The developing agreement on the DNA database would be part of a series of pacts that would resolve many of the key outstanding issues in the legislative session this year, including the state’s budget for the next year, new political districts for state legislators and a new pension plan that would reduce retirement benefits for future public employees. 
 
 “We have the parameters of a deal,” Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Democrat from Brooklyn , said of the DNA bill that he is sponsoring. 
 
 Negotiations are moving at an unusually brisk pace in the capital, as Mr. Cuomo and lawmakers face two sets of deadlines: a federal court has demanded an update on the Legislature’s redistricting progress by Thursday, and the governor and legislators are required by law to have a new budget in place by April 1. 
 
 New York’s DNA database was created in the mid-1990s but applied only to those convicted of a limited number of crimes; the data collection has been expanded three times since then by the Legislature, most recently in 2006. Currently, DNA samples can be collected from people convicted of fewer than half of the crimes codified in state law, including all felonies and some misdemeanors. The measure would expand that to require that a DNA sample be submitted by all convicted criminals. 
 
 The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. , an advocate for expanding the database, wrote in a recent opinion article that taking DNA samples from those convicted of low-level crimes had proved to be effective. He said that since the state allowed prosecutors to collect DNA from individuals convicted of petty larceny, investigators had been able to identify people linked to 48 murders and 220 sexual assaults statewide. 
 
 In one case prosecuted by Mr. Vance’s office, DNA from the butt of a cigarette smoked by Lerio Guerrero while he was being questioned for trespassing in Brooklyn last year linked him to a 1998 rape. Mr. Guerrero had been arrested several times in the interim, but none of his convictions were for crimes serious enough to warrant that he give a DNA sample. 
 
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 Prosecutors also argue that the database could be used to exonerate the wrongfully convicted by matching DNA in their cases to someone else. But the defense bar has argued that courts sometimes place onerous restrictions on gaining access to evidence after a conviction and has, therefore, urged the Legislature to make it easier for defense lawyers to get evidence and run tests against the database. 
 
 “New York has a demonstrated problem with eyewitness misidentification and false confessions leading to wrongful convictions,” said Stephen Saloom, the policy director of the Innocence Project. “Any legislation that ignores the recommendations of those who’ve studied these issues is ignoring the heart of wrongful conviction reform needed in New York State .” 
 
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 The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver , a Manhattan Democrat, has pushed to allow defendants access to the database. “We need to see fairness in terms of discovery, in terms of a defendant or a, quote-unquote, wrongfully convicted person,” he said. 
 
 The Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos , a Long Island Republican, said he was not opposed to access provisions, as long as it was “done in a very tight and controlled way.” Senator Skelos did say he was against including broader so-called wrongful conviction protections in the bill, like videotaping interrogations. 
 
 Some in the Assembly, led by Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, have been pushing to include as part of the DNA bill a measure that would make it a violation, rather than a crime, to possess very small amounts of marijuana in public view, but it was not clear whether that provision would make it into the final language. 
 
 “There’s absolutely no justification for expanding the database and simultaneously including illegitimate misdemeanor marijuana arrest convictions that are racially biased and fatally flawed,” he said. 
 
 The discussions over the DNA database are running alongside quickening budget negotiations. As part of his spending plan, the governor is proposing to give newly hired public workers across the state, including in New York City , the choice between a less generous pension plan than is available to current employees or a defined contribution plan, which is similar to a 401(k). 
 
 But the senior administration official said the governor was now prepared to drop the 401(k) option, which has been a lightning rod for criticism from labor unions, so long as legislative leaders agreed to his proposal to create a new pension tier that would provide reduced retirement benefits for future workers. ||||| While frustrated California detectives looked fruitlessly for a man accused of brutally raping 45 women and killing a dozen more people, one of his relatives was likely busy seeking information to unite a big family tree. 
 
 Their colliding searches lead to the momentous arrest Tuesday of Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, the suspected Golden State Killer who eluded law enforcement for four decades. 
 
 The bulk of the information detectives used to help capture DeAngelo came from a no-frills “open-source” genealogy website called GEDmatch that allows users to voluntarily share their genetic profiles for free. 
 
 The Florida-based website that pools raw genetic profiles that people share publicly to find long-lost relatives was the team’s biggest tool, said lead investigator Paul Holes, a cold case expert and retired Contra Costa County District Attorney inspector who’s spent about seven years using such websites to identify the California killer. 
 
 The website revealed a “distant relative” early this year that helped lead authorities to DeAngelo, who was arrested at his Citrus Heights home on suspicion of conducting a reign of terror up and down California, including 12 homicides, 45 rapes and more than 100 residential burglaries between 1976 and 1986, investigators said. 
 
 That information made it possible for police to focus their search, supplemented by other clues, like ethnicity, height and where he lived at the time. Then they did surveillance and retrieved new evidence — such as saliva on a restaurant dish or a discarded beer can, cigarette or Kleenex – for a more direct DNA match, leading to his arrest. 
 
 The case sheds light on a little known fact: Even if we’ve never spit into a test tube, some of our genetic information may be public — and accessible to law enforcement. That’s because whenever one of our relatives — even distant, distant kin — submits their DNA to a public site hoping to find far-flung relations, some of our data is shared as well. 
 
 “When you put your information into a database voluntarily, and law enforcement has access to it, you may be unwittingly exposing your relatives — some you know, some you don’t know — to scrutiny by law enforcement. Even though they may have done nothing wrong,” said Andrea Roth, assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley Boalt School of Law and an expert on the use of forensic science in criminal trials. 
 
 And even companies that promise privacy may be required to surrender your genetic data if confronted with a search warrant. 
 
 “As more and more genetic information becomes available, its possible use in criminal investigations becomes more and more feasible, both for direct checking and familial checking,” said Stanford University School of Law professor and bioethicist Hank Greely, director of Stanford’s Center for Law and the Biosciences. “That’s true whether it’s a genealogy database, electronic health record or research.” 
 
 Holes began his search six years ago on Ysearch.org, a similar website as GEDmatch. Last March, Holes narrowed it down to an elderly man in Oregon, but he knew it was a “weak match,” he said. 
 
 Court records obtained by the Associated Press show that in March 2017 investigators in Clackamas County, Oregon, convinced a judge to order the 73-year-old man to provide a DNA sample. The documents said they used a genetic profile based off DNA from crime scenes linked to the serial killer and compared it to information from genealogical websites. The man turned out to be innocent. 
 
 “He was cooperative,” Holes said. “We generated the legal documentation more as a matter of routine, due diligence … But he was willing all along to provide his DNA. 
 
 “I knew it was a weak match. After six years it was our only match,” he said, adding that Golden State Killer and the Oregon man shared an unusual genetic trait. 
 
 After that failure, Hole said he “recalibrated” and used his own family member’s DNA profile from Ancestry to start learning how to use GEDmatch. He was confident the new technology would provide answers and he visited the agencies touched by the serial killer’s crimes to convince them to provide some DNA for his new tactic. Ventura County offered some DNA, but to submit DeAngelo’s data to the GEDmatch, investigators would have to put it in a format that would be recognized by the website and uploaded it to the site for analysis, said CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist who has used the site in thousands of adoption cases. 
 
 The site returns a list of relatives — with names and emails — by degree of shared single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, which offer a genetic fingerprint. On average, you share 50 percent of your SNPs with a sibling, 25 percent with a half sibling, 12.5 percent with a first cousin, and 3.1 percent with a second cousin. The numbers diminish after that. 
 
 “They had luck, and they had skill,” said Moore, who owns a company called The DNA Detectives. 
 
 The hits on DeAngelo came from third and fourth cousins, Holes said. Family members directly related to DeAngelo’s great, great, great, great grandfather dating back to the 1800s when families would often have 15 kids. Holes and his team built out more than 25 different family trees. The tree that eventually linked to the Golden State Killer was so large, it contained about 1,000 people, he said. 
 
 “I’m not familiar with any other case used to capture someone like this,” Holes said. 
 
 California law limits such “familial searching” using the state’s criminal DNA database. And major companies, such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com, require a court order for law enforcement to access DNA files stored in their databases. 
 
 But there are no legal restrictions against accessing the 900,000 DNA files on the public GEDmatch database, created when consumers take information from commercial testing companies, such as 23andme, then upload it to the volunteer-run database. 
 
 That openness is what makes the site so useful, said Moore. Because so many people contribute data, vast family trees can be built. 
 
 “The majority of companies do a really good job of protecting the genetic privacy of customers,” said Moore. “But if a company allows the uploading of files from other sources, that opens the door up for other types of uses.” 
 
 On Friday, GEDmatch operator Curtis Rogers released a statement saying his company was unaware of the search for the East Area Rapist using his site. 
 
 “We understand that the GEDmatch database was used to help identify the Golden State Killer,” he said. “Although we were not approached by law enforcement or anyone else about this case or about the DNA, it has always been GEDmatch’s policy to inform users that the database could be used for other uses, as set forth in the Site Policy … While the database was created for genealogical research, it is important that GEDmatch participants understand the possible uses of their DNA, including identification of relatives that have committed crimes or were victims of crimes.” 
 
 Rogers continued to say if anyone had concerns that their profiles might be used for “non-genealogical uses” they should remove it from the site or not upload it in the first place. He provided an email address to delete profiles. 
 
 The site does not specifically address law enforcement searches, but it stresses that it “cannot guarantee that your information will never be accessed by unintended means.” 
 
 One of the earliest uses of this approach helped detectives reopen the killing of a 20-year-old woman in Wales. In 2002, data from a 14-year-old boy in Britain’s database of offenders led authorities to his uncle. In 2010, a DNA sample from the son of California’s “Grim Sleeper” serial killer Lonnie David Franklin Jr. led to his arrest and conviction. The son had been jailed on weapons charges. 
 
 The East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer case shows the promise and potential peril of DNA as a law enforcement tool, said UC Berkeley’s Roth. 
 
 “The promise is that it’s a wonderful thing that police were able to find this person,” she said. “And the potential concern is that the government is looking at a lot of genetic information that most of us probably want to keep private. 
 
 “And even though it is easy to think of this technology as something that is used just to track down serial killers,” she said, “If we allow the government to use it with no accountability or no further safeguards, then all of our genetic information might be at risk for being used for things we don’t want it to be used for.” 
 
 Staff writer Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.
– New York is poised to become the first state in the nation to require people convicted of any crime, no matter how minor, to provide DNA samples for a database. The state's lawmakers are putting the finishing touches on the measure, which would double the size of New York's DNA database, reports the New York Times. Supporters—including all 62 of the state's district attorneys—say the move will catch more violent offenders and exonerate more innocent people. "Every single time we’ve expanded the DNA database, we have shown how effective it is in convicting people who commit crimes, and we’ve also shown that it can be used to exonerate the innocent,” the chief of the Citizens Crime Commission says. The legislation would allow both prosecutors and defense lawyers to access the database. Some lawmakers are seeking to add a measure to the bill that would make it a violation, not a crime, to possess very small amounts of marijuana in public. Click for more on a state with a serious wrongful-conviction problem.