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Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#71

Post by simias »

pc86 wrote: post #45
PeterisP wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the concept of "parallel construction" is mostly an USA specific thing because USA legal doctrine is heavy on fourth amendment application and "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine that can make evidence inadmissible depending on how it was obtained. But all those things and rights are specific to USA, not in general, and not even for other common law countries. As far as I understand, such "fruit of the poison…

I agree with you on the legal doctrine piece, but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence. Every person has the right to speak their mind, to defend themselves, to not incriminate themselves, etc. etc. with all the caveats and potential nullifications that accompan…

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you arguing that you think that the UK police and/or justice system tacitly enforce the US Constitution because they think it's a good idea or merely that you think that the world would be a better place if all of humanity adhered to said constitution?

The former is preposterous, the latter is your opinion but it's frankly irrelevant in this discussion.

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#72

Post by benjohnson »

sjy wrote: post #64
logicchains wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally what the constitution itself says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The vast majority of Americans are not Silicon Valley technocrats who reject any kind of deontological ethics.

That’s the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution came 11 years later (and did not, even then, include the Bill of Rights).

As I understand it, the Bill of Rights was considered redundant by many people - and some thought that enumerating the rights line by line was dangerously limiting them.

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#73

Post by danbruc »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #39

Umm you can't even see his fingerprints on that photo. It's way too blurry. Weird. Edit: The lines on his palm are very clear though in the whole picture: https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2021/m... Maybe that was it. Those are also pretty unique.

You can remove blur from images with [blind] deconvolution. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_deconvolution

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#74

Post by brendoelfrendo »

ekianjo wrote: post #62
wfleming wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence As an American I find this a very surprising interpretation, and I doubt anybody in my close social circle would agree with it either.

Its not an interpretation at all. Its is litterally written by Jefferson in the preamble to the constitution > We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from…

I'm really, really enjoying that two people (this comment and a sibling comment) both posted in support of this interpretation of the constitution, and then both of them posted the same snippet of the Declaration of Independence instead.

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#75

Post by elliekelly »

fnord77 wrote: post #38

amazing the amount of data leaked by a photograph.

I remember I once saw a post here about research at (I think) MIT where they were able to use shadows in photographs to “see” what was behind the camera and “see” around corners. It was really rough and didn’t really look like very much but I think about that research all the time. What happens when that technology improves and every photo that has been posted online is suddenly a photo of way more than the photographer intended to share?

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#76

Post by Kenji »

pc86 wrote: post #70
GekkePrutser wrote: post #39

Umm you can't even see his fingerprints on that photo. It's way too blurry. Weird. Edit: The lines on his palm are very clear though in the whole picture: https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2021/m... Maybe that was it. Those are also pretty unique.

It's a pretty huge leap to assume that the image you see in a public news article online is the same image the police have access to without any form of recompression or artifacting.

The fingers are out of focus. No amount of image resolution will correct for out of focus optics at the time the photo was taken. The fingerprints are nowhere to be found in this picture. So clearly something is bogus about the claims in the article.

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#77

Post by dTal »

pc86 wrote: post #70
GekkePrutser wrote: post #39

Umm you can't even see his fingerprints on that photo. It's way too blurry. Weird. Edit: The lines on his palm are very clear though in the whole picture: https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2021/m... Maybe that was it. Those are also pretty unique.

It's a pretty huge leap to assume that the image you see in a public news article online is the same image the police have access to without any form of recompression or artifacting.

The blur is clearly optical.

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#78

Post by mnw21cam »

pjc50 wrote: post #60
pc86 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not meaning to imply that the USC applies to anyone other than US citizens from a legal standpoint. Not only am I not a lawyer, but I'm meaning to draw a distinction between legal rights and human rights in this context. I'm saying that the rights codified in the USC are inalienable rights. The US government isn't granting the freedom of speech, and it can't take it away. The right exists because you're a human b…

Yes, that's the usual human rights rationale but it's practically a theological one - that the rights have always existed and exist even if you can't see or action them. Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it. https://www.echr.coe.…

The other point of course is that even if you recognise a pre-government system of human rights, it is reasonable to apply exceptions. For example, the right to free speech is reasonably curtailed when the person speaking is ordering a lackey to commit murder. Most countries recognise some level of intrinsic human rights, but they all handle these exceptions slightly differently.

It's not that the UK is dastardly in violating this person's right to privacy because it doesn't think the rights are worth upholding. It's just that the UK has formulated a particular set of reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy, and has reasoning behind each of them. The US has a different set of formulated reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy that much of Europe is pretty horrified about. Both sides being horrified at the borderline areas of the other is not surprising.

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#79

Post by cm2187 »

PeterisP wrote: post #14
Threeve303 wrote: post #6

In reality, the police were likely violating his rights and doing some good old fashioned parallel construction. They had his prints from his products, knew who he was already, waited until they watched him post a picture of cheese, then claimed it was only the picture that caused him to be caught. This is a clear change in police methods, enabled by tech, and an abuse of your constitutional rights if this was a U.S.…

IMHO the concept of "parallel construction" is mostly an USA specific thing because USA legal doctrine is heavy on fourth amendment application and "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine that can make evidence inadmissible depending on how it was obtained. But all those things and rights are specific to USA, not in general, and not even for other common law countries. As far as I understand, such "fruit of the poison…

Fruit of the poisonous tree assumes that the real way they identified the target was through illegal means. It doesn't have to. Could be an anonymous tip, a suspicion from the police, etc.

Re: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

#80

Post by dTal »

Kenji wrote: post #76
pc86 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pretty huge leap to assume that the image you see in a public news article online is the same image the police have access to without any form of recompression or artifacting.

The fingers are out of focus. No amount of image resolution will correct for out of focus optics at the time the photo was taken. The fingerprints are nowhere to be found in this picture. So clearly something is bogus about the claims in the article.

"Bogus" seems strongly worded when the article makes no hard claims, but it does call into question the implication we're all here for, which is that fingerprints were extracted from the photo.

Although, come to think of it, it is in fact perfectly possible in theory to recover information from out-of-focus images. In practice it tends not to work well due to noise, but it's theoretically a reversible transform if you can deduce the blurring kernel. I highly doubt it would work well on a social media JPEG, however.

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