Drug dealer busted by sharing a photo of his hand holding a hunk of cheese that revealed his fingerprints

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Originally published at: Drug dealer busted by sharing a photo of his hand holding a hunk of cheese that revealed his fingerprints | Boing Boing

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Scooped…

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I’d suggest the possibility that the police actually broke the encryption of this site and then used the fingerprint-photo story as a “parallel construction”, but I don’t want to offend my fellow BB BBS users who “back the blue”.

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I always have similar thoughts when presented with a fantastic tale about evidence gathering when “we just paid a guy five hundred bucks” would do (or, alternatively, “we just used this backdoor in your encryption standard” ). In this case however there apparently was a server compromise on the EncroChat network that was placed there by LE . You’d think this would be end to end encrypted and a server compromise wouldn’t matter, but there you go.

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The imaginary ones?

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They’re being awfully quiet if they’re here.

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Now I’m torn between Caroline’s “they’re here” gif and CSI “enhance.”

Because both apply.

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They turned out in force when I made the same suggestion about the guy who was arrested after telling his dentist he broke into the Capitol on January 6 (after bringing an active cell phone into the Capitol on January 6). Gentleman arrested after bragging at his dentist's office that he was at the Capitol riots - #42 by JohnEightThirty

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Seems not many people agreed with you last time either.

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I read the article and I’m not sure if I missed something, but I can’t figure out the connection between the cheese photo and the arrest. His drug crimes were definitely not cheese-related, and the cheese photo doesn’t have anything illegal about it. So the police already knew about the criminal activity but they couldn’t find him? Or something like that? It seems odd that the fingerprint photo was his undoing because they would have needed the prints already in order to match with…

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The French were I think the lead agency on this investigation, and Stilton is an English cheese. Inevitable, really

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I have so many questions. If it’s an “encrypted messaging service used exclusively by criminals” do you have to show proof of a previous conviction before they let you use it? What if you’re not a criminal and you use it? Is that a crime?

Also, I support catching dangerous people. I have seriously icky feelings about police analyzing fingerprints from photos sent through supposedly encrypted messaging services. How many private messages for which they didn’t have a warrant might they have gone through before happening on this one? Or did they have a warrant for cheese photos?

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Another senseless cheese related tragedy

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Mugshot Photographer, “Say, “Cheese!””

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It does seem weird that you’d burn your back door for one case (you’d probably want to discredit something that you can’t see into - though I’m not going to start using this service either way).

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Cheesy snaps finger Liverpool man forced to sell drugs to finance his Stilton addiction.

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The cheese was innocent, in this case.

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It’s not a back door. They basically scooped everything from the criminal telecommunications network a year ago, and kept it under seal. The company running the network shut down almost immediately once they realized they were infiltrated by law enforcement.

Now they’re prosecuting the cases and stuff is coming unsealed and newspapers are reporting on it.

They didn’t burn their back door. They got everyone.

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In the other thread I went into this.

It wasn’t an encrypted messaging service. It was an entire telecommunications company offering encrypted services through a modified version of android running a dutch telecom’s SIM cards. They had a full set of features from encrypted and spoofed voice calls to darknet tor hosted sites and browsing and a chat app that offered encryption and was probably based on signal or similar.

This wasn’t an app. It was a full scale mobile phone provider.

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The cheese was innocent, in this case.

The whole case? Got it in time.
It doesn’t have to start with consorting - all cheese turns bad in the end - it’s just a matter of time.