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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

#111

Post by pbhjpbhj »

avianlyric wrote: post #32
IshKebab wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the photo they've shown is clearly way too low quality to get fingerprints. Presumably they actually used his palm (the article sort of mentions it), and they have a really small pool of people that they suspected so they could just manually compare his palm with known palm prints. I think that's fine though.

I don’t know why you think the photo on the BBC is the original photo. It’s probably been re-compressed half a dozen times as it was passed between police to reporter to CMS to CDN.

The writing in the BBC article suggests "this photo", they refer to "the photo" and show a photograph.

IMO that's bad journalism if it's not the original photo - how about 'the original photo, of which this is a lower quality copy, had enough detail for police to read fingerprint markers from, those markers were matched to the suspect [...]'.

If it's not _the_ photo, then who knows, perhaps it's a fake the BBC produced or it's a stock photo. Why not state details about the pertinent evidence on which the whole story supposedly hangs.

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

#112

Post by meowface »

40four wrote: post #96

I don’t get it. I’m mostly very skeptical of the claim of making a positive fingerprint ID through a picture. Has anyone ever heard of this before? Fingerprints are known to be very unreliable and subjective. I’m not convinced this is actually what happened, and not just a cute story pushed by the British law enforcement. Edit: I did find a couple articles talking about technique of lifting prints from photographs, s…

Yeah, the article title should be "Drug dealer caught by online photo that revealed fingerprints". That's the interesting and unexpected part, here. I didn't really know that could be done and hadn't heard of it before; but I suppose it's not too surprising given the prevalence of high-resolution phone cameras, now.

I'm guessing what happened was that they were monitoring an anonymous chat group on this EncroChat app and weren't sure of the true identities of some of the people in it. They saw one of them posted a photo showing fingertips, decided to see if they could extract and match the fingerprints against their database, and got a hit.

I disagree with the (current) top post in this thread saying it's "likely parallel construction". It could be, but the claimed story also sounds pretty plausible, if it's indeed true that they could match the fingerprints based on that photo.

That said, if they didn't heavily downscale or obfuscate the photo before uploading it, the fingertips look so blurry that I imagine it'd be hard to get anything actually useful from it... (https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/F8F6/production/...). If that's close to the original photo, I would grant more probability to the parallel construction/source protection hypothesis.

I'd be quite impressed if the photo was really that blurry and they still managed to extract fingerprints. Though, maybe it could become more feasible with some Photoshop adjustments?

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

#113

Post by tptacek »

anomaloustho wrote: post #109
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…

After looking at the Wikipedia page for Parallel Construction[1], there is a subsection about the UK, it mentioned that one could argue that parallel construction is now a concept that applies in the UK as of 2016. It then points to an article on The Register subtitled “Enshrining parallel construction in English law”[2]. It looks like Section 56(1) of the Investigatory Powers Act prohibits “any content of an interce…

The UK doesn't even have the exclusionary rule --- in fact, most countries don't. There's no need for "parallel construction" there.

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

#114

Post by Fnoord »

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.…

Not needed (Occam's Razor). EncroChat is a gold mine for the police, world wide. Being active there alone is suspicious, and it was effectively a honeypot. High quality picture containing a finger contains fingerprint. You run that through a database and presto.

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

#115

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hristov wrote: post #101
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.…

Why would it be a violation of his rights? The police have a right to investigate and they sure have a right to gather fingerprints from drugs.

Do they, for example, have a right to decrypt emails for the purposes of data mining? I'd have thought they needed a warrant and/or reasonable suspicion before they're allowed to just mine anyone and everyone's private communications.

Are UK police, for example, allowed to run fingerprint and facial matching algos against all image-based content uploaded to Facebook/YouTube/Instagram/whatever? I thought dragnet policing was considered to infringe the right to a private and family life, say?

In short the police right to investigate is curtailed, and controlled by the courts and a warrant process, at least.

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

#116

Post by will4274 »

wfleming wrote: post #55
pc86 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

It's disappointing to me that you and your social circle weren't educated in your own country's government and history. Can I ask which underfunded school district you attended?

In most American schools, for "social studies", US history is grades 8 and 9, while US government is grade 10. What did you study instead at these grade levels?

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

#117

Post by dplavery92 »

danbruc wrote: post #73
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

Blind deconvolution is useful in astronomy and space domain awareness where you can make reasonable assumptions that the support for the signal pixels is limited against a blank background. This isn't the case in everyday terrestrial photography, and the Lena image on that wiki shows the sorts of results you get from applying a blind deconvolution algorithm naively to this sort of imagery.

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

#119

Post by StavrosK »

weego wrote: post #13
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.…

A major dealer in Liverpool is almost certainly someone who has his prints on file for previous crimes. They'll have suspected that account was him for a while but didn't have reasonable grounds, this photo clearly convinced someone it gave them that. But sure, let's take talking points from another country and apply it here too to get angry because question mark

Do you see any visible fingerprints on the photo? I don't.

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

#120

Post by pjc50 »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #110
pjc50 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that arranging to commit a crime is protected speech? I don't think that one will fly anywhere, even in the US, let alone in the UK with no constitutional protection only the much weaker ECHR one.

>let alone in the UK with no constitutional protection only the much weaker ECHR one. I think that's overstating the situation a little. The Human Rights Act (which enabled domestic courts to give effect to the ECHR) is considered to be as much of a constitutional document as one can be in the UK. Laws can't accidentally go against Convention rights. Secondary legislation can be struck down if it breaches the HRA/ECH…

> The Human Rights Act (which enabled domestic courts to give effect to the ECHR) is considered to be as much of a constitutional document as one can be in the UK.

Yes - that is, it can be overruled by a simple majority of MPs plus the unelected House of Lords. So constitutional change can be achieved with the support of only a minority of voters.

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