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Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall

bbc.co.uk

181–190 of 208 posts

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

#181

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.…

It's a plausible theory, but they almost definitely would have had prints from him already.

The fingers and palm were analysed in the photo. There's a better photo here: https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2021/m...

Without any image processing, we can already see palm prints and the ridges and lines in the palm and fingers. These are unique biometric identifiers. In fact, palms have more identifying characteristics than fingerprints.

They are almost certainly telling the truth in this story.

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

#182

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.…

Nope this is all from the compromise of Encrochat. There have been dozens of stories about the pseudonymous users of that service being linked back to real identities since the initial first large wave of arrests Sometimes you don’t need crazy parallel construction theories - just a simple criminal network cracked because the participants believed it to be secure

I wouldn't quite describe parallel construction as a crazy theory given the amount data and metadata a person generates.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key point of Brexit is to "restore sovereignty." At least some of that ire is directed at the ECHR, which can issue rulings that override British rulings and parliament. One of the examples of this occurring is when the ECHR overturned a British ban on voting for prisoners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirst_v_United_Kingdom_(No_2) Like many things independence from the ECHR has not actually happened yet. https://…

> Like many things independence from the ECHR has not actually happened yet. Independence from the ECHR does not follow from leaving the EU. To get out of the European Convention on Human Rights, the UK would have to leave the Council of Europe. The Convention is also in the Brexit agreement. Though of course whether the tories will follow the provisions of the treaties they sign is another matter.

I know that but that's certainly not what was sold. The link I provided says as much.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Declaration of Independence made the claim that certain rights were inalienable. The US Constitution was much less exciting and largely just laid out how the government would function. "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselv…

> The Bill of Rights wasn't even part of the original constitution I see this claim frequently, but I still judge it as "mostly false." Multiple states refused to ratify the constitution without the bill of rights. Without the bill of rights, the original constitution would have collapsed in less than ten years. The original constitution by itself was a piece of paper. The constitution together with the bill of right…

Incorrect. The Bill of Rights was written after the US Constitution was ratified. The part about it collapsing is conjecture (quite a few scholars agree with thus position).

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

#185
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean I shouldn't share a photo of personally identifiable information through the same communication medium that I'm using to sell drugs? Anyways, you think we should change the laws so that just because somebody is using an encrypted or "anonymous" chat app the police can't use any of that to build evidence against them? That seems too OP for the criminals

Next up: T-Shirts printed "I'm feeling invisible and I demand you to respect that feeling!"

I was in court with a traffic ticket and the “opening act” was a bench trial for a lady who stole beer from a gas station.

Her defense was that the clerk was lying, because Jesus gave her an invisibility cloak. The judge didn’t skip a beat and asked “Did you put the beer under the cloak?”. She said “shit” and changed her plea.

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

#186
post #142
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parallel construction is also used to protect sources and methods.

> Parallel construction is also used to protect sources and methods. And, of course, it is the unethical and unlawful methods which have the greatest need of "protection".

Snitches get stitches, or a dirt nap. Protecting a confidential informant sounds facially reasonable, but obviously abuses are possible.

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

#187

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.…

[deleted]

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

#188
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

the edges seems to be restored fine on that image - this is exactly what you'd need for fingerprints.

Also, the image have clear partial palm prints which police may have had in their db on this guy too.

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

#189
post #45

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…

It's interesting how the US has such a different cultural view of rights than other English speaking commonwealth countries that you'd expect to be culturally similar. I can't speak for other countries but as a Canadian I view the idea of "inalienable" or "god-given" rights as preposterous. A right is a promise a government makes to a people. I have a much more expansive right to free speech than someone in North Korea does, that's just an objective reality since the North Korean government does not make the promise of free speech to their people. I have no right to be granted employment if I cannot find it myself, but that right has existed for others in various places and times. You can say that people should have certain rights, but to me it's wrong as a statement of fact to say that they already have them.

This view of rights also makes it easy to say that we should have the right to healthcare, or food and water, or housing. You don't have to debate about whether those are "inalienable human rights" to decide that it would be better for our government to make those promises to our citizens.

More of an aside, it is weird to me that you would include the right to not self-incriminate among the set of inalienable rights. That one seems like a much more arbitrary detail of your justice system than some more obvious right like access to food and clean water.

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

#190
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not allowing freedom of assembly would have saved many lives in the protests that have swept the US, though potentially at the cost of slower social progress. The US supreme court has established that the government can't regulate the content of speech, but the government is in its right to regulate the time, place and manner of speech. [0] So it is very much a thing in the US and has been enforced plenty of times,…

> even during BLM when protests were just declared as "riots" to then crack down on them with the full force of a militarized police arresting thousands of people Many Americans actually died in these events in addition to dangerous fires (with people still inside buildings!) and random acts of violence, so the riot characterization has at least in some cases been fair. It makes sense thousands of people would be arr…

> That is where France differs — a protest can, from the beginning, be declared unable to occur, and police respond to it accordingly.

I think you are misunderstanding what all of this actually means: The US government doesn't just have to tolerate protests anywhere anytime.

It is in its right to deem certain times, places and forms of expression as not valid, the only thing it can't regulate is the content of the expression.

So you are free to protests for whatever you want, but you are not free to do it whenever and wherever you want, the authorities have the last word on that, regardless of any violence or crimes happening.

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