After rewatching DS9: “Defiant”, I had a thought; to prevent transporter clones from impersonating each other, could Starfleet require, as a part of duty, that transporter clones receive slight genomic resequencing that changes no major traits but allows DNA scanners to distinguish them?
I can think of a few issues. One, would it break genetic experimentation laws even though there would be negligible changes to each transporter clone? Two, is this too sever a violation of personal liberties for the Federation to be allowed? Three, is the technology there to do this effectively in a starship’s sickbay?
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Transporter clones appear to be vanishingly rare. We’re aware of two (Thomas Riker and William Boimler), and the circumstances around Thomas Riker’s existence were clearly unheard of to any of the people investigating. Clearly this is not a thing that transporters normally do, or are even capable of outside of extremely unusual circumstances.
It also seems pretty dystopian to require the insertion of artificial genetic markers to make a person more easily recognizable. Would we expect “normal” identical twins to be treated similarly? Or actual clones?
I think the larger lesson on this incident from Starfleet’s perspective is that they need to beef up their internal security practices. Big shocker, that. Thomas Riker is neither the first nor last person to successfully impersonate a starfleet officer and cause major troubles in doing so, and most threat vectors can’t be solved by preemptively identifying likely perpetrators (such as this likely very offended transporter clone) and modifying them specifically to make infiltration more difficult.
I’d say you’re right.
Just as a clarification, though, bother Enterprise Riker and Thomas Riker would receive the DNA modification to mark them as legal forks of the old Riker (since both are the real Riker, a.k.a there are four transporter clones, not two).
The same thing would be done to both Boimlers.
It should be considered no different than scanning for errant microbes/viruses/changlings. Not to mention, there should already be a detectable difference in phase variance by merely being a body in another point in spacetime (updated info not reaching all known outposts/ships notwithstanding).
