Stuff You Should Know - How Fingerprinting Works

Episode Date: August 1, 2013

The Babylonians, one of the earliest civilizations, were the first to use fingerprints to differentiate people, but it wasn't until the 19th century that prints were used for crime fighting. Ever since, analyzing, classifying and collecting fingerprints to catch criminals and positively identify people has advanced, but is it valid? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone out there, if you want a great looking website, then you need to head on over to Squarespace. Especially if you're selling something, Squarespace is everything to sell anything. They have the tools you need to get your business off the ground, including e-commerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. Whatever you sell, Squarespace has merchandising features to make your products look their best online. So head on over to Squarespace.com slash SYSK for a free trial and when you're ready to

launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 30 years ago, a van exploded in a parking garage below the World Trade Center. The plan was to send the North Tower crashing into the South. It failed, but six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. The masterminds behind it all were just getting started and would soon change the world forever. Featuring never-before-heard audio, this is a story told by investigators from around the world. There are double agents and an undercover operative to bring the bomber to justice.

This is Operation Trade Bomb, an Apple original podcast hosted by Mark Smerling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Josh W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry and there's some papers in front of me and an Ikea lamp and a big old microphone and it's all pressing in on me really hard. That means that this is Stuff You Should Know.

That means Josh is going on vacation soon. When the microphone is the size of a watermelon, it's hitting you in the face. Yeah, I'm like, it doesn't normally abrade my chin. It is today, so. Yeah, Chuck. Josh. How are you doing? I'm good.

You got some fingerprints there? Let me see. I do. I have four on my fingers and one each on each thumb. Yeah. Are you one of those guys? Yeah. Oh, let me tell you a little story about where your little fingerprints came from.

Okay. Back when Chuck, little Chuck, was just a 10 week old fetus. Okay. So 1970. Yeah. It's a certain point in 1970. Well, if I was born in March of 1971, then that would go back, just go back nine months from there.

Okay. Whatever that is. 1970. Yeah. So your little basal cell layer of your skin, you got three. You got the epidermis, the outer layer, the basal layer, which is in between, that's like where all these new skin cells are produced. Then there's a dermis below that, those are your three layers.

About that time, your little basal layer started going haywire, producing skin cells at a much faster rate than your epidermis and your dermis, which meant that your basal layer was growing up against your epidermis and your dermis. Yeah. Squishing together. Yeah. And so when this would happen, when it would grow up against, say, your epidermis, it would create a point of contact and that point of contact would create enough pressure so that

your basal layer would buckle a little bit. And what's weird about that was that your little basal layer buckled in what appear to be little patterns, little whirls, little swoops, little circles. But what's neat, Chuck, is at this point, within the next six weeks after it started, you had fingerprints that are going to stay the same for the rest of your life, just beneath your epidermis. Yeah, the tiny little Chuck fingers are now sort of tiny little man fingers, but they are the same fingerprints throughout my entire life.

That's right. And you can. It's true. Damage your fingerprints. Some people have purposely, which we'll talk about, but for the most part, since it's your basal layer, that's where the actual fingerprint is. Even if you cut your epidermis, which happens, your skin will grow back and your basal layer will remain the same.

Your fingerprints will remain the same. That's a great way to end this. Good night. That was a great little story. Thanks. And I would grow up to be a sociopath, podcaster, with those very same fingerprints. I don't think you're a sociopath. I'm just kidding.

So we're talking fingerprints and you mentioned the little ridges, little whirls, and we're not making these words up. U-H-O-R-L-S is actually what it's called, whirls, valleys, loops, arches, does it three? I don't know where you got valleys. Well, it's in the pattern, but that's not a part of the official fingerprint. Are you adding to the fingerprint classification? No, no, no. That's not a part of the classification.

But each are unique, and we all know this because that's why they use fingerprinting as one of the biometric sciences to classify people and identify people. There's a one in 64 billion chance that your fingerprint will match exactly with someone else's. So get this. Sir Francis Galton was the one who said that, and he was saying that through his classification system, legally speaking, as far as what would be admissible in court probably, there would be a one in 64 chance of matching people's fingerprints up.

He also thought that if you went down on more of a more granular level and looked at people's fingerprints, there were probably a better chance that people would have fingerprints who matched. And if you take Galton's kind of liberal view of matching fingerprints and you have a one in 64 billion chance of having matching fingerprints with somebody, just looking. Like that's somebody just looking at the pattern. Since about a hundred billion people have lived in the history of humanity, that means that there's at least one pair of people who've ever lived who had the same fingerprints.

And that's if you subscribe to his numbers from 18, whatever. Which may be overestimating it. Our fingerprints may be slightly more similar than you think. Interesting. But while they are more unique than DNA, because we all know if you listen to the twins podcast that twins can share a lot of DNA, but they can't share fingerprints. No, it's different. It's very different.

All right. So let's get into this. Fingerprints are actually made of ridges called friction ridges. And they have little pores underneath them, and it's the pores where you leak like sweat and oils. And that's actually what the mark you are leaving as a fingerprint is coming up through those pores at those friction ridges. Yeah, you're not leaving skin behind.

No, that's gross. You're just leaving a little bit of a sebum. That's right. And they're a really popular way of probably the most popular biometric right now because everyone's leaving fingerprints. Everyone's got fingers. Well, not everyone. They're easy to classify.

They're easy to sort. They do mention this article that you could probably do the same thing with toe prints. But no one wants to ask all these criminals to take off their shoes and socks and lay toe prints. Especially not if they just defecated in the back seat of the police cruiser. Plus, you're more likely, and they even mentioned this in the article, you're more likely to leave a fingerprint than a toe print. Sure.

They don't even put that in here. Right. A lot of people wear shoes. I thought that was the most obvious. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You're not going to commit a crime barefoot.

Some people do, but it's necessary. Nowadays, it's virtually too late because we've amassed such a database of fingerprints that a barefoot print would be almost useless unless you had the person, the suspect. Well, is it about one in every six people have their fingerprints on record? Yeah. That doesn't mean that one in every six people have been charged with a crime, but there's a lot of ways that fingerprints make it into the fingerprint database IAFIS. Yeah, what people use them as signature verifications these days is to identify victims, job applications

sometimes. Yeah. First time mine. Mine made it in because my dad took me to the public library to have me fingerprinted as a child. Really? Yeah. It's just so now that we have your kid on file in case he ever goes missing.

Yep. After that whole Adam Walsh thing. Oh, sure. That was it. Anything anybody said, this could help if your kid is kidnapped or lost or whatever, my parents just did it in the early 80s? My parents did. No.

No, I don't think I'm on file anywhere. Really? With my fingerprints. That's good. Is it? I guess so. Sure, man. Your fingerprints are your own.

Yeah. Maybe so. And that is one in six people and apparently the iPhone 5S, the rumor is, it is going to have fingerprint authentication instead of your passcode. Wow, that's pretty neat. We'll see. That's the rumor. We used to have laptops here that had that.

Well, yeah, you did. I never used mine. Yeah, I did. I thought it was pretty cool. Yeah. Thumbprint, right? Whatever you wanted. I think it was...

Oh, really? Either your thumb, your forefinger, or your middle finger. I would have done my big toe. Right? It would have been like... What is this? Isn't it obvious? There's, I guess, cars, some cars now have biometric, I guess, ignitions.

Yeah. And we might as well talk about why that stinks. Yeah, because in Malaysia? Yeah, in Malaysia, they cut off a guy's finger to get into his Mercedes, and that is a worry for police as fingerprinting becomes more and more used as authentication that people can start cutting fingers off to do so. Right. Did you say authentication?

Authentification? Authentication. Authentication. Authentication? What did I say? You had another syllable. Oh, boy. So...

Hey, don't get on me about words. Yeah, I know. I can't. Um... There's one that I won't bring up. What? The deletrious deleterious. I just say it in my own way.

You made up a word. No, deletrious. This is just not a word. It is. You're deleting. It deletes things. It's negative. All right.

So... I'm going to sniff you off this case. So the biometric companies who said, well, we can't have our customers' fingers being cut off... Yeah. And now we'll just add a little something that detects blood flow. So now our customers are just kidnapped rather than have their fingers cut off. Or the kidnapper doesn't know this, and you still have your car, but you're out of finger.

Right. You should probably put, like, that kind of thing on ads, on buses. Yeah, or put it on your car, like... Oh, yeah. The car will not start if the finger is detached. Yeah, I could think about it. That could be even worse if the finger doesn't work, they're like, oh, maybe it's his other finger.

They just keep cutting fingers off, and you're like, no, it needs a pulse. 30 years ago, a van exploded in a parking garage below the World Trade Center. The plan was to send the North Tower crashing into the South. It failed, but six people were killed, and more than 1,000 injured. The masterminds behind it all were just getting started and would soon change the world forever. Featuring never-before-heard audio, this is a story told by investigators from around the world, using double agents and an undercover operative to bring the bomber to justice. This is Operation Trade Bomb.

An Apple Original Podcast, hosted by Mark Smerling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple Podcasts. Hey, everybody. We all know the stock market has been hard to stomach this year, and if you're like a lot of Americans, it's hard to look at your stock portfolio. Yeah, but you don't have to sit on the sidelines and watch your hard-earned money disappear. You can diversify your portfolio, and Rad Diversified can help. That's right.

Rad Diversified buys cash-flowing real estate all over the country, and for a minimum of just $1,000, you can access their lucrative portfolio of investments. They have thousands of clients. Yeah, only $1,000 to see how they've been delivering awesome results for their clients. You don't have to be a millionaire to access world-class investment opportunities. Rad Diversified investor share price has doubled since 2019, and boasts an impressive 11 straight profitable quarters. So now you can be a real estate investor without doing any of the heavy lifting.

Watch your money grow with RadDiversified.com. In economic times like these, it's a good reminder to explore all your options in a balanced portfolio. Make your money work for you. Just visit RadDiversified.com today. All right. So we talked about the friction ridges. Yeah, and they're called friction ridges, remember, because they buckle up under the

pressure of the friction up against the dermis. Yeah, they can't take the pressure. No, so buckles. But it forms a specific pattern, and this is what the arrangement shape and size and number of lines is what they're looking for when they're identifying and comparing these things. Yeah. And there's three different patterns.

There can be, there's loops, begins on one side, curves up and around, and exits the other. Yeah, look at your fingers while we describe this. There are radial loops and ulnar loops, radial slope toward the thumb, ulnar toward the little finger. And I think it's kind of intuitive to tell which way the slope is going. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because technically it could be like, well, no, I think it's starting the other

side. And so which way you turn your head. Yeah. The aforementioned whirls are circular or spiral in nature, and arches slope up and then down like, and they're described here as narrow mountains. Yeah, it just goes, whew, whew, and I think that summed it up. So those are the identifying marks on your fingers that you can see with the naked eye. And then if you're in law enforcement, they're going to be also analyzing something called

minutia, which you can't see with the naked eye. No, and these are basically like further characteristics of the loops and whirls and arches. So you might, you might have a spur, which is another like whirl that comes off of a larger whirl. Or there's an abrupt end to a ridge or there's bifurcation or islands is like a whirl within a whirl. Yeah.

And then there's alters, which are like ridges that form like Y patterns, just little stuff like that. Yeah. And they all form this classification system that the cops rely on when they fingerprint you. And the science, the forensic science of fingerprinting is called dactyloscopy. That's right. Like pterodactyl.

Exactly. And I guess there are probably some places still that do it the old fashioned way and don't have digital scanning fingerprinting methods. Montana. Hello, Montana. They would do it like you've seen it on countless TV shows and movies. They would clean your hand off, dry it off with alcohol. Yeah.

They want to get all the sebum off, get all the sebum off, roll the fingertip and then I usually say left to right, but I imagine you could do either way to get the ink on the finger. Yep. Make sure it's fully covered. And you roll onto the card from fingernail to fingernail, from one side to the other and that is called a rolled fingerprint. Yep.

And you do this with all eight fingers and two thumbs. And then you've got your set of rolled prints. Then they take your hands and cover all your fingers with the ink and then just have you press it down flat at the bottom of this fingerprint card. And that's a set of flat prints which are used apparently to verify the rolled. Yeah. Exactly. Just so they have two sets basically.

Yeah. If you live in the modern world and you live in a large city, you're probably going to have digital scanners doing the same thing. It's an optical scanner that basically you put your fingers on there and it through magic converts that into digital data patterns and then they have programs that map those points and basically it's sort of like you see in the movies. Yeah. And what's neat about the optical scanner is the picture that it makes is the inverse.

Lightwise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So you're... To negative image. Right.

The worlds and everything have more light bounce off of them so they tend to be lighter. Right. Whereas like the valleys and everything in between the friction ridges are darker. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's more accurate than rolled prints. I might be wrong. You're probably right. From what I've read. Sure.

Yeah. Because you know, when someone's like you ever seen First Blood. No. Yeah. You have. Stallone? First Blood. Oh, I thought you meant the vampire show.

No, no, no. That's True Blood. Oh, okay. First Blood to Rambo, First Rambo. Sure, yeah. It was getting difficult when they were booking him and he wasn't doing the fingerprinting right. Right.

They couldn't get good prints. No. Because Rambo wouldn't stand for it. No. He doesn't take any crap. All right. There's two types of prints, visible prints that we talked of. I don't actually...

We didn't talk about them. They're... They're... If you actually leave an indention in something. A visible print? Yeah. Like dirt or clay or something. Blood or something like that.

Blood. That'd be a good example. It's visible. You can look and say there's a fingerprint. Exactly. There's also latent prints, which we leave everywhere all the time. And those are the ones that are just made with the sebum coming out of our fingers, the pores on our friction ridges.

And those are typically not necessarily naked to the human eye. If you look at stainless steel, you'll probably see some prints. Sure. Clear glass, maybe. Right. But those are technically latent prints. They also can be invisible to the naked eye. And so they have to be dusted.

Yeah. And they actually do dust with a little brush. I looked up the dusting powder, fingerprinting powder, and apparently most of it these days is proprietary. So like you don't know exactly what's in it. Really? I just guess like carbon. Well, who knows, maybe.

I know. You should formulate your own, Josh's fingerprinting powder. Market it to some local art force made in season. Yeah. I'll sell it like snake oil or something. Yeah. I mean, happy's patented A1 blue ribbon fingerprinting powder. So they lift the prints, these latent prints.

And those are obviously the prints too that you see criminals in TV shows and movies always trying to wipe off with a hanky. Right. Very wisely. Yeah. I wonder if that really works. You want to get into that? Do you know?

Yes. It should. Okay. It should work. I read this one paper that was basically like we should not be using fingerprints in court any longer. Oh, really? That first of all, we have DNA now and DNA is objective.

It's like this protein sequence is the same as this protein sequence. Right. Right. With fingerprinting is subjective. Even though there's an extensive classification system, it's I think that this print matches up to this print. It's not quantitative or if it is, it's not enough, quantitative enough. Also, there's so much faith placed by the public in fingerprint analysis that fingerprinting

people who do this work frequently are matching stuff like they're taking a great role print and comparing it to just the worst smudge print on the planet where you can be like, well, I don't get that because I'm not a dactyloscopist, but I'm sure that somebody who is that could figure this out. Supposedly, that's a lot of faith that we're placing into people and that now that DNA evidence is becoming more and more available and prevalent and widespread, it's starting to show like fingerprinting is actually probably put a lot of innocent people behind bars and we really shouldn't rely on it anymore.

Even if you have a great print that you took, a latent print and a great dactyloscopist. There are plenty, like they're not shysters or frauds or crooks because even within their profession, a lot of them are like, there's a lot of recklessness going on here that you're never going to have a really great latent print. It's never going to be good and so you're working from a deficit every time and you're also comparing it to a roll print and a roll print is also not the same as another roll print made right after. You can take somebody's finger and roll it from finger nail to finger nail, pick it

up, put it on the next little box, roll the same finger from finger nail to finger nail and you're going to have basically two different prints. Yeah, so that's in the olden days before they had the digital scanning though. Right, but those are still a lot of the ones on file, I imagine. Yes, and I feel like we're probably still dealing with the same deficits. The paper I read was from like 2005 or 2007, so it's not like it was old and they're saying like this is still going on, even with the advent of digital scanning. Plus I think as well as I do, when you're in court and the attorney yells at the top

of his lungs, his fingerprints were found all over the murder scene, your toast. Well, yeah, and I think that a lot of perpetrators too think that, like if they have your prints while you're dead, that's it and if they have you dead to rights, so you might as well confess and I'm sure it's a great tool for confessing. Yeah, I wonder if DNA thwarts, I wonder if anything like that actually thwarts people from committing crimes. I wonder if anyone ever stops and goes, boy, now with DNA. I would think so.

I can't just wipe down a crime scene. If I drop a hair on the carpet, then I could be nabbed. Sure, I would think that's a pretty good deterrent. I just don't know in the criminal mind how that operates. I'm sure it makes them operate a lot less sloppy than you see, you know? That's a good point. All right, let's talk a little bit about the history because it's pretty interesting, I think.

Yeah. An ancient Babylon, they actually pressed fingertips and clay for some business transactions. Yeah. It's pretty advanced. I mean, thousands of years ago, people already understood, like, if fingertips are unique. And of course, the Chinese were always ahead of the game on everything it seemed like. They actually used ink on paper for business transactions and to help identify their kids. Like my dad.

Yeah. Can you not identify your child? Oh, well, if they grow up, if they're kidnapped and taken to another village, they grow up and return to claim a birthright. Yeah, that's a good point. Sure. It wasn't until they didn't use them for identifying criminals until the 19th century. And there's a series of events that sort of just not necessarily connected, happened

one after the other to sort of advance it at the same time. The first in 1858 was a guy named Sir William Herschel, an Englishman who was Chief Magistrate of the Hoogley District in India. And he started recording fingerprints when signing documents, so that's kind of the first thing. Right. Then you mentioned Henry Falls. He came around next.

Scottish doctor. Yeah. He was, I guess, he got into Japanese pottery and noticed like the fingerprints left behind by the artists. Yeah. And he started getting into fingerprinting, so he wanted to create a classification system and said, well, I'm not going to do it myself, I'm cousins to Charles Darwin, all this asked him to do it.

He's pretty good at it. Yeah, and Darwin said, I'm kind of busy, but I have another cousin, and his name is Sir Francis Galton, and he's going to be into this, because Galton, he was a eugenicist. I wonder if Darwin was like, oh, god, it's, you know. Another classification system. Doesn't Henry again. Right. I don't know, let's pass him off to cousin Colton.

Frank. Yeah, cousin Frank. So, like you said, he was a eugenicist, and he got, I feel like we've talked about him before. Yeah. He pops up here there. Okay. He was pretty big in this era.

Yeah, he was the first dude to really start kind of collecting biometric information on people, not just fingerprints, all kinds of stuff. Right, and being a eugenicist, he decided that there was a perfect human, and we should selectively breed ourselves. That's right. Yeah. We're not promoting his work, by the way. Although in 1892, he wrote a book called Fingerprints, and he outlined his systems first time it

had ever been done, and it was based on the system we know today, arches, loops, and whorls. And then in France, a guy named Alphonse Berthillon. No, he's made maybe four appearances in our broadcast before. I knew I knew that name. He was, at the same time, using his own system called Berthillonage and Anthropometry is basically what he was doing. Yeah, because remember, he was working in the Paris police department, and he saw the same criminals come and go, but they'd use aliases, so he devised a system of measuring their face

and head and their ears and all that stuff. Police sketches, he was definitely in that one. Yeah, definitely. And one of them also was fingerprinting, too, but his system was extremely exhaustive, even though it was adopted by the London police, I believe, it was really time consuming. Sure. But he was advancing the art. Like eight of them at once.

Yeah. And then about the same time in Argentina, a police officer named Juan, you want to try that? Vucitif? It sounds good. It doesn't sound Argentinian. And in 1892, he actually used fingerprinting, and this is in 1892, in a case to convict a mother who had killed her two kids when, in fact, she was saying it was her boyfriend.

He actually matched fingerprints, and she confessed, and like he had her first case right there, it actually being used to convict a criminal. Yeah, that was the first time it ever happened, 1892 in Buenos Aires. I think, what, the following year? Yeah. 1893, a guy named Sir Edward Henry, he was the commissioner of the police department. He became interested in using fingerprinting to fight crime, and he came up with a classification system that further extended galtons.

So he came up with, I believe, the minutiae, and I guess the comparable points that we rely on still today, it's called the Henry classification system. And when you see on TV, you know, a fingerprint fed into a computer, and like it flashes through for some reason, all of the fingerprints that it's matching them against, that is using the Henry classification system that this guy created in 1893. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. In 1901, Scotland Yard established the fingerprint bureau, its first one, and then they used

them as evidence the following year for the first time, and then the year after that, in New York, they started using it in state prisons, and then the FBI said, it's not a bad idea. Let's get on board. Exactly. So everybody's getting on board. The Henry system, like, really allowed a system of classification that could be used anywhere to be devised, and it was adopted.

The problem was, it was extremely time-consuming, too. Yeah. You're matching paper to paper, basically. And you're doing it with a magnifying glass, that the computer systems that we see today on TV, those are going through, you know, millions, say, possible matches. Even if you had, like, a thousand, how many detectives would it take to just look through a set of prints, your control prints, you imagine, and then, you know, another print? Yeah.

To find a killer or something like that from a latent print. Yeah, they call it minutiae for a reason. Exactly. I imagine those guys went kind of nuts. Yeah. And that's if they even had a fingerprint on file, like they were counting on someone having, because at the time, you know, it was only criminals had fingerprints. Right.

Well, they probably were like, this looks like a man's thumb print. Yeah. Let's go through all the thumb prints of the men we have on file, see if we can catch somebody. Who's thumby? It was much better if, like, you could catch a suspect, print them, and then compare it, but that's, you know, not necessarily what they were doing. Luckily, we created computers to be our mindless slaves at this kind of stuff, starting around

the 70s. Yeah. And Japan was, their national police agency was the first one to use this kind of automation in the 1980s, and they created the automated fingerprint identification systems, APHIS. Its slogan was warm, fuzzy happiness. That's what it says in quotes underneath. The automated fingerprinting concern. Right.

So they used it in the U.S. to great effect, although the problem was, it wasn't integrated, like, you know, they didn't share information between agencies or between districts of law enforcement, so you're kind of stuck with whoever you had on file, even though it was computerized. Yeah. A particular police department, maybe even a statewide police department could buy APHIS, an APHIS system. Yeah.

But, like, that was your APHIS system. Fortunately, the FBI said, hey, there's this awesome thing called the Internet. Yeah. I say fortunately, if you're a criminal, not necessarily fortunately, or you're into privacy and all that. Yeah. But the FBI, and I think 1999, created the integrated APHIS, which basically plugged all of these databases together and created one huge database that the FBI maintains.

Screwed up their acronym, though. IAFIS? Yeah. It's terrible. Yeah. So, yeah, now there's one in six Americans who has their fingerprints on file in IAFIS. Yeah. And I think they say it takes about 30 minutes, as little as 30 minutes, to scan against everyone

in the entire country at this point, including mugshots, criminal histories, 47 million people on record. Yeah. That's not bad, including you, my friend. Yeah. So you better keep that hanky on you at all times. Wipe down my print. Wipe down your prints.

I could also just stay on the straight and narrow. Oh, yeah, that's true. I'll let you wipe my prints down just to be sure. Sure. Should we talk a little bit about other biometrics, even though we've covered some of this stuff? If you want. Eye scans? Yeah.

They're really expensive. They're, the retinas and the iris are also unique, but they're just super expensive, so the only place you're going to see those are in high security, expensive facilities. Well, it depends. The retina scan is extremely detailed and tough. The iris scan supposedly is much quicker. Oh, really? And you're more likely to find those.

Is it cheaper too? Yeah. Okay. A little more prevalently, but still, you're not going to find that at your average hearties. What about Carl's Jr., though? Maybe. Okay. Ear scans, apparently ears are unique in size and shape and structure as well.

I think they use this too for scanning crowds as well, like part of facial recognition is to scan ears. Interesting. Yeah. Slapdash? Scary. Okay. Voice fingerprints.

There's an audio lab that FBI operates in Quantico, Virginia, and when there are messages from supposed known terrorists, they run it through their program and it does a pretty good job. It's not like a fingerprint, but they can do a pretty good job with vocal analysis at this point. Right. So if you're like, say, contacting your bank in Geneva by phone, your bank may use some sort of voice print analysis to say, okay, you're you.

Sing a favorite song. Right. I wonder what they do have you say or do. I'm sure it's just your name, but it'd be funny if they had you sing a snippet. Yeah, sure. You give love a bad name by Chuck. And then DNA, of course, there was just a ruling last week in the Supreme Court. Oh, yeah?

They ruled five to four that DNA swabs can now be taken at the time of arrest for serious crimes. Yeah. Wait. Is that right? Yeah. So for serious crimes, I thought the whole row over this was that it was like they can just take them from anybody if you're stopped by a cop.

No, it says for serious crimes. The whole row is the fact that it's a police officer doing it and not a, like you're not at the police station with a trained, you know, DNA analysis. Gotcha. Analyst. Man. Analanized. What is wrong with me today?

Analanized. Yeah. In the ruling, they said that they've essentially found that it's the same thing as fingerprinting. So now cops are going to have little swab mouse swab kits in their cars and it was a five to four ruling. It was close. Yeah, I'm sure. And it's, uh, some people, you know, are up in arms about it.

I'm sure. Saying it's civil rights, uh, infringement and the end of privacy is what we're witnessing. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's sad to see. Tough words. Nobody's doing anything about it.

That did NSA whistleblower gave up his life basically and everybody's like, wow, I guess I always suspected that was going on anyway. Right. You know. So anyway, fingerprints. Yes. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

All right. Well, if you want to learn more about fingerprints, you can type that word into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, that means it's time for message break. Yeah. 30 years ago, a van exploded in a parking garage below the World Trade Center. The plan was to send the North Tower crashing into the South. It failed, but six people were killed and more than 1000 injured.

The masterminds behind it all were just getting started and would soon change the world forever. Featuring never before heard audio. This is a story told by investigators from around the world using double agents and an undercover operative to bring the bomber to justice. This is Operation Trade Bomb, an Apple original podcast hosted by Mark Smerling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple podcasts. Hey, everybody, we all know the stock market has been hard to stomach this year. And if you're like a lot of Americans, it's hard to look at your stock portfolio.

Yeah. But you don't have to sit on the sidelines and watch your hard earned money disappear. You can diversify your portfolio and Rad diversified can help. That's right. Rad diversified buys cash flowing real estate all over the country and for a minimum of just $1,000, you can access their lucrative portfolio of investments. They have thousands of clients. Yeah, only $1,000 to see how they've been delivering awesome results for their clients.

You don't have to be a millionaire to access world class investment opportunities. Rad diversified investor share prices doubled since 2019 and boasts an impressive 11 straight profitable quarters. So now you can be a real estate investor without doing any of the heavy lifting. Watch your money grow with raddiversified.com. In economic times like these, it's a good reminder to explore all your options in a balanced portfolio. Make your money work for you.

Just visit raddiversified.com today. I know it's time for listening to your mail. Josh, I'm going to call this, let's help this young lady raise some money for cancer. Okay. We don't do this a lot. We get a lot of requests and we can't do them all. We wish we could. Whitney spoke to me.

She's been listening for years. She's a big fan. She has started as an undergrad and now she is wrapping up her second year in law school at the Ohio State University. Go, guys. Yeah. I know you like to hear about awesome charities. I wanted to share this unique one here in Columbus, Ohio.

Pelotonia is a bike ride that raises money for life saving cancer research. 100% goes raised by riders, goes to cancer research at the James Cancer Center at Ohio State. It's special to me because my grandmother got cancer treatment at the James. When she did not have health insurance and she was proud that they could use her rare case to potentially help find a cure for others, Nancy passed away in 2011. She was fighting her cancer in the course of a single day, though, at the age of 65. She began having severe dementia-like symptoms.

We are not sure why. Symptoms left her unable to mentally compete with the cancer and without her willpower and understanding that she had an extremely rare terminal cancer to battle, her health went downhill quickly. Still her inner dignity shined through, even with a drastic drop in body weight and repeated trips to the ER. In memory of her grandmother, she is riding for charity. She has raised $215 right now and I think we should bump that up a little bit, our listeners.

That's great, man. I created a little tiny URL of her page, http colon slash slash tinyurl.com slash mrmkx6v. So that's mrmkx6v after tinyurl.com. That is Whitney Bromlin's bike ride page. It goes down August 10th, I believe, and that would be cool if we could raise a little extra dough for her. Everybody gets you there, 100% of the proceeds. That's pretty good.

So, and you know, it's one of those things where you can get like $5 if you want it. Dude. To skip that latte today, I'd say, and donate to Whitney's College. Yeah. Way to go, Chuck. Way to go, Whitney. Way to go, Whitney. And way to go you for donating.

We're proud of you already in advance. Agreed. If you want to let us know about a charitable organization you care about, we're always down with that. We'll try to let everybody know about it in turn. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You should know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcastdiscovery.com. You can join us at our home on the web at stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by YouTube Geek Week. Tune in to find your channels at youtube.com slash geek week. Woo! A day of travel brings a basket full of learning in Mississippi with family-friendly places like the Mississippi Aquarium, the Hattiesburg Zoo, and Tupelo Buffalo Park.

Explore today at visitmississipi.org slash family fun. Mississippi, Wanderers, welcome. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. What about a pissy off? The cops. Are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jackmove

or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.