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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

This honestly doesn't seem like a problem with organisational silos. The level of efficiency the author is suggesting is completely unnecessary. If the police had done some very basic police work, followed up the unauthorized transactions at each location for CCTV they would have gotten a very clear idea of who this person was. In fact hell, find out which phones pinged the phone tower near each of the locations at each of the relevant times and you almost certainly have exactly one suspect who'll match the CCTV and would be banged to rights.

With small crimes it's not that they can't be solved, it's that the UK has decided it would rather have some petty crime than to pay the taxes necessary to catch petty criminals (assuming that catching the criminal would even solve the crime problem). The current state of policing in the UK is that small thefts won't be investigated - so it doesn't matter how easy they are to solve.

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Even given that, there are only so many police officers. Even assuming that it would take a person about 30 minutes of work to get an ID of the person, that's Yet Another Person in the system. The extra work goes through the entire chain of operations (can we automate away the court system too? Who is going to drive down to tell the criminal they need to show up?)

There is a checklist with hundreds of items that will appear if a person like this gets picked up. And a hell of a lot of work after that. This is the really dumb pragmatic argument to not being a police state (beyond the other arguments)

While I agree with most of what you've said, there is an issue of (a) what level of economic damage does this crime need to cause before it gets investigated—both for individual cases and for London overall (b) any efficiency gain would hopefully decrease the cost of investigation (in terms of hours spent), hence the assistance them with details (e.g. transactions) which they have completely ignored.

Except once they catch him they have to charge him and then prosecute him and then house him in prison and then release him with even worse prospects then he started with, so that he can go back to stealing.

I think that there is no economic gains, and there is no efficiency to be had in catching petty criminals. It is a symptom of a bigger social problem which needs to be dealt with .

Since when is law enforcement about money? Laws exists to ensure a reasonably ordered society and level playing field for everyone. There as to be an attempt at enforcement, even a half-hearted one, to ensure the genereal population follow and believe others follow the rules. Or you have vigilantes rising to deal with issues the police can’t bother with.

Unenforced laws are pointless and will be used at the discretion of the police to mess up someone’s day. That’s what gave use expressions like “driving while black”, “sitting while homeless”, and so on.

I’m not necessarily advocating for jailtime but maybe catching them and giving trade school as their sentence would be time and money well spent.

so where does the line between a crime being small enough not to warrant police attention and being big enough to warrant it get drawn? seems pretty arbitrary to me

well that's easy; start at the worst crimes and make your way down until you run out of resources. The line will draw itself for you.

>find out which phones pinged the phone tower near each of the locations at each of the relevant times

I don't know that that is actually possible. The police can access the records for any one number, but accessing all the records for a set of towers in a given time window is a different matter. I would actually love to know if this is within their capabilities.

It totally is within the capability of telcos. It's a database query away. Whether the police can get a warrant for it is a different matter. I'm not au fait with the details of RIPA post the EU decision [1][2] but it is safe to say the barriers are not that high. Meta data (like cell tower signal strength) is almost certainly available. Towers log everything, and location is a valued derived product.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/uk-surveillance-regime... [2] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2016/01/05/some-t...

You will never be able to justify the collateral intrusion that getting all the connections to a single cell site would represent.

If you don't know who you're looking for then it isn't actually that much help in any case.

Assuming you know that the suspect phone will have pinged a given cell site, then you still have to work out which phone it was. Assuming that they're not daft enough to use anything other than an unregistered PAYG sim, then you're left hoping that the IMEI of their handset has come to police attention.

If you had the resources, you could get the top-up data for all the unregistered sims attached to that cell site and hope there's CCTV at a given newsagent or that they've used their own bank account to top up online.

I'm not sure if you read the links? The UK doesn't have the same requirements as the US. They don't have a collateral intrusion limitation.

Once you have the IMEI of interest you can find everywhere it has been and every number dialled, and all DNS requests and IP transfers. You just need a dialled number which has a plan attached and you can look up the phone book entry from that persons phone (though police would need a warrant for that).

The only thing preventing the Met from finding this thief is a lack of person time.

Yes, there is a collateral intrusion limitation. You cannot simply go on a fishing trip.

Once you have an IMEI number that you can attribute to the suspect, having exhausted all conventional means of finding the data then you go ahead and start requesting billing and cell site data.

Note, however, that this won't tell you what ip addresses have been assigned to that account.

That's just it. There's already a frontend for the police to use that gives them access to all the data for a single phone number, sans warrant. Does that same frontend allow them to perform arbitrary queries across the entire dataset?. If not, then pursuing this lead would involve filling out forms and writing letters to telcos, possibly even obtaining warrants (unlike the usual process), and they probably wouldn't bother.

Incidentally, the ability to perform unrestricted arbitrary queries without a warrant across the entire phone-location dataset is a fairly horrifying amount of power for the police to have. But I suppose legally that ship has sailed with RIPA, and now it's just a question of the fine details of the implementation.

No.

Getting a request approved is a nightmare. It's literally easier to get a search warrant from the courts than it is persuading police SPOCs to approve your RIPA request.

The gatekeeping is fearsome. They take their duties incredibly seriously.

I'm not quite sure what your 'no' is specifically in reference to. I'm also not sure what a SPOC is, and I'm not familiar with the details of the process.

But The Guardian reported in 2014 that "EE, Vodafone and Three give police mobile call records at click of a mouse", and in 2015 that "UK police requests to access phone calls or emails are granted 93% of the time", with rejection rates varying wildly by county from as high as 28% to as low as 0.1%. So it doesn't seem to be as hard as you're making out, unless things have changed wildly in the last few years. May I ask your sources?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/10/automatic-poli...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/01/police-request...

SPOC = single point of contact

The filtering isn't about civil liberties (although keeping councils out seems sensible) but rate limiting requests via paperwork, so only important ones get done.

What's your source for that?

I'm a police officer who routinely uses communications data in investigations.

Already exists in production

>> it's that the UK has decided it would rather have some petty crime than to pay the taxes necessary to catch petty criminals

No such "active" decision has ever been taken by the UK citizens and simply never would be by any democracy I can imagine - and this is probably the next major problem democracy needs to solve.

Did you know the UK is self sufficient in strawberries? Supermarkets saw they had demand, and put strawberries on shelves from global suppliers year round, then started competing amoungst themselves on price which meant air freighted strawberries cost more than locally produced greenhoused food so we expanded our greenhouses - in a good stuff it's likely noone would vote for

I don't know quite how to solve this but I think a "backlog" approach to democracy would work

>> Did you know the UK is self sufficient in strawberries?

Is that’s why I can never find sweet strawberries in the UK?

The plastic ones take less damage from shipping, and people don’t seem to mind eating pretend strawberries, so that’s more of a free market failure thing.

In my experience, there are good ones to be had, but only if you buy locally and in-season. Imported or forced fruit are almost universally disappointing.

Or grow your own, using traditional varieties like Cambridge Favourite or Elsanta.

Sometimes I wonder if the motivation is to allow petty fraud as an outlet for crime, to keep the people who commit it from doing other less desirable things. Like a stealth welfare.

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