> Andrew texted the officer a screenshot showing the precise location of the AirTag. As the officer approached the rail yard, Andrew's second AirTag started pinging at the same location, suggesting the Bluetooth signal emitted by the device had connected to the officer's smartphone. (The tracker relies on nearby GPS-enabled devices to determine its location.)
Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada… and even literal stabbing victims often go without any sort of closure, in pretty much every major city across Canada.
And it’s been like that for some number of years without any sort of fundamental reform, or enormous police/prosecutor budget increases, in sight.
From that perspective it’s amazing any car thefts gets solved at all…
> Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to operate and co-operate more freely than ever before, and establish global supply chains.
Is this the payload message of the article?
Many cars have GPS installed. Everybody has a smartphone, and even if it's offline, it's possible to see who went offline when the car was stolen. Customs offices have never ending databases of the containers that passed them.
How is it impossible to track down a thief? I guess, because there's just too much data to automatically track many cases. How on Earth will banning cryptograhpy and adding more data to the sea, help track the thieves?
> Fourth, police forces largely remain in the dust. NaVCIS has enjoyed some success, intercepting 550 cars in the past year. But that is a small fraction of what gets through. Mr Gibson is one of three officers on the whole south coast. Britain’s police have yet to catch any high-ups in the business. European forces do not even have dedicated investigation teams. Across the rich world, police resources tend to be directed towards “higher harm” offences.
There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.
The state only cares about thieves insofar as the optics of their activity is bad for the state, illicit trade is lost revenue and every score criminals settle among themselves challenges the state's monopoly on violent dispute resolution, it doesn't really care about the peasants' property, it just looks like it cares a little when the interests align.
> There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.
Right? The existence of organized crime is a policy choice by politicians. If they truly wanted to do something about it, the policies would change - both in terms of funding/staffing, as well as the incentivizing of officers to pursue leads.
Britain's current government is heavily pro-censorship and pro-surveillance, and encourage any and all rhetoric that might help them to this end.
However, when the reality on the ground is that I can literally locate a stolen object myself and pass to the police evidence both of the object being mine and of its current location, and they simply cannot be bothered to do anything at all with that information... it is clear that the existence of encryption is not relevant to the problem.
a GPS jammer should be trivially easy to track. plus that's a crime on its own so police could just investigate those without needing a stolen car to find.
It's not , but i've seen plenty of stories of people, in many countries, reporting that they know where their stolen laptop, bike etc is and the police being kinda useless.
It's not. If an expensive supercar is stolen, the police forces somehow find it really quickly.
The problem is that police forces are there to protect the property of the aristocracy and oppress the plebeians. Any "protection" for the plebeians is purely incidental and accidental.
That expensive supercar is a lot more noticeable than a toyota corolla. People are also more likely to remember seeing a lime green lambo than a silver corolla.
This makes it sound like a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws like ChatControl. Even if encryption was illegal and everything scanned 24/7, all it takes is speaking in code to be uncatchable. It's what criminals have done for all of history.
>This makes it sound like a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws like ChatControl
Encrypted chat apps get mentioned in literally one sentence out of a ~1900 word article, and somehow that's "a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws"? Get a grip.
I know this opinion is anathema on HN, but this is one reason I like Teslas.
Keyless unlock over Bluetooth keyed to the owner's phone is very difficult to spoof, making it hard to steal the car.
If you manage to steal the car somehow, it's wired to the gills, meaning it can tracked and bricked remotely (the apparent fate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's Cybertruck).
And if you do manage to take it offline and bring it to another country, the navigation won't work and you'll have a very hard time finding spares outside the official dealer network.
I have a Tesla. It is trivial to steal; you just get my phone and you have my car. It is tied to the car through Bluetooth that auto unlocks AND drives without any other security measures beyond just being close to it with the devise. You don't even have to unlock my phone. Getting my phone would be the harder part, but it just would take a lapse in paying attention (like left in on the table to get a drink refill).
The comforting part (unless you consider the immense privacy issues) is, as you mention, how tied the auto is to Tesla and my account. I could have the car disabled and tracked probably less than 10 minutes of discovering it was taken. I could also lock/erase my stolen phone remotely which would then disable driving the car again once it was put into park for the first time.
I saw a video of some alpine explorer who recorded a video of himself to be uploaded later. He was on some stupid long 500 mile trek through the mountains when the police texted him. They were paving the parking lot where he'd left his car and requesting that it be moved, so he was hiking towards better signal so that he could start the engine and someone local could move it a few feet.
You could steal it with a tow truck. Which would be an order of magnitude more difficult but serious car thieves have them. I imagine the mechanical components would be valuable. Definitely out of reach of the young,dumb criminal though
I prefer my French dumb car. If someone steals it, meh the insurance will pay out and I buy another one. Not that anyone is going to steal it. It’s just invisible.
And it’s more comfortable and after 6 years lifetime it cost less than half of just the depreciation on a model S including fuel.
I have a 2001 Mazda 626 and a 2002 Ford F-150 7700 in the driveway, and there are days I forget to lock the doors. Which is an unwise thing to do in my neighbourhood. But even after half a decade living here I have yet to find any evidence they’ve been rifled through, much less attempted to be stolen.
Plus, I recently ran the numbers, and ignoring fuel and insurance, adding up purchase price + all repairs and maintenance - including brand-name tires! - has both vehicles together amortize under $1,000/year. And that is _BOTH, COMBINED._ I know some people in my own tax bracket who pay more than a $2,000 a month just for a single vehicle.
Now granted, AC is still dead on both, and will cost a pretty penny to resurrect (heavy corrosion in the lines). But for getting from point A to point B, those are some pretty cheap fucking rides.
England & Wales (because policing is a devolved matter in the UK) have very robust crime recording rules. Consequently, the detection rates are low because you record and close crimes where there is literally no prospect of a conviction.
You compare this to, say, Japan, where an investigation only starts if it’s likely that the crime will be solved, and you have an explanation for why detections seem comparatively poor.
There is also the fact that, despite TVs assertion to the contrary, that solving crime is not easy and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
> and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
Because this was true before robust encryption, we know encryption doesn't change the equation and can be safely omitted from your assertion.
> As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
Governments have never had realtime access to our communications. Humans' communications have been private for as long as there has been language. Privacy is good for us and is better than all other alternatives.
Robust encryption is how we maintain that natural, neutral, healthy default.
Otherwise, we're talking about gifting new, unprecedented surveillance powers to officials, politicians and their powerful allies.
Massive power. Over us. At which point we are less safe.
How does insurance for stolen property work in Japan? Do the insurers not require evidence that the theft has been reported to the police, as they do here? Or do those reports not form part of the Japanese crime statistics, and if so, what would those look like if they did? Or is something else going on?
I simply don't believe this. Any one crime is hard to solve but the same criminals are doing most of the crime, so if policing were effective you'd still see closure rates.
>if they maintain decent opsec.
don't believe this either. no one has ever maintained decent opsec.
Because the only society with a high clearance rate for crime is a police state that is very good at finding someone to blame, but not necessary the guy who did it.
A high Chechnya bureaucrat was several months ago stopped by Dagestan police for reckless driving that happened to be DUI. Before Chechen SWAT came to rescue the police had managed to check the car, and it happened to be stolen in Canada. That was one of the several high-end cars Kadyrov publicly gifted to his ministers.
How Kadyrov came into possesion of multiple Cybertrucks must be an interesting story, probably revealing entire supply chains of few crime organizations.
It is pretty strange that a country doesn't control what is going in and what is going out. In a small European country I'm most familiar with, everything is checked by customs officers. Dogs, x-rays, customs declarations, import taxes.
You can't inspect everything without creating a huge friction on trade. Australia is well known for it's tight borders - not just for security but for quarantine as well. It only inspects ~5% of containers and ~80% of interceptions are driven by intelligence.
The later is how you solve this. The stolen goods trade described in the article is likely centred around a few key networks that could be taken down with resourcing intelligence and law enforcement.
The article itself states that the UK has failed to arrest any top-level members. Cut the head off and you'll see the pull factor of street-level thefts removed, or at least disrupted.
> Around the world, border agencies overwhelmingly focus on imports, hunting for people and drugs. In many countries, exports are hardly checked at all. Anyone can book a container.
A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.
Congratulations: the port is now a crime scene, its gonna take hours or days to process this. I'm going to need you to remove all containers from this shipper from the stacks for further inspection. Please stop all movement of containers. I'll need to interview all longshoremen who came in contact with this container. Please begin filling out these 17 forms to recover your inspection fee.
The image seems to show him cutting the container open with an angle grinder. Do you want the police to be able to destructively enter any property without making the owner whole?
Yeah, in this case there was a stolen Porsche in it, but most of the time it's likely to be an innocent shipment.
T̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ The more shipments you have, the more officers you need. The more officers you have, the better the chance one of them is working for organized crime.
Although, your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter, while your population to pull agents from should scale like your area, so unless you have a very weird geometry this should get easier as you increase in size, right?
Can anyone just put a container on a ship? I'm curious why the senders wouldn't be registered, and then extra scrutiny is given to newly registered senders, and senders are blacklisted and fined/jailed if it's found they're attempting to ship stolen goods under false manifests.
It's even more strange than that when you consider that the UK hasn't been any sort of industrial manufacturer for many decades. What is it that is supposedly being shipped? Granted, some British auto manufacturers might be shipping those, but why should containers full of phones ever leave the UK? Every ship leaving their ports is leaving with stolen goods.
If anyone cared, this problem could be ended even without the cooperation of the destination countries. But no one hurt by this has enough political sway to do anything about it.
The UK exports a reasonable number of cars (I think less since Brexit now they make less sense going to Europe). Also machinery/technical equipment, pharmaceuticals, alcoholic drinks, clothing, furniture, etc
Readit News
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorit...
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-finds-stolen-truc...
> Andrew texted the officer a screenshot showing the precise location of the AirTag. As the officer approached the rail yard, Andrew's second AirTag started pinging at the same location, suggesting the Bluetooth signal emitted by the device had connected to the officer's smartphone. (The tracker relies on nearby GPS-enabled devices to determine its location.)
And it’s been like that for some number of years without any sort of fundamental reform, or enormous police/prosecutor budget increases, in sight.
From that perspective it’s amazing any car thefts gets solved at all…
>Teen pleads guilty to role in deadly Etobicoke mass shooting, gets bail ahead of sentence
>Axe-wielding suspect out on bail within hours of Vancouver stranger attack
>Nearly half of 124 arrested by Ontario carjacking task force were on bail
Unfortunately the clearance rate is similar in the US as well. This source is a bit outdated violent crimes had a 45% clearance rate in 2019: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
There should be automatic punishments and career censures when cops fail to leap at opportunities like the one you quoted.
Is this the payload message of the article?
Many cars have GPS installed. Everybody has a smartphone, and even if it's offline, it's possible to see who went offline when the car was stolen. Customs offices have never ending databases of the containers that passed them.
How is it impossible to track down a thief? I guess, because there's just too much data to automatically track many cases. How on Earth will banning cryptograhpy and adding more data to the sea, help track the thieves?
> Fourth, police forces largely remain in the dust. NaVCIS has enjoyed some success, intercepting 550 cars in the past year. But that is a small fraction of what gets through. Mr Gibson is one of three officers on the whole south coast. Britain’s police have yet to catch any high-ups in the business. European forces do not even have dedicated investigation teams. Across the rich world, police resources tend to be directed towards “higher harm” offences.
There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.
Right? The existence of organized crime is a policy choice by politicians. If they truly wanted to do something about it, the policies would change - both in terms of funding/staffing, as well as the incentivizing of officers to pursue leads.
> Is this the payload message of the article?
No, this is:
> > Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes
Britain's current government is heavily pro-censorship and pro-surveillance, and encourage any and all rhetoric that might help them to this end.
However, when the reality on the ground is that I can literally locate a stolen object myself and pass to the police evidence both of the object being mine and of its current location, and they simply cannot be bothered to do anything at all with that information... it is clear that the existence of encryption is not relevant to the problem.
cf. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crl873p51zro
It's not , but i've seen plenty of stories of people, in many countries, reporting that they know where their stolen laptop, bike etc is and the police being kinda useless.
I understand the frustration.
It's not. If an expensive supercar is stolen, the police forces somehow find it really quickly.
The problem is that police forces are there to protect the property of the aristocracy and oppress the plebeians. Any "protection" for the plebeians is purely incidental and accidental.
This makes it sound like a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws like ChatControl. Even if encryption was illegal and everything scanned 24/7, all it takes is speaking in code to be uncatchable. It's what criminals have done for all of history.
This is just disgusting.
Encrypted chat apps get mentioned in literally one sentence out of a ~1900 word article, and somehow that's "a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws"? Get a grip.
Keyless unlock over Bluetooth keyed to the owner's phone is very difficult to spoof, making it hard to steal the car.
If you manage to steal the car somehow, it's wired to the gills, meaning it can tracked and bricked remotely (the apparent fate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's Cybertruck).
And if you do manage to take it offline and bring it to another country, the navigation won't work and you'll have a very hard time finding spares outside the official dealer network.
The comforting part (unless you consider the immense privacy issues) is, as you mention, how tied the auto is to Tesla and my account. I could have the car disabled and tracked probably less than 10 minutes of discovering it was taken. I could also lock/erase my stolen phone remotely which would then disable driving the car again once it was put into park for the first time.
Deleted Comment
And it’s more comfortable and after 6 years lifetime it cost less than half of just the depreciation on a model S including fuel.
You are smart.
I have a 2001 Mazda 626 and a 2002 Ford F-150 7700 in the driveway, and there are days I forget to lock the doors. Which is an unwise thing to do in my neighbourhood. But even after half a decade living here I have yet to find any evidence they’ve been rifled through, much less attempted to be stolen.
Plus, I recently ran the numbers, and ignoring fuel and insurance, adding up purchase price + all repairs and maintenance - including brand-name tires! - has both vehicles together amortize under $1,000/year. And that is _BOTH, COMBINED._ I know some people in my own tax bracket who pay more than a $2,000 a month just for a single vehicle.
Now granted, AC is still dead on both, and will cost a pretty penny to resurrect (heavy corrosion in the lines). But for getting from point A to point B, those are some pretty cheap fucking rides.
Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?
England & Wales (because policing is a devolved matter in the UK) have very robust crime recording rules. Consequently, the detection rates are low because you record and close crimes where there is literally no prospect of a conviction.
You compare this to, say, Japan, where an investigation only starts if it’s likely that the crime will be solved, and you have an explanation for why detections seem comparatively poor.
There is also the fact that, despite TVs assertion to the contrary, that solving crime is not easy and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
True. In a healthy society, policing is hard.
> and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
Because this was true before robust encryption, we know encryption doesn't change the equation and can be safely omitted from your assertion.
> As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
Governments have never had realtime access to our communications. Humans' communications have been private for as long as there has been language. Privacy is good for us and is better than all other alternatives.
Robust encryption is how we maintain that natural, neutral, healthy default.
Otherwise, we're talking about gifting new, unprecedented surveillance powers to officials, politicians and their powerful allies.
Massive power. Over us. At which point we are less safe.
>if they maintain decent opsec.
don't believe this either. no one has ever maintained decent opsec.
I imagine the 5% includes all kinds of petty crime, no?
Because the only society with a high clearance rate for crime is a police state that is very good at finding someone to blame, but not necessary the guy who did it.
The later is how you solve this. The stolen goods trade described in the article is likely centred around a few key networks that could be taken down with resourcing intelligence and law enforcement.
The article itself states that the UK has failed to arrest any top-level members. Cut the head off and you'll see the pull factor of street-level thefts removed, or at least disrupted.
> Around the world, border agencies overwhelmingly focus on imports, hunting for people and drugs. In many countries, exports are hardly checked at all. Anyone can book a container.
> For each container Mr Gibson holds up and searches, the police must pay the port a fee of £200.
A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.
Congratulations: the port is now a crime scene, its gonna take hours or days to process this. I'm going to need you to remove all containers from this shipper from the stacks for further inspection. Please stop all movement of containers. I'll need to interview all longshoremen who came in contact with this container. Please begin filling out these 17 forms to recover your inspection fee.
Yeah, in this case there was a stolen Porsche in it, but most of the time it's likely to be an innocent shipment.
Airports not included.
Deleted Comment
If anyone cared, this problem could be ended even without the cooperation of the destination countries. But no one hurt by this has enough political sway to do anything about it.