In response to EPIC's FOIA
request, the California Department of Justice has released
records on a controversial forensic technique. The records
show that in 2014, the state agency spent more than $300,000 on STRMix, a secret technique for matching DNA. Investigators in Australia subsequently
found an error in the STRMix code that produced incorrect results in 60 criminal cases, including a high-profile murder case. STRMix
promises prosecutors the ability to "[c]arry out familial searches against a database, searching for close relatives of contributors to mixed DNA profiles" but the algorithm remains secret. EPIC is
pursuing FOIA requests on the secret DNA matching algorithms with state agencies across the U.S.