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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

The article itself states that they weren’t able to get usable fingerprints from the photo, and instead the offender was arrested from other evidence.

> 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.

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You're exactly right. This type of thing happens quite often in BBC articles - they are very brief and seem to be written for the lowest common denominator so they omit so many crutial details that the article becomes almost a complete waste of time to read, especially if the article is on a technical field like criminal forensics.

You're right, but they used the photo as evidence to convict someone. They couldn't get a match on a national database, but it's possible that they could tell which of the 3 held the bag.

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.

That's a terrifying thought. For example the DeepFakes scandal was based on convincingly plastering celebrity's faces onto other video. If you had good data on someone's fingerprints I imagine it's inevitable that at some point you could do the same to put their fingerprints onto a photo of a hand.

Terrible article but reading between the lines:

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.

My “reading between the lines” is that they tried to get fingerprints from the photo but were unable to. They then used other evidence, like the WhatsApp group to narrow down or find the suspect, then POSSIBLY the photo was used as the “nail in the coffin”.

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.

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