Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/31/drug-trafficker-alters-fingerp.html
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Two encrypted phones?! Wait, don’t we all have encrypted phones? Android and iPhone since 2014? “He was arrested on Tuesday while carrying two encrypted phones.” feels like a cheap way to say “Clearly he’s a super spy”
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It’s not like fingerprints are a super reliable way to catch people to being with.
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Argh! The article doesn’t answer the important questions.
How did they figure out who he was? How was he arrested? Did they just catch him in the act and he confessed or did they figure it out some other way?
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I erased some of my fingerprints by being an idiot with some welding practice. Finger tips bald as a billiard ball. They grew back eventually.
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The way they usually catch international terrorists…unpaid parking tickets.
(I totally made this up BTW. I don’t know how they caught him).
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Gloves would have been cheaper.
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Hilarity aside, it probably was something stupid. If you keep a low profile, you can get away with a lot. If the police think you’re boring, they don’t fingerprint you at all.
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He was arrested on Tuesday while carrying two encrypted phones.
Seems legit.
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Probably something stupid that just a tiny bit of time and attention would have prevented. You read all the time about somebody getting pulled over for speeding and it turns out he has 4 pounds of meth in the trunk and half a dozen outstanding warrants.
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Spoke to a police officer one time about fingerprint identification, and masons and car mechanics generally don’t have them since they tend to work with rough or hot surfaces without any gloves on.
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I was gonna say, I think most fugitives who get caught aren’t recognized by their fingerprints. If you manage to avoid doing anything that gets you arrested it’s highly unlikely anyone is going to look at your prints unless you’re applying for a job that requires a background check or something.
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the phones were so encrypted you couldn’t actually tell they were phones. At first they thought it was a pair of ocelot pelts, after some very fine work by interpol they decided - wait these are actually comic books! Then, one of the comic books rang. It was all over then.
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This method of altering fingerprints
was on Maxwell Smart…
Or was it 007?
Maybe 60-minutes…
Fingerprinting is so old fashioned, do they still do that when DNA tests are available? You can’t falsify one of those.
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It will probably be irrelevant by the time it comes out, since DNA testing is unlikely to stop being powerful in the intervening time; but I have to wonder how long it will be before the aspiring emigrant of the cyberpunk grid will be able to get some sort of subdermal shape memory polymer implants that can push on the skin above them to produce the fingerprint pattern of your choice.
Convert your prints to match any set you have data on when it’s time to bypass the biometrics or impersonate someone? Check. Automatically rotate your fingerprints to freshly generated values every couple of minutes when out and about? Check.
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Two points to make about DNA testing:
- You can’t falsify it yet
- DNA testing allows a DNA-printed villain to continue to commit crimes for months or years before being caught red-handed. Huge backlogs.
Whereas fingerprints are a relatively quick database search. Obtaining and searching is very straightforward.
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Did they grow back the same as before?
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I’m just your average busy bee but I have had to get a dermatologist write a note more than once to whoever is using fingerprint technology that yes, I am myself and yes, my fingerprints suck. Once it took four months to get a new ID after being robbed because they kept rescanning and re-processing to no avail.
I am slightly traumatized by biometrics failures
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