> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
130,000 car thefts a year. That's over £1bn loss, probably closer to £4bn. In this context the total police budget of around £20bn seems remarkably low!
You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!
With all the technology that exists today, I'm surprised that we haven't invented something that would make it logistically and economically feasible to do a quick scan of e.g. all containers going into a port.
Take the Evergiven. It can fit ~20k containers. A “quick” check each going 2 minutes would add 40k minutes to loading, or 667 hours or 27 days. A month basically.
In a world where time is money no way they are checking all containers.
We do have it. We just don't scan outgoing shipments. The US claims a > 99% scan rate for incoming containers, although they are not looking for stolen cars.
Showing a completely legal electronics market in HQB in Shenzhen and claiming it's selling stolen phones is rather unfair - there is a building not far from that market that sells and recycles phones mostly by stripping them for parts and rebuilding them from scratch, but it's not that perfectly legal market that is so much fun to shop at
A new aluminium iMac or MacBook Air, or MS surface for 200 dollars?
Those are the prices of stolen goods. A lot of people want a metal computer instead of a plastic one, but don't want to pay for it.
I was offered stolen goods at those prices and passed. A friend of mine took the bait as was super happy for a month or so until police took his new adquisition from him. Of course he received no compensation as it was stolen and they could prove it, so in the end it was expensive.
[+] [-] nkurz|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] _1tem|7 months ago|reply
- 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.)
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|7 months ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] rekabis|7 months ago|reply
There should be automatic punishments and career censures when cops fail to leap at opportunities like the one you quoted.
[+] [-] culebron21|7 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] throwup238|7 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] tsukikage|7 months ago|reply
> 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
[+] [-] axus|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lawlessone|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bsder|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Llamamoe|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] decimalenough|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Scottn1|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jvm___|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gosub100|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crinkly|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wagwang|7 months ago|reply
Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?
[+] [-] multjoy|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prmph|7 months ago|reply
I imagine the 5% includes all kinds of petty crime, no?
[+] [-] vkou|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trhway|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lifestyleguru|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] antonmks|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yelling_cat|7 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] MattGrommes|7 months ago|reply
> For each container Mr Gibson holds up and searches, the police must pay the port a fee of £200.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lifestyleguru|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] IncreasePosts|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cobbzilla|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RobinL|7 months ago|reply
You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!
[+] [-] _1tem|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hatthew|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rimbo789|7 months ago|reply
Take the Evergiven. It can fit ~20k containers. A “quick” check each going 2 minutes would add 40k minutes to loading, or 667 hours or 27 days. A month basically.
In a world where time is money no way they are checking all containers.
[+] [-] dghlsakjg|7 months ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_scanning
[+] [-] jonwinstanley|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Taniwha|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cladopa|7 months ago|reply
Those are the prices of stolen goods. A lot of people want a metal computer instead of a plastic one, but don't want to pay for it.
I was offered stolen goods at those prices and passed. A friend of mine took the bait as was super happy for a month or so until police took his new adquisition from him. Of course he received no compensation as it was stolen and they could prove it, so in the end it was expensive.
[+] [-] lifestyleguru|7 months ago|reply