(Just The News)—Since the advent of DNA testing, law enforcement agencies have been able to prosecute crimes – and exonerate the wrongly convicted – with greater certainty than ever before.
Though not perfect, genetic technology has brought justice to scores of violent crime victims and their families, and with them has come what the American Civil Liberties Union called a “Pandora’s box” of constitutional privacy issues.
In the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case Maryland v. King, justices narrowly ruled that it was not a violation of a person’s Fourth Amendment rights to collect a DNA sample upon their arrest. In keeping with that ruling, 34 states and the federal government now have laws on the books authorizing DNA collection upon arrest for certain crimes.
Once taken, DNA samples are processed in a laboratory where they are reduced down to a series of numbers which are then linked to a unique identifier within the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. That identifier contains no additional personal information.
If someone is arrested for one crime and their DNA matches the evidence from another, the justice process begins for the matching crimes, starting with a second DNA swab to confirm.
Sen. Frank Farry, R-Langhorne, would like to see Pennsylvania join other states in collecting samples from a much wider group of people with Senate Bill 912.
The legislation would require the collection of DNA samples from “persons arrested for serious violent or sexual crimes” as well as those convicted of criminal homicide. However, the bill goes well beyond felonies, enumerating a series of misdemeanors including theft and writing bad checks in its list of qualifying offenses.
Despite long odds in the House, the lower chamber’s Judiciary Committee held an informational hearing Wednesday where it heard testimony from both supporters and opponents of the Senate bill and similar legislation.
Among them was Ashley Spence of the DNA Justice Project.
While a sophomore at Arizona State University, Spence was brutally raped and beaten over the course of hours during a home invasion. Years later, a man was arrested for an attempted break-in in California, where a collection law is on the books. His DNA matched that of her attacker.
Spence wasn’t alone. The attacker’s DNA matched crimes in several other states, and police found a collection of women’s underwear and identification cards from around the world at his home.
Since justice was served in her case, Spence has pushed for legislation requiring DNA collection across the country, including the commonwealth.
“Here’s the truth as the law stands in Pennsylvania today,” said Spence. “Had my perpetrator been arrested, you would not have swabbed his cheek, and he would still be free today to rape and harm and terrorize his next victims.”
In other cases, DNA evidence has brought freedom to those wrongfully convicted.
James Tillman served more than 18 years in prison for a rape that occurred in 1988. In 2006, DNA evidence from the victim’s rape kit exonerated Tillman and led to the conviction of a man who was currently serving time for another crime.
“Every time someone is wrongfully accused, a guilty party walks free,” said Tillman. “We owe it to ourselves, to our aunts, cousins, mothers, daughters to not allow a handful of bad actors in our community to make life a living nightmare for others.”
For Tillman, giving a DNA sample is simple.
He told The Center Square, “Take my DNA because if I have nothing to hide and I know that the state is going to look after the DNA.”
That’s where the issue gets thornier for opponents to the law. They say that regardless of how many lives may be saved by DNA collection, it represents a dangerous step toward unlawful search and seizure. They say the bar for obtaining a search warrant should be maintained.
As to the Supreme Court’s ruling to the contrary, Elizabeth Randol, legislative director of the Pennsylvania ACLU, said “Just because the state is permitted to do something doesn’t mean it should,” invoking Justice Antonin Scalia who passionately dissented.
States which have DNA collection on the books have leadership that covers the political spectrum. Opposition does as well. Randol pointed to previous no votes from Republican Sens. Cris Dush of Brookville and Dawn Keefer of Dillsburg. She also asked the committee to put on their “Libertarian hats” to consider the issue.
“Our most personal and private genetic data would be available not just in Pennsylvania to state and local authorities, but also accessible to federal authorities and uploaded into federal databases, regardless of who’s at the helm,” said Randol. “And the rapid pace of technological and scientific advances makes it difficult to imagine all the ways in which the government could gather, analyze, track, categorize, and surveille us.”
Advocates say that people misunderstand the highly secure process. They highlight the security of CODIS, which began in 1990 and went national in 1998. Spence even has her DNA code printed on her business cards to demonstrate the harmlessness of the data housed by the government, distinct from DNA analysis done by medical and genealogical companies.
In fact, it’s so secure that Senior Fellow and Director at the Center on Public Safety and Justice, NORC at the University of Chicago, Dr. John Roman said “Law enforcement and labs all around the country are forever pushing the FBI to loosen their restrictions and regulations on the way evidence is processed in the system because it is so tightly regulated and so restricted.”
That the FBI has fended off those pushes in the past, however, does not influence whether technologies, uses, and policies may change in the future. As an example, Radol pointed to DNA collection by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on children as young as four.
“It’s absolutely a concern that the Trump administration or future administrations could seek to loosen FBI restrictions, which is why our state legislature must strengthen safeguards around the most potent private information of Pennsylvanians — our genetic information,” Rep. Chris Rabb, D-Philadelphia, told The Center Square.
To that end, attorney and Rep. Emily Kinkead, D-Bellevue, pointed to her HB 1179, which would give individuals ownership rights to their DNA, preventing overreach in the private sector. She is among a growing body of legislators showing concern for where new technologies – and the potential to abuse them – may take us.
“I think one person wrongly convicted for a crime is one too many,” said Kinkead. “But we have to balance that with the inherent privacy rights that we are guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment.”
For Tillman, the future is bright and progress inevitable, thanks to DNA collection and technological innovations.
“It’s a tool,” said Tillman. “Times are changing. Technology is changing. AI is here.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.