Electronic devices used for car thefts set to be banned

You get less for 34 felonies

We‘re talking about the UK here. They’ve jumped the shark long ago and are now at the „legislate blunted butter knives“ stage.

You're talking about the UK here, have been insane for centuries. And then George Orwell wrote a manual.

Standard UK culture. You can be arrested for social media posts.

In UK it is a crime to silently pray at your own home. It is a different culture, court decides who is a criminal. There are no civil liberties or constitution like in US!

Wow the other comments on this thread are all ironic, exaggerated, and misleading.

A little context is necessary.

“Up to” is worth emphasis. Even if in an extreme scenario a 5 year sentence was disbursed only up to 2.5 years would be in prison (and likely far less), automatic release at 2 thirds in the worst case.

"Up to". I guess maybe appropriate for a car theft kingpin selling these by the thousand?

How does it compare with the sentence for actual car theft?

Car theft is not only a unnecessary cost for the victim, but the whole process it starts demands a significant amount of tax payer money.

They call them "Keyless repeaters and signal amplifiers", but say people also refer to them as "jammers".

This. There is seemingly no incentive for manufacturers to make it harder to steal their cars - every stolen car is likely a new sale.

Unlike the US, it was also illegal to listen in on police radio frequencies. I always felt this was madness to make it illegal rather than adopt encryption. Thankfully they are now encrypted.

That wouldn't help people who have cars that already don't do that very sensible thing which yes should be mandatory on all new cars with keyless entry worldwide.

This is shoddy reasoning: you don’t have to care or not care about laws to not want to receive the deterring effect of incarceration. Laws, in their most basic form, exist to dangle that threat and others like it.

It's so they can arrest people they catch with just the jammer, but not a stolen vehicle.

This is a dumb take. Being able to add additional charges on top of the already illegal car theft charge is useful for a number of reasons.

First, a “throw the book at them” approach leads to easier convictions via plea deals and the ability to be guilty of one charge even if another doesn’t stick.

Second, if lawmakers did not adapt the criminal code in the face of new technology then we’d all be posting here about how out of touch and behind the times they are. Or we’d be bemoaning how law enforcement can’t go after this type of crime because it turns out not to be explicitly illegal to maliciously block RF signals used to lock doors.

And also, writing new policy is their job? Are you just suggesting that we pay lawmakers to never try to address things affecting their constituents, because we care about what the criminals think?

By making tools used to commit crime illegal where they don't have a legitimate reason to be carried, you can charge people with that crime if they're found rather than having to wait for them to actually commit the crime the tools are for. Less harm done but they still get stopped, is the idea.

The other idea is that if the tools themselves are illegal it's a higher barrier to entry for the people who want to get into that kind of crime so maybe some of them will never start in the first place.

And it does work in some circumstances.

They perhaps could have gone with clarifying or strengthening existing legislation instead of course. There's already an offence of "going equipped to steal", but it is hard to prove because you might be able to get a court to believe that you were carrying a bunch of housebreaking tools around in the middle of the night for some legitimate reason.

So that's why we tend to pass laws to target tools.

And yes, hardened car thieves probably won't be deterred, but it will be easier to prosecute them if they're found in suspicious circumstances and found with these now-illegal devices. It's not like criminals usually think they're going to get caught - the deterrent effect simply doesn't work on some people.

I feel it a bit ironic arguing about "devastating effect on victims, who need their vehicles to go about their everyday lives" while the lock of homes including brand new ones are from the last century, somehow not the same worry about the place where people live. And in a car based society - more like forced outside of London which has usable public transportation - made itself so vulnarable to the use of cars for basic necessities like going to work and shopping, yet the practices and public infrastructure (parking in traffic lane, blocking traffic for safety, damaging neglected potholes) are making it worse like car theft. Seems like very selective worries from a theatrical public figure.

Frustrating this law comes from my country, which seems determined (for now) to be at the vanguard of draconian over-reach. It isn't hard to see this being extended to SDRs.

I fear for the day that the state insists on limiting our computing choices to sanitised controllable devices, and that having a root-access programmable computer is viewed by them with the same suspicion as keeping Great Grandpa's old service revolver in the attic.

The jammer prevents the car from hearing the transmitted un/locking signals while the jammer themselves collects and repeats it later.

Yes, it would stop somebody's key from working, and that's the entire point, because most key fobs work on rolling ciphers, and if you block one, you can reuse it. Typically the fob will allow like 10 or so presses. It depends on the model before you're forced to re pair to the car. But by jamming it and capturing what it sent, you can then use that to get into the car.

You can sit around a car park with a jammer and jam the signal as people walk away from their cars - some people don't notice that their attempt to lock the car just didn't do anything.

> How is a signal jammer useful for stealing a car?

I can't vouch for UK in particular, but generally having some sort of tracker (level x security system) is mandatory to insure more expensive/exotic cars. A signal jammer prevents the tracker from calling home and, well, the stolen car being tracked before the tracker is found, disconnected and destroyed.

Radio equipment restrictions are as old as radio itself. Go into cellular telecommunication or, god forbid, radar, and you will find a great number of things you are not allowed to possess or sell, with very severe punishments for violation.

> It sounds like ordering all pencils be made illegal because they can be used to write threats

My country enacting overreaching and ill defined laws concerning technology? Colour me surprised…

Sure, search every outbound shipping container in case it's got a stolen car in it. Super practical.

And what about the cars which are stolen and then broken up and sold as parts? That's fairly common.

And the ones which are given false plates and resold - perfectly doable if nobody checks the VIN - and never leave the country.

Just because we're an island doesn't make it easy.

But we do need to spend more resources on crime prevention and the apprehension of criminals, we've known that for years but we've also kept electing governments who refuse to do it while also claiming to be "tough on crime" so it's the usual mess.

Interestingly this law does not require such a handover.

"the onus will be on someone in possession of a device to show they had it for a legitimate purpose."

"Making or selling a signal jammer could lead to up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine."

I saw an ad recently for a car (Kia?) with a phone app that could sent an unlock/start code to someone else's phone. It was so you could lend your car to a friend without all the hassle of physical keys. What could possibly go wrong?

Doors everywhere have been trivially easy to bypass for all of history. The crime has always been in taking advantage of that.

For millennia we have been doing ok by focusing on punishing the bad actor and not punishing people for making something that isn’t exactly perfect.

It will reduce supply, but it will also make it easier to prosecute those that have these devices.

I frankly don't understand the sentiment. Should we not outlaw murder because "ha, surely criminals won't murder anymore now"?