4 ms·

This is nonsensical. From the time that a person looks at your identification to the time that you go through the scanners, there is no tracking of individuals

by crusso 11y ago

This is nonsensical. From the time that a person looks at your identification to the time that you go through the scanners, there is no tracking of individuals to associate the body type and DNA information with the ID provided. Depending upon the airport, people can go from the ID checks to up to a dozen different lines with no ordering of people as they go through the scanners. Then on the swabbing side, there's no checking of ID once again. If their intent was as nefarious as you claimed, the TSA would have changed the way you move through security in order to properly correlate the collected biometric information with ID.

Dan_Nguyen 11y ago
Adding onto this, a skin swab for a DNA sample is pretty useless. You have contamination from everything from skin flora to skin cells from other people you've had physical contact with. Given the very public nature of airports, contamination by others is not far fetched.
- jimrandomh 11y ago
  To clarify, I didn't mean to imply that all those swabs get sequenced. That's too expensive to make sense. Rather, I'd expect them to be sequenced on demand if called for by a specific investigation.
  - Dan_Nguyen 11y ago
    Ah, gotcha. I misunderstood that one. My bad. That said, I'm not too sure how that would work. They only check your boarding pass at the initial security check before the scanners, and the order at which people have their IDs checked is not preserved once you get to the scanners, so you can't track identification that way. On top of that, as someone who's been swabbed multiple times (I'm assuming something to do with my camera equipment), I've never been asked for identification when swabbed. So you might get some DNA to sequence, but you won't really know who it actually is.
dgant 11y ago
It's still feasible without the direct tracking. If you see the same body/DNA at three different times, odds are only one person was flying at all three times, and then you have a match.

by crusso 11y ago

Dan_Nguyen 11y ago

Adding onto this, a skin swab for a DNA sample is pretty useless. You have contamination from everything from skin flora to skin cells from other people you've had physical contact with. Given the very public nature of airports, contamination by others is not far fetched.

jimrandomh 11y ago
To clarify, I didn't mean to imply that all those swabs get sequenced. That's too expensive to make sense. Rather, I'd expect them to be sequenced on demand if called for by a specific investigation.
- Dan_Nguyen 11y ago
  Ah, gotcha. I misunderstood that one. My bad. That said, I'm not too sure how that would work. They only check your boarding pass at the initial security check before the scanners, and the order at which people have their IDs checked is not preserved once you get to the scanners, so you can't track identification that way. On top of that, as someone who's been swabbed multiple times (I'm assuming something to do with my camera equipment), I've never been asked for identification when swabbed. So you might get some DNA to sequence, but you won't really know who it actually is.

dgant 11y ago

It's still feasible without the direct tracking. If you see the same body/DNA at three different times, odds are only one person was flying at all three times, and then you have a match.