For example, the police may lift fingerprints they believe belong to Super-Joe. However Super-Joe’s secret identity Average Joe is just an ordinary citizen. He was never arrested, and never served in the military so his fingerprints are not available in any forensic database. They can run queries for months and try to find matches but the fact is that his fingerprints are just not there.

Similarly, police and press may have photos and videos of our hero but there is no single national database of head shots they could query. The only picture of Average Joe on file might be his low-resolution grainy driver’s license pic – and that may not be enough to run a facial recognition match. Especially if Super-Joe uses some sort of mask obscuring part of his face.

Same goes for DNA. Most of us don’t have any DNA records lying around. Police may gather a blood sample, but it will not give them much to work with if they can’t match it against anything.

Most of the forensic techniques are used to rule out whether or not a suspect is the man you are looking for. But you must have a suspect first. So if Average Joe lays low and keeps out of trouble, Super-Joe may conceal his identity for an indefinite amount of time.

The science in CSI like TV dramas is usually more fiction than science and real life cases are never so clear cut. What superheroes have going for them is that in most western nations there is a big emphasis on personal privacy. In US citizens are not required to be fingerprinted, they do not need to posses any national form of ID, and unlawfully sampling their DNA would be a breach of privacy. Hospitals and doctor offices will not release any identifying info (such as blood samples) to the police without a court order.

So really, identifying an average law abiding citizen based on few flakes of skin, few hairs or a tiny speck of blood is very, very difficult. Secret identities are not as hard to maintain as CSI would make you think.

Clem, you seem to write magnetic suggestions — you’ve had more turned into posts than anyone else at this point.

I like the setting it before technology becomes a problem like you suggest Alan. Heading back to a less intrusive past makes it a lot easier to get around snooping technology. If you’re playing in an alternate timeline, you could retard the development of problematic technologies too- keep the parts of the 21st century that you like, but cross it with less ubiquitous security cameras and 30 year old progress in biology.

I hadn’t even considered the idea that Kurt and Alan suggested– that your secret ID is broken for limited purposes (to the government), but that it’s secret to everyone else. That’s another strong way of defanging the problem.

1. As Kurt suggested above, accept that the modern world is very different from the past. Build on top of it instead of fighting it. Maybe all supers are registered with the government, so they know anyway but accept the secrecy for some reason, benevolent or malevolent. Maybe the Powers That Be have reasons to suppress the information.

2. Move to an era when it’s not a problem. There’s no harm in, say, setting your game in the 80s. It was a nice decade. This is useful if there are other modern elements (cell phones, cell phone cameras, the internet) that are problematic for the type of game you want to run.

(After all, if hundreds or even thousands of federal agents can cover up the JFK assassination conspiracy, the faked moon landings, and the Roswell alien crash site, they should be able to handle a few secret identities, right?)

Plus, unless the PCs have prior criminal records, their fingerprints probably aren’t on record. The same is true for DNA. If they’re not registered sex offenders (hmm…strange concept for a superhero PC) then their DNA is probably not on record either. Of course, this assumes a somewhat libertarian society. In an authoritarian one, everybody has a file. In that case, destroying that file should be the first order of business.

Finally, the thing to remember about all this technology is that it attempts to match one person to another (heroic identity to secret identity). If either one is not on record, then the match can’t be made. So, since it might be hard to avoid leaving evidence as a hero, perhaps the secret identity should be more careful about staying off the radar. No speeding tickets, always wears gloves, no public photo ops, none of that.