As a father, I would be mildly concerned about this notoriety, especially as a traveler. Airport authorities are not known for the subtlety of their understanding, and it is entirely plausible that this man might be arrested and jailed on the basis of not only being photographed committing a crime, but now admitting to it, calling himself a thief.
Yes, this would be preposterous, wrong, and I might go so far as to call it evil. Certainly stupid. But can you really say it can't happen? Would it surprise you if it happened in the US, or that rather than apologize and reverse the injustice that it would be ignored or worse, jumped on by conspiracy theorists and an even harsher penalty applied?
To live in a post-evidence world is to live in a world of chaos and terror where light-hearted online banter can and will be used against you. You laugh now, and say it couldn't possibly happen? Well, wait.
They framed a shot, akin to acting, and no bike was stolen.
The author clearly outlines this point that nothing was stolen.
If the author showed his face, showing a clear resemblance, I could see notoriety possibly raise some eyebrows being the same guy as the bike thief stock photo... But that's a very far fetched possibility.
Unless the guy was convicted of a crime, with a criminal record, then maybe have some issues... But this instance maybe take off the tinfoil
This is an expression of contempt for authority, and is not a criticism of the OP. The fear I recommend is not tinfoil hat stuff, it's just an unfortunate byproduct of broken minds running a broken justice system.
You should also know that posting on a forum with "hacker" in the title is dangerous.
It's the unknown people who say or do unusual things that risk running afoul of the authorities. Hall is famous enough and what he does is "usual" enough he's probably okay. But writing a public website that declares you're a bike thief in the headline? I'm thinking that a lot of LEOs aren't going to bother reading the rest of it, call it probable cause and grind up another person's life in the pre-trial torture machine that is American justice. And their supervisor is going to say, "Job well done. Too bad this one got away." Sorry to be cynical like this, but it's not without reason.
Law enforcement isn't reading random cycling blogs looking for admissions of crime. It's hard enough to get their attention with a call of "Hey, there's this crime happening right in front of me and it's causing a pretty big scene."
Our new product - The Inditer Pro - uses state of the art machine learning to crawl the web and identify travelers coming into your country as criminals! You will be able to proactively lock up potential threats and keep the population safe, all thanks to the expertise of the Inditer Pro.
All the world's bad guys under your thumb! (Rolling Stones 'Under my thumb' starts playing as a border guard presses Inditer Pro search button - identifying tourist as BIKE THIEF!)
on edit: yes, it should be Indicter, but ours is a web 4.0 company.
No, but if you are arrested through the high quality solutions Indite Pro provides you can use our partner app Paroll-io to bail yourself out with our hot new cryptocurrency $ukka$ which has end to end $.
Now the interesting question is this: if your government did something like this - what would you, could you, do about it? That's the scary question, because the answer is "almost nothing". That's especially true if "Inditer Pro" had, say, a 90% success rate. (Success is defined as "% convicted". To solve this you offer a choice: plea bargain or indefinite detention until a trial. It would be more correct to accuse people of random crimes, cuff them and put them in a cruiser for a few hours, strip them and put them in jail clothes, jail them for a day or two, put them in shackles for hours before a "hearing", and then see how many plea deals you get. I suspect your "clearance rate" would be over 90%, too)
IF Inditer Pro had 90% success rate, it would actually substantially solve (wrongly) a problem, and that would again disqualify it from being web 4.0.
The actual success rate would probably be - by design - around 59-62%, high enough to be better than flipping a coin in preliminary controlled studies and allowing yearly improvements (I beg your pardon, I meant OTA updates) of 1-2%, so that the company would have guaranteed income for the next 20 years or so.
probably not dangerous, but I do remember reading an article maybe 20 years ago where some lady playing a villain in a soap opera complained about being accosted at the supermarket and yelled at for their onscreen shenanigans.
I can barely read your comment as it's been down voted but two theoretical risks come to mind. One being some ML decision maker that scrapes the web to build a profile of someone and decides this person is a criminal.
The second being a human decision maker with poor English reading the headline and not fully comprehending the story.
Both cases unlikely but an interesting idea anyway.
Yes, this would be preposterous, wrong, and I might go so far as to call it evil. Certainly stupid. But can you really say it can't happen? Would it surprise you if it happened in the US, or that rather than apologize and reverse the injustice that it would be ignored or worse, jumped on by conspiracy theorists and an even harsher penalty applied?
To live in a post-evidence world is to live in a world of chaos and terror where light-hearted online banter can and will be used against you. You laugh now, and say it couldn't possibly happen? Well, wait.