WhatsApp photo drug dealer caught by 'groundbreaking' work
bbc.com
bbc.com
> However, there were just parts of the middle and bottom of a finger visible - records only keep the top part. This meant the image did not find a match on national databases.
> However, other evidence meant officers had an idea who they believed was behind the drugs operation.
So, what’s the story here? What a complete fucking sham of a propagandist article.
There's another story to this too, I bet someone is developing a tool right now to scan fingerprints from youtube videos and photos. Maybe they can also plant them. The idea itself opens a new array of possibilities.
The photo did not contain finger-tips, which are the only prints stored in the database so they could not simply search it for the person. It only contained prints from the middle of a finger.
However they had a limited number of people of interest that they suspected were involved so they could just take palm prints from those and use that to prove whose hand it was.
I wouldn't exactly call it ground breaking but it's pretty cool.
Then PR or whatever found out about the story and turned it into a “we’re coming for you”/“police so advanced” puff piece which was regurgitated by the BBC.
So really neither the fingerprint or whatsapp had anything to do with the arrest.
We think it’s this guy and we can match a small portion of his fingerprint with the picture.
Maybe it’s statistically significant beyond reasonable doubt but seems like a little too much of a stretch to me.
This is just building enough evidence to convict someone based on matching a photograph of a partial finger to a suspect's hand. Which sounds perfectly reasonable and legitimate (as legitimate as fingerprints can be). Just because there's not enough in the photo to match a national database doesn't mean there's not enough to be statistically certain it's a match with the suspect.
The article is light on details about how the fingerprint was actually used so one can only speculate. My assumption here though is that whatever they recovered wouldn’t stand up on its own but used in conjunction with other evidence it might have added to the case against the parties.
It’s hardly as impressive as the article title makes it out to be.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/can-unconscious-b...
and they are pretending it was his physical fingerprints that led to his arrest as a cover :)
Victimless crime does not exist in my book. Having it in the law books says a lot about the those who wrote it.
For users the appeal of corporate branded pills is that it's sort of fun/funny to see something so illicit branded with something so commonplace. It's almost a joke. As if IKEA or Microsoft sold ecstasy.
No one cares about those stupid logos, or infringement or whatever. It's more about shared secrets and awareness of undisclosed details while dropping hints and passing around code words on the sly.
Now that these code words have been leaked in a bust, they'll google some other logos, print them out, mold them into the pill press, and next week's batch will be "Bob's Discount Furniture" and "Facetime" or whatever.
If a text message is asking for Angel Dust or ICE, the defense attorney will have a harder time than if the text message is asking about IKEA or Gorilla Glue.
I honestly wonder if they are using some ML-style hallucination algo. Because most non-technical folk don't understand that the details are missing, and any attempt to fill them in usually requires a great deal of liberty.
Anyways, they probably used the weak evidence to get the warrant for the raid. And then he confessed and there was all the evidence in his home. It's common as rain, use faulty evidence in order to secure confessions or actual court-admissable evidence. Egh.