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Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall
- aritmo 5y agoThere is some heavy editorializig by the BBC here. As a cheese lover, the cheese was fine. That person just posted a photo that also included their fingertips.
- Clewza313 5y agoIt was posted as a "cheese photo", it just happened to include his fingerprints.
- ginko 5y agoI was hoping it'd be some extremely rare regional cheese that allowed them to find the guy.
- Mauricebranagh 5y agoI kind of wanted it to be a Wallace and Grommet crossover with Breaking Bad.
- gadders 5y agoKind of disappointed. I thought they would do some high-tech matching of the blue veins in the cheese in the photo to one in the suspect's fridge.
- redis_mlc 5y agoThe irony is that judges believe fingerprinting (and sketchy police lab DNA processing), but would laugh you out of court for applying that to cheese.
- xtracto 5y agoI think the article is originally from Echo, which is Liverpool's local newspaper. Crazy the number of people that have been arrested in that city.
- supernova87a 5y agoI was thinking that the block of cheese was tracked down at the store by police by it's very unique shape, and fingerprints dusted off of it...
- Threeve303 5y agoIn 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. citizen. But hey, it’s funny because the guy liked cheese.
- tomcam 5y agoAlmost certainly true and seems to show a fairly deep understanding of police work in the real world. I am truly conflicted about these techniques.
- BuildTheRobots 5y agoIf the photo in the article is the actual photo posted, then I'm most impressed. It seems out of focus in all the areas you'd expect to need detail to match fingerprints.
- Crosseye_Jack 5y ago976px x 549px is a standard size the BBC use for images to be displayed on desktop computers. 976px x 549px would be half a megapixel. The BBC most likely resized the image they obtained from the NCA down to that res and prob threw some jpeg compression on it just as a matter of course when publishing the image to the site. While the focus would play a huge part, an iPhones camera (ok the phones were Android Based, but the res of an iphones main camera hasn't changed since the iphone 6s, which is what 5 years old by now? So its not unfair to say the phone model could easily of had just as a camera with just as high MP) is 12MP. So right off the bat the image you are looking could easily have 24 times less pixels in it then the image posted to the system, and thats before you throw in compression that could easily smooth out the fine detail of a finger print. EDIT: The BQ Aquaris X2 (which seems like was one of the models used on the service) comes with a 12mp camera. Even if the phones camera was disabled so the person had to manually copy the picture to the phone inorder to share it just means the picture we see on the BBC site could easy be just a shitty compressed of the orig that was shared.
- tux1968 5y agoThis is a very good example of showing that decentralized anonymous communication channels of any type are not enough to ensure free speech. I'm not saying that this particular example has anything to do with free speech, but it does show that you can not speak freely even over encrypted anonymous channels. You can still easily be doxed. We can not rely on any technology to ensure freedom of speech. We need to engender social acceptance and our laws to encourage it.
- kijin 5y agoNo amount of technology will keep you anonymous if you freely post details that identify you. This example is just poor opsec. He might as well have posted a picture of his driver's license! Just like that guy who posted the exact GPS coordinates of his terrorist camp.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoYou 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
- usrusr 5y agoNext up: T-Shirts printed "I'm feeling invisible and I demand you to respect that feeling!"
- Spooky23 5y agoI 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.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
- nix23 5y agoThat reminds me so much about "The Expanse" and i don't know why!
- busterarm 5y agoObviously because Miller busted the Space Cheese Cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcNnUHSwOHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcNnUHSwOHI
- iand 5y agoThe implication is that police are routinely scanning all Encrochat photographs to extract fingerprints and other biometric details to match with existing databases.
- getlawgdon 5y agoIsn't it just as likely that the police had a hunch and guided a chat with the aim of having the perp take the (or some other) incriminating photo?
- nickkell 5y agoBobby_1979: Lunchtime, lads. Let's see those cheeses! CarlS: Check me out, getting fancy with the marks and sparks stilton :P [img]
- pdpi 5y agoOr even more prosaically — they were monitoring that chat for anything juicy at all, and got a break when the conversation organically went to cheeses and the guy posted that pic
- pjc50 5y agoYes, they compromised the network through the usual means (the center) and recorded all the messages for a while. https://www.reeds.co.uk/insight/encrochat/ https://www.reeds.co.uk/insight/encrochat/
- thinkingemote 5y agohttps://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2021/may/liverpool-man-latest-to-be-jailed-as-part-of-national-operation-venetic/ https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2021/m... is the police source for the news. The fella pleaded guilty, so (I guess?) the rest of the evidence didn't have to be revealed in court. Of interest is that Liverpool police arrested 60 people because of the Encrochat "hack" for selling drugs and weapons. I imagine some of those would be customers, but I imagine a few hundred would have been arrested across the country.
- fnord77 5y agoamazing the amount of data leaked by a photograph.
- elliekelly 5y agoI 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?
- shadowythroaway 5y agoYou'll probably be interested in https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/15/did-these-syrian-generals-watch-a-chemical-attack-on-a-hospital/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/15/did-these-syrian-...
- boulos 5y agoYou’re probably thinking of the Dual Photography work from Stanford (and all the follow-on work): https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/
- GekkePrutser 5y agoUmm 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/may/liverpool-man-latest-to-be-jailed-as-part-of-national-operation-venetic/ https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2021/m... Maybe that was it. Those are also pretty unique.
- pc86 5y agoIt'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.
- Kenji 5y agoThe 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.
- dTal 5y ago"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.
- doetoe 5y agoA convolution is not generally reversible. Or are you thinking of something else?
- dTal 5y ago
- corobo 5y agoDumbass drug dealer took a picture of his fingerprints*
- chiefalchemist 5y agoHow do they legally get from "it's his hand holding the cheese" to "he's the true source of all the bravado in this nefarious forum" to "he's a drug dealer"? If all they needed was a fingerprint, certainly there are more convenient ways to go about it. He's got to touch something other than his product. This smells more like a false narrative contructed to cover up the actual source / methods for cornering him. Maybe law enforcement had someone on the inside? And still does? Or a loyal flunkie turned on him? But holding cheese? (Note: I'm aware this is technically possible. I'm questioning it's use in ths case.) Much like the news stories of "car stopped on interstate and police find _____ amount of ______ in the trunk." Right. Of all the cars traveling the police randomly pick the car filled with drugs? Sounds great. But too random too often to be legit. They knew which car to stop but they're not going to say how they knew.
- mannykannot 5y agoThe police could have had his prints from his merchandise, or an entirely separate issue, with no idea that they matched a certain until-then anonymous drug dealer known only for his posts on EncroChat.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoSo they have drug product with prints. They match those to the hand / fingers holding the cheese. Presuming the EncroChat is anonymous, how do they then tie that to the person arrested? Where and how does that happen?
- IneffablePigeon 5y agoI suspect it's the other way - they have his prints on file already from some previous arrest, and the image linked the incriminating EncroChat account to his real identity through the data already on file.
- mannykannot 5y agoYou are right, under the assumption of anonymity, that alternative does not work. Prints on file for a different reason, such as a prior conviction, would give you an ID. According to a link from the article, however, EncroChat was cracked last year. Stewart was presumably not one of those arrested at that time, which implies that either this crack did not yield enough information to ID him, or did not yield enough evidence to proceed against him. The former case could be solved if his prints were on file, and in the latter case, his prints might have led to additional evidence which had previously not been attributed to him. As the article says he was identified by his prints, the former seems much more likely.
- ChaitanyaSai 5y agoHere's a fun little game. Try and get GPT3 to reconstruct the story, based on the headline (and maybe just a wee nudge). Here's one attempt: ===== Story of the day: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer’s downfall “In an awe-inspiring display of the power of the internet, police in Liverpool have arrested a drug dealer in connection with an online cheese sale. A 28-year-old man has been charged with controlled drug supply after a photo of him holding a block of cheese was posted on Reddit yesterday. The photo was posted by the user ‘Whatyouknowaboutdis?’ underneath a thread about the best place to buy cheese. The photo, captioned: “Cheese is good”, clearly shows the man holding a large block of cheese, however, one observant user noticed something very sinister. The cheese, which was only on top of a carrier bag, didn’t have a price label and appeared to be slightly curved towards the bottom. After seeking advice from other users, ‘Whatyouknowaboutdis?’ commented: “This is actually really interesting, the cheese is curved towards the bottom (in the pic) but if you look at the bag it’s flat. It’s on a bag, so the cheese is obviously curved due to the weight of the block. This is a new one to me, I can’t wait to hear the excuse.” As expected, the photo shot to the front page of Reddit, with more than 800 comments and counting, including several from users who claimed they were police officers and would be investigating. One user, who claimed to be a police officer with the Kings Cross Police Force in Australia, commented: “I’m a cop and I’m here to tell you … this is a very clear case of controlled drug supply. The cheese has clearly been purchased by this man.” The Reddit users were not to be disappointed, however, as the Liverpool police tweeted this morning: “We’ve arrested a man today. He was charged with drug offences after an image of him holding a piece of cheese was posted on @reddit.” ==== * (search engines: this is a fictitious story with fictitious names made up by GPT3) Here are a few more attempts: https://saigaddam.medium.com/cheese-photo-leads-to-liverpool-drug-dealers-downfall-and-gpt3-tries-to-figure-out-how-adedfae4c8e3 https://saigaddam.medium.com/cheese-photo-leads-to-liverpool...
- iNic 5y agoI love how bad GPT-3 is at logical inference: > "This is actually really interesting, the cheese is curved towards the bottom (in the pic) but if you look at the bag it’s flat. It’s on a bag, so the cheese is obviously curved due to the weight of the block. This is a new one to me, I can’t wait to hear the excuse."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 40four 5y agoI 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, so I guess it’s a thing? Enough confidence for them to track him down, and win a guilty plea.
- meowface 5y agoYeah, 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/_118643736_cheese1.jpg 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?
- IneffablePigeon 5y agoThat's not the full image. The full image (https://twitter.com/MerseyPolice/status/1395783747115618306 https://twitter.com/MerseyPolice/status/1395783747115618306) has a lot of detail in the palm area - enough to get a match I'd assume, if they have his full palm print on file. Even if it's not a super high probability match, it could have been enough to give them a name and find more evidence. I don't buy that they'd make up the story _and then tweet proudly about it_, especially when the image they posted is so easy to be sceptical about because of the blur.
- jonplackett 5y agoDid they blur that photo for use in the media? I can't see how you get could any prints off of that image.
- prismatix 5y agoenhance
- jonplackett 5y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo
- moioci 5y agoIsn't this just like trying to link the Dread Pirate Roberts identity to a real-world person? Not really anything nefarious about that.
- dmix 5y agoRoss/DPR ruined it by acting like some anonymous drug lord doing (fake) assassinations with (pretend) Hells Angels. Violence is the scourge on (certain) societies that needs to be dealt with. This guy was just selling drugs consensually/non-violently (AFIK) and probably happened to be far up the chain. The police pat themselves on the back and 20 other distributors they didn't catch are getting a minor pay raise and life goes on. The only hope is this guy can find real productive work in the 5-7yrs he actually does in prison, and doesn't become a hardened criminal with street rep from prison. The other risk is potential power vacuums that results in violence that wouldn't otherwise be there but I doubt it in Liverpool (unlike Mexico and for example: CJNG, aka Jalisco New Generation Cartel). Note: I feel the need to point out I'm not some hippie activist against the police. It's just obvious and rational that DEA is burning through money while the real work of addiction and access to drugs is much harder problem than arresting replaceable dealers and needs a new whole new approach. It's been obvious for decades and some governments are finally realizing it.
- legohead 5y ago13 years? wow. do British prisoners get out early for good behavior and such similar to US?
- TheRealPomax 5y agoin the category "we had nothing else to write, the title pretty much has all the information". There's no reason to even click the link, it's not going to tell you anything about how we got from A to B other than "they looked at the fingerprints of the hand in the photo".
- gatvol 5y agoStill finding it hard to believe that society is willing to spend this much resources on locking up people for dealing in the wrong sort of chemicals.
- 3GuardLineups 5y agoprudishness is a hell of a drug
- hyko 5y agoYeah, they didn’t get them from that photo. Edited to add: where has this story come from? Why does someone want us to believe in CSI Stilton? And why on Earth do they think we’d swallow it?!
- gorgoiler 5y agoForgive the hot-take-paranoia, but this tale is exactly what the parallel constructors want you to think. In reality the criminal was traced using* a government mandated BT Internet router backdoor / super grass / chemtrail deployed insect drones. *one of the above is not serious.
- matthewmorgan 5y agoHow much did all this cost? End the mad 'war on drugs' now!