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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand what is happening here. Why is the ground completely covered in packages? Do thieves just break into the passing train compartments and start throwing out packages?

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The trains are forced to stop at this accessible location sometimes, just outside the rail yard. They don’t stop for long, so the strategy is to hop on, cut a container open, and throw as much stuff to the ground as you can before the train starts moving again. Then you hop down and look through your spoils for items of value.

Hint: look for “lithium ion battery device inside” warning labels.

So if the train cars, or the containers thee packages are kept in within the train cars, were at least so secure that they prevented access for say an hour or two, then this likely wouldn't happen?

What is this, open crates or sacks of packages, in traincars locked with a small padlock?

A battery-powered bolt cutter is pretty powerful. Containers are no bank safes because that would make them too heavy and most places are not as lawless as this.

> What is this, open crates or sacks of packages, in traincars locked with a small padlock?

Yes, pretty much. Although in many cases it’s not even a padlock, just a tamper-evident seal device with a serial number matching the paperwork for that container:

https://shipped.com/img-parts/server/php/files/containers/sh...

For huge cargo firms handling tens of thousands of containers daily, padlocks can be problematic operationally and quite expensive.

Padlocks are easy to cut, a bigger padlock just needs a bigger tool. Some companies apparently start welding their containers shut, which raises the bar for thieves significantly (now they need a grinder and more time).

Battery powered grinders being the hot new thing.

Been used in bike theft for 10+ years.

The trains come to a stop from time to time. They break in to a container and throw as much as they can to the ground before the train continues.

Once the train is moving again, they go through all the packages on the ground looking for things of value.

So the thieves just lurk around the area, waiting for trains to come to a pause, and then break open the containers, I guess the containers are not very secure? And there's minimal patrols? It just seems like extraordinary 'easy pickings'.

Turns out it's pretty tricky to make a padlock secure against bolt cutters. Of course improving the security of the lock would soon lead to thieves cutting off the locking bars on the container instead.

It doesn't have to be the lock that's secured. What about a hinge mechanism which takes a programmable amount of time to open the container door? If it takes 10 minutes for the door to open, the lock doesn't matter as much, since the thieves have a very limited amount of time before the trains start moving again, apparently.

That sounds like it could be quite error prone. If it's electronic, what about power failures? If mechanical, sounds like lots of intricate machined parts which will wear down over time.

Time locks have been around for more than 100 years, I'm pretty confident that if something like this was desired by the powers that be, it would have been implemented. What I'm assuming is stopping it aren't the engineering challenges, but the fact that currently it's cheaper to let the thefts happen than it is to mitigate them.

I wonder what the cost of engineering secure containers would be vs. addressing the societal problems in the USA that lead to situations like this would be.

I guess you could apply some of the same solutions used in refrigerated shipping containers for power redundancy.

Those are standardized containers standardized which are made in the millions as cheap as possible. That stuff needs to work, think of all the means of transport where it is used (vessels, trains, aircraft), be accessible for inspections (customs) and so on. The costs to secure and upgrade the containers for the whole system is probably a lot higher than accepting a small percentage of stolen parcel.

Way too complicated. Apparently shippers are opting to start just welding the door shut and unwelding it at the destination.

Containers are secure in the sense that you can tell when you receive them whether someone has been inside them (and had the opportunity to change their contents). They are not secure in the sense that they prevent people from entering them.

so .. tamper-evident but not tamper-proof?

Correct. I think the main reason is that this "security" is geared more around Customs & Border enforcement than anything else.

It helps with customs, but it's a big deal for private businesses too. Before containers, you effectively had to have one trusted person's eyes on the cargo at all time -- and still people along the way lightened the load as they handled the stuff. It was almost considered part of the compensation for a longshoreman.

With tamper-evident containers, you have a trusted person watch the container being loaded and locked, and then a trusted person watch as its unloaded at its final destination, and you don't have to care what happens at every point in between.

Makes sense. 99% of what I know about container shipping comes from the movie Contraband and Season 2 of The Wire. ;)

Don't think you would want to be walking around with someone else's package. Taking just the item gives some plausible deniability and there is probably no way to find the actual package that an item was taken from at that scale.

They open things up, take what they want, and dispose of the rest.

This seems like a problem that armed guards would fix pretty quickly.

Maybe. Or you just up the stakes and now you have thieves with automatic weapons having a gunfight with the train guards.

The stakes remain unchanged, because the stakes are the packages.

Since there can't be that much profit in this activity, I think it's reasonable to assume that a lot of the people responsible are doing it just because it's easy.

Yeah, that's exactly what they do, and they open the packages right there on the side of the tracks and take anything that's valuable inside.

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