> 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.
And therefore, the state also cares. You expect them to let pass by such a great opportunity to performatively score points with voters by being "tough on crime"?
The police can hunt down car thieves which they don't get much money from. Or police can hunt down low-level marijuana offenders which they can extract money from over and over and over.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
Also true before robust encryption protected all of us.
> 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 alternatives.
To gift new, unprecedented surveillance powers to politicians (and their powerful allies) doesn't really help us. It makes us less safe by making them massively more powerful.
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.
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.
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?
The main factor is the quantity of goods which need to be inspected, and that tends to scale with the population which is buying the goods.
> your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter
Is that really true? An entry-point is generally something the people choose to create to satisfy the pre-existing need to transport goods, by building roads, rail, harbor-piers, etc.
Border-checkpoint facilities don't spontaneously generate in trackless wilderness or barren coastlines, like some fantasy-dungeon that the Adventurers' Guild must periodically raid in to avert a stampede of monsters.
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.
But the goods going into the containers are coming from somewhere right. Why are they not checked at source or when they are due to be loaded?
If we wait until they are already in the containers, then yes, it is not feasible to check them all. basically the check should be distributed, not concentrated at the port.
This would require a "container cop" at every loading point.
Containers get dropped off and loaded in all sorts of unexpected places. Not just big factories.
The big loading points would be easy to inspect, just require an independent property master or something. But you can load a container in your driveway and have it picked up for shipping to anywhere in the world.
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!
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/T50Y3
Meanwhile police in Canada won't do anything about your stolen car even when you show them it's right there in a rail/shipping yard in your city.
- 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.)
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…
Just to complete the picture, violent crime in Canada is at historic lows and falling.
Percentage-wise or numbers-wise?
And even if someone is caught, every day the headlines are like:
>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
> 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?
From the article:
> 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.
That's grossly untrue in democracies.
The people who vote in democracies care.
And therefore, the state also cares. You expect them to let pass by such a great opportunity to performatively score points with voters by being "tough on crime"?
The police can hunt down car thieves which they don't get much money from. Or police can hunt down low-level marijuana offenders which they can extract money from over and over and over.
Which one do you think is going to get voted for?
Also in the article, they mention at the time of theft cell phones are wrapped in foil, and GPS jammers are installed on the car.
> How is it impossible to track down a thief?
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.
>How is it impossible to track down a thief?
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.
> Is this the payload message of the article?
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.
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 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.
This is the tradeoff now - extremely invasive, but secure.
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.
> There is also almost no deterrent: Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes (and 2% of vehicle thefts)
Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?
Crime statistics are difficult.
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.
> 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.
Also true before robust encryption protected all of us.
> 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 alternatives.
To gift new, unprecedented surveillance powers to politicians (and their powerful allies) doesn't really help us. It makes us less safe by making them massively more powerful.
What is the rate for major and violent crime?
I imagine the 5% includes all kinds of petty crime, no?
> Idk how this is acceptable at all.
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.
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.
The article covers this:
> 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.
The incentives just don't seem to be there. This boggled my mind:
> For each container Mr Gibson holds up and searches, the police must pay the port a fee of £200.
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?
Airports not included.
Why should population scale with area? The top ten countries in area are:
Russia (#9 in population) Canada (#37) China (#2) USA (#3) Brazil (#7) Australia (#54) India (#1) Argentina (#33) Kazakhstan (#62) Algeria (#32)
There doesn't seem to be much relationship between the two?
If we believe that Claude pulled correct data: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d74a7c48-b5a1-4d86-acc2-e...
The main factor is the quantity of goods which need to be inspected, and that tends to scale with the population which is buying the goods.
> your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter
Is that really true? An entry-point is generally something the people choose to create to satisfy the pre-existing need to transport goods, by building roads, rail, harbor-piers, etc.
Border-checkpoint facilities don't spontaneously generate in trackless wilderness or barren coastlines, like some fantasy-dungeon that the Adventurers' Guild must periodically raid in to avert a stampede of monsters.
> Is that really true?
Probably not true, but very intuitive!
The scale and logistics of major ports like Barcelona, Hamburg, or Rotterdam are unimaginable.
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.
The volume of containers is unimaginably huge.
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.
But the goods going into the containers are coming from somewhere right. Why are they not checked at source or when they are due to be loaded?
If we wait until they are already in the containers, then yes, it is not feasible to check them all. basically the check should be distributed, not concentrated at the port.
This would require a "container cop" at every loading point.
Containers get dropped off and loaded in all sorts of unexpected places. Not just big factories.
The big loading points would be easy to inspect, just require an independent property master or something. But you can load a container in your driveway and have it picked up for shipping to anywhere in the world.
You are assuming sequential processing, done by one checker.
Spotting that a container has a car in it is not the same as a stolen car. You’d have to open up each container and run the plates.
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!
Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice.
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.
Sounds like a market opportunity for cheaper phones and cars globally.
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.
Expensive luxury cars are one big pain for society. Draining the economies and fuelling 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.
Indeed. If the UK can do something as wild as ChatControl, why not ShippingContainerControl?
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 crane that picks up the container to put it on the ship could work out the weight, anything that isn't empty gets inspected.
https://archive.is/tQXqC