I'm not sure the article correctly interpreted the findings. The paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/02/18/1917222117.full.pdf https://w

I'm not sure the article correctly interpreted the findings. The paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/02/18/1917222117.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/02/18/191722211... What they found was a correlation between false positive rates and true positive rates, where IF you could accept a false positive rate of 0.1%, THEN you could get a little over 50% true positive rate with the longest seam length under "ideal imaging conditions". They do not attempt to estimate the false positive rate of whatever methodology FBI agents are using in practice. I doubt the FBI has a rigorous well-defined test that could be analyzed; I suspect this is just a general technique that is applied by different agents in different ways. Even if the FBI's methods approach this ideal false positive rate (which they can't), they are not describing it honestly in court. > When, for example, an FBI analyst identified the plaid shirt in a surveillance video as that belonging to Wilbert McKreith, the analyst stated in court that the odds that two different shirts would match were a staggering 1-in-650 billion. The analyst arrived at this number by making eight measurements along two seams, estimating the probability that the plaid stripes at these eight locations were misaligned by a certain distance, and then multiplying all eight of these probabilities to reach the astronom-ically low odds of 1-in-650 billion.