On Declan McCullagh's politech list, Ethan Ackerman writes:
In developments straight out of GATTACA's handshake scene, A Kansas City Star report indicates that the suspected "BTK" killer was tentatively linked to crime scene evidence by acquiring genetic material from the suspect's daughter's medical records – the tissue samples being taken without her knowledge.
The article goes on to give a brief but factually accurate explanation of how a request for "medical records" is entirely within the framework of the federal medical privacy laws (HIPAA), and also gives a likely source of the tissue – a routine pap smear. The article suggests that a judge issued a
secret order for the records, though the article does not state if it was a formal 4th Amendment "probable cause" warrant, or some lesser standard subpoena, or even go into whether the police were required to acquire an order under HIPAA (there are circumstances where agents can just the
recordholder.)BUT the article also doesn't raise the fact that what was apparently requested was NOT "health information" – what HIPAA protects – but _actual tissue_ from the suspect's daughter's file samples.
Link to news article, and link to full text of Politech post.
See also this New York Times story about the role of "undeleted" data on a floppy disk in the BTK suspect's capture, which was blogged a few days previously here on BoingBoing: Floppy disk among clues leading to BTK capture .