The new geography of stolen goods
economist.com
economist.com
- 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.)
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…
>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
Sources:
https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Also, some jurisdictions have been known to engage in a practice where criminals are charged with lesser crimes in order to make the violent crime numbers look good.
For murders and serious violent crimes like stabbings and robber/assaults resulting in major injuries, or for serious thefts, in a country like Canada or the U.S. i'd believe the numbers are. Very few people in these countries, where perception of police as useful more or less exists, would fail to report such crimes.
On the other hand, just to showcase a counterpoint, in countries like the one I live in (Mexico) even violent crimes and major thefts often don't go reported simply because in many parts, police are considered so useless (or even sometimes collusive with criminals and thus counterporductive) that even for serious things, they're not contacted unless absolutely necessary.
Even with these tendencies however, you'd be surprised how often people do go through the formality of filing a report just in case it turns up a result, particularly for murders and kidnappings, where desperation obligates them.
e.g. Whether there are 1000 stabbing victims per year, or 5000, a low clearance rate means there are still many victims that can only pound sand, without even a remote prospect of seeing any action taken.
I'm not saying to ignore the problems, but it's important to get a better perspective.
Anyone proposing extra resources to be spent or diverted to car thefts would not be taken seriously, if it’s clearly insufficient to even clear most violent cases.
Unfortunately the clearance rate is similar in the US as well. This source is a bit outdated violent crimes had a 45% clearance rate in 2019: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
There should be automatic punishments and career censures when cops fail to leap at opportunities like the one you quoted.
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 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"?
Which one do you think is going to get voted for?
I wonder. With a sufficiently sociopathic point of view, every high end car theft almost certainly represents a subsequent insurance claim and new car purchase. And every insurance claim results in upward pressure on insurance prices. If you just look at car theft and export through a "economic impact to the state" lens, there are without doubt a lot of industry and political people who see it as being new revenue and _good_ for the state.
This kind of stuff is textbook broken windows fallacy.
You don't even need to be a sociopath. You just need to be a single minded idiot who's rounding every hard to measure harm to zero in dishonest pursuit of your goal.
You see these thought patterns and flimsy justifications on all sorts of issues once you start looking.
Right? The existence of organized crime is a policy choice by politicians. If they truly wanted to do something about it, the policies would change - both in terms of funding/staffing, as well as the incentivizing of officers to pursue leads.
> 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.
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.
I understand the frustration.
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.
This is just disgusting.
Encrypted chat apps get mentioned in literally one sentence out of a ~1900 word article, and somehow that's "a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws"? Get a grip.
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.
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.
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.
You are smart.
I have a 2001 Mazda 626 and a 2002 Ford F-150 7700 in the driveway, and there are days I forget to lock the doors. Which is an unwise thing to do in my neighbourhood. But even after half a decade living here I have yet to find any evidence they’ve been rifled through, much less attempted to be stolen.
Plus, I recently ran the numbers, and ignoring fuel and insurance, adding up purchase price + all repairs and maintenance - including brand-name tires! - has both vehicles together amortize under $1,000/year. And that is _BOTH, COMBINED._ I know some people in my own tax bracket who pay more than a $2,000 a month just for a single vehicle.
Now granted, AC is still dead on both, and will cost a pretty penny to resurrect (heavy corrosion in the lines). But for getting from point A to point B, those are some pretty cheap fucking rides.
Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?
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.
True. In a healthy society, policing is hard.
> and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
Because this was true before robust encryption, we know encryption doesn't change the equation and can be safely omitted from your assertion.
> 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 other alternatives.
Robust encryption is how we maintain that natural, neutral, healthy default.
Otherwise, we're talking about gifting new, unprecedented surveillance powers to officials, politicians and their powerful allies.
Massive power. Over us. At which point we are less safe.
No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption, both messaging and voice, in a manner that is impossible to attribute to an individual handset or terminal.
Regardless of whether you’re for or against it, you have to admit that this is a boon for criminals as much as it is for everyone else.
Encro failed because the Dutch got all up in their servers (and the owners, who I suspect are now dead as a result, pretended it hadn’t happened) - e2e encryption bypasses that vulnerability.
> No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption,
As a preamble, police already have a vast array of new avenues of surveilling citizens. They have this now and it gives them massively more access to our private data/comms, than ever before. There is little that LEO/Govs/Corps don't have access to already.
Police have never had at-will access to any personal data and communications they desired.
Until very recently: To find info they wanted, police performed police work and commonly found some degree of what they were looking for. But often it was nothing. Under this, society thrived.
What police have right now is massively more than that. In the few spaces where some content might be denied them, they still have the associated metadata which is valuable on it's own (often more so than the contents).
Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.
We have lost most of that. However, using robust encryption we can keep a minuscule portion of our total comms and data out of their trivial reach. What little it is - it is still good for us.
Historical privacy was what we had. Under that condition, societies were healthy and thriving.
Persistent, pervasive surveillance is what we're moving (rapidly) toward. It promotes other types of societies.
Wiretaps, postal interference.
None of it was routine, but the tactic for dealing with serious criminality was still there.
>Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.
No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.
It is very good for the citizen, but you cannot argue for it without also acknowledging that it is incredibly advantageous for the criminal. It is without precedent in human history.
I'm not saying that the police should be able to backdoor everything useful, because that's nonsense. What I'm pointing out is that once you realise that your suspects understand how to use signal and how to use a VPN and how to maintain some sort of operational discipline (and this isn't a high threshold), then your crimes become incredibly hard to solve even with a perfectly executed investigation and this is reflected in the clear-up rate.
As the comment above clearly and repeatedly mentions, this has been the default for most of history. Previous to the modern digital age of endless location and habit tracking, people could move around without being easily detected except through tremednous, dedicated effort, and communications was easy to secure in simple ways. You're describing a completely new phenomenon that's very dangerous in many ways which go far beyond mere crime prevention, and apparently lamenting countermeasures against it as if they were what's creating a "terrifying" new state of criminals being able to move and communicate without easily being tracked.
Your post was easy to open, your phone easy to tap. The use of surveillance equipment was basically unregulated.
You may not have had transaction level monitoring but you certainly had no expectation of privacy at the bank.
Do you people not read? You're harking back to some bucolic, pastoral existence that never existed.
In no real way are these comparable to the deeply granular, deeply rooted 24/7 surveillance of movement, habits, contacts and nearly anything you like, that's today possible against any normally digitally connected person who doesn't take pretty extreme steps to avoid it (steps that by themselves make that person stand out as unusual enough to soon be flagged) I could go on and on with all the ways in which the tracking is pervasive and applied to most of the things we do today, and how none of that existed so autoamtically before the last 30-40 years or so.
Nobody with half a brain here is referring to some bucolic pastoral existence, simply to one in which the tools for tracking were just not like they are today, and if any government wanted to apply tracking of the kind that's pretty much turn-key constant now, it took unusual effort, staffing and specialized procedures.
You're either being deliberately obtuse or have no sense of perspective or idea of what you're saying
There has never, in the history of humanity, been a time where a criminal can communicate with other criminals with absolute immunity as they can today.
Please don't spout Daily Mail rubbish.
Not only is this a demonstrably false comment, it is an idiotic one.
>if they maintain decent opsec.
don't believe this either. no one has ever maintained decent opsec.
Very good point. I do think the number rounds to zero, but yes there is a data bias here.
I imagine the 5% includes all kinds of petty crime, no?
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.
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.
> For each container Mr Gibson holds up and searches, the police must pay the port a fee of £200.
A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.
Congratulations: the port is now a crime scene, its gonna take hours or days to process this. I'm going to need you to remove all containers from this shipper from the stacks for further inspection. Please stop all movement of containers. I'll need to interview all longshoremen who came in contact with this container. Please begin filling out these 17 forms to recover your inspection fee.
[0] I welcome corrections on this, but I would think the commercial per-day storage fee is higher than £200
The primary role of the police after all is to protect capital, not people.
Shutting down a port would cost the billionaires (who donate to the politicians who are in charge of the police) money, so its much preferable to the police and those in positions of power over them to let the crime run rampant so long as the ports keep operating so that the billionaires profits can flow unimpeded.
Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.
Here, we prefer our police to be beholden to the public and obey the law; the spirit as well as the letter. It creates a trust that is clearly lacking with the (frankly thuggish) American police. To their clear detriment.
Yeah, in this case there was a stolen Porsche in it, but most of the time it's likely to be an innocent shipment.
While it is "destructive" in a very strict sense, it damages no property in any relevant way.
Any shipper anywhere on earth is well aware that their container can be opened by the authorities at any time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPLvSYJvSkw
You don't want this. As long as the police are actually catching criminals, the fee shouldn't bother them. It's probably not that much compared to the rest of the cost of the operation.
Sibling comment says the seal is worth a few cents, but ignores the inconvenience of someone having to go to the port and replace the seal, plus the possible delay in getting it loaded. These containers and their contents are worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. A $200 fee to be able to mess with one is not unreasonable.
Airports not included.
> 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.
Probably not true, but very intuitive!
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 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.
You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!
Insurance companies compete viciously with each other on price. Have you not seen their ads? If one could offer significantly cheaper insurance through some mechanism like that they definitely would.
A mere six or seven figures spend on lobbying and/or wining and dining the legislature will plug that loophole.
The legislature will spew some grandiose bullshit about how in an effort to reduce the cost theft coverage is now one of the mandatory parts and half of the population will eat it up.
>would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one
Which will never happen because reducing costs across the board is bad for insurers. Even if their margins are thin a thin margin on a big number gets you more money. They don't care how high costs go as long as they're uniformly distributed and/or predictable.
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.
Obviously if it were that easy then somebody would have done it already, but I don't immediately see why that definitely wouldn't work. My guess is either a fast x-ray machine is implausible, and/or simply matching the contents to a manifest wouldn't be enough of a deterrent to criminals.
If we wait until they are already in the containers, then yes, it is not feasible to check them all. Basically, the checks should be distributed, not concentrated at the port.
Containers get dropped off (empty) 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.
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.