they go from just the letter to finding the printer you have? 

They had to have suspicions about where the location was, what town it was in and check a bunch of printers. And most printers now—I don't know whether it's true of laser printers, this was old enough that it would have been probably an air jet printer, inkjet printer—but like typewriters, they all have little quirks. 

The keys on typewriters aren't all exactly the same. The ‘E’ will be a little crooked in one or have a little slash through it than another, so yeah, they could do that and they had a suspect. But they didn't have any strong evidence he’d been in the right area. He was the right age. He was male. Could have done it. But they didn't want to arrest him. They had lots of crime scene DNA, but this guy wasn't in any database. So instead they knew he had a daughter who was a student at Kansas state university in Manhattan, Kansas. A young woman. They guessed accurately that while a student, she probably had a pap smear screening for cervical cancer.  

Pap smears and other pathological path specimens get saved. And so they went to the student health center, asked if they had a pap smear for this young woman. They did. They got it from the center—whether they got it under a search warrant or a subpoena, or just voluntarily, has never been clear to me. They checked the pap smear’s DNA. And yes, it was consistent with the crime scene DNA belonging to a first degree relative of hers either a parent or a child. She didn't have any kids who were old enough to have committed these crimes.

They then arrested the father. His DNA matched. And they charged him with 11 counts of murder and other things. He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. Now—this is interesting. They surreptitiously collect DNA, but not from him, from his daughter. They don't ask his daughter's permission. Maybe they've got a warrant, maybe they don't, it's not entirely clear. 

It never got litigated. And they use that to catch him. Her first reaction was horror. She couldn't believe her dad had ever done things like that. And she didn't want to have been complicit in him being arrested. Although over the years, her position has changed and she's decided that her dad really was a monster. Good dad to her. And that she's kind of glad that her pap smear led to his arrest. But mixed feelings, as you can imagine… 

Catherine: On the next episode of Civil Libertrees, we’ll continue this conversation and discuss how the confidentiality of corporations who handle your genetic material may be much more compromised than many users realize, and we’ll ask the question, “Is privacy really dead?”