This seems like a trivial problem for law enforcement to honeypot. You wouldn't even need to actively monitor. Just get an alert when the devices start moving and dispatch officers to track them down.
If thieves start getting clever and putting the stolen goods in a Faraday cage, then add a camera to monitor and capture faces/plates. Hell, add hidden cameras to all major trailheads and don't even bother with the honeypot.
Obviously, there's funding and expertise issues with a solution like this. But is it really that significant or just law enforcement complacency?
What you're describing is called a bait car and cops have been using them for decades. Back in the day typical bait cars were shitty cars with aftermarket sound systems. Made for interesting reality TV (for the standards of reality TV at the time).
Video is fake, author paid his friends 'per outcome', so they manufactured outcomes (pretended being shocked thieves). Redditors even tracked one of the packages going off two houses away from YT account owners registered residence, at his friends house. Allegedly NASA guy didnt know this at the time of publishing.
This assumes the police give a shit. In the bay area, they seem to have given up. Assuming they catch someone, either the DA will decline to file charges or the judge will release them immediately.
There was a comment on Nextdoor today about three cars being hit right in front of Baskin Robbins on Lawrence... one with the owner in the driver's seat.
Santa Clara PD response: "yeah, that happens there every day".
In many cases they don't even follow up when location services tell the former owner where the device is. A shift in policing so that they go after such cases is a better use of time than setting traps.
Yeah cuz what we need is more cameras installed by the gov invading our privacy. You think they should implement facial recognition on them too? Don't leave values in your car easy as that ....
I had security cameras installed at my home last week. We already had a security system. I dont like having the cameraa, but the final straw was when someone tried to break into my home while I was at work and my wife was home the Friday before Thanksgiving in the US. With no cameras, had nothing to give the police.
Id like to get a 12 gauge shotgun and teach my wife to use it, but she's gun shy. (I am licensed by the state, but dont own any firearms). There is something about the aound of a 12 gauge round being chambered that puts the fear of God in everyone (and I'm an atheist).
>>Id like to get a 12 gauge shotgun and teach my wife to use it, but she's gun shy.
That sounds like a great way to get your wife shot to be honest. Either by criminals or by police coming to "help" you. You might as well advise people to carry a knife to avoid a mugging.
Not necessarily. Assuming his wife was comfortable learning more about how to safely handle a firearm it could be a great asset for protecting their household...
>So what can you do to keep your stuff safe? Putting a device in airplane mode or entirely powering it off will both work [...] For additional protection, you can place those devices in a Faraday fabric sleeve
Right, but that's the asymmetry of theft: all I have to do is mess up one time. It's the unfairness in Full Metal Jacket when Private Pyle is told if it wasn't for people like him (who forget to lock stuff) there would be no theft in the world.
Expanding on it further, what I mean is that our BT stack should be built from ground up with security in mind. We cannot fight every attack surface but we probably can get to all the low hanging ones that the crims can exploit.
One day in some utopia probably.
I as a user of BT stack do not have to worry about whether it is switched on or off. This is what I mean by _secure by default_.
Downvoter - thank you. I took time to explain what I mean this time :)
test your sleeve, I bought one off amazon years back and when I finally got around to checking if it worked: it didn't. It was just a slightly more expensive pencil case.
Most don't work. I returned some very high dollar items when I discovered this. Turns out, in general, 'conductive fabric' is not enough. It could be as simple as the seams not having continuity, or more likely a textile issue.
Per tfa, many devices still leave a minimal radio active. While not useful for communication, it may emit trace radition at the frequency that is being list3ned for.
Right, but the same article also is saying that thieves are using bluetooth scanning apps, so you should be safe until thieves upgrade to high sensitivity SDR scanners.
Fearmongering; this is a legal issue, not a technical one. Does anyone really think they're going to save themselves from thieves by turning off bluetooth? I hope nobody is that naive. This kind of thing also popped up when people realized that thieves could scan and replay early remote commands to unlock cars (and still can for some models!) Was the answer to not use car remotes? Maybe, but for most of us the answer was to make sure your car insurance is up to date and covers theft.
Having a car without dents or scratches is attractive. Having visible chargers in your car is attractive. What thieves will find attractive will change over time.
Get insurance, do the basic stuff you can to avoid having valuables in your car or advertising yourself as a mark, and don't worry about the rest. When the inevitable happens let your friends take you out for a drink and move on.
What does this even mean? If you get stabbed while withdrawing money from the skid row ATM at 2am, are your final words "This is a legal issue, not a ғɪɴᴀɴᴄɪᴀʟ ᴏɴᴇ"?
Yes, people aren't supposed to break into your car, and they're bad, bad people if they do. For the sorts of people that do there is clearly a cost/benefit analysis, where the cost is the risk. Smashing into a dozen cars just hoping to find something valuable is quite a degree removed from knowing that certain vehicles have valuables, and even what those valuables are.
And saying "get insurance" is weak sauce. Yeah, most of us have insurance. All of us, I suspect, never want the hassle and annoyance of claiming on it, or dealing with the BS involved with having one's car broken into.
This is one of those crimes I'm curious why the police in certain areas don't do more to stop. SF is the worst place I've been for this. You can literally walk down Folsom street or around Dolores Park and see that every 2nd or 3rd car window was smashed the night before. Leave anything showing and your car will be broken into. It's so common it's hard not to notice the glass everywhere from previously broken windows. Given it's so common it seems like the police could just put a few honey pot cars out and the problem would be solved but they don't care to solve it.
LA is also bad though not as bad as SF. I've had my car broken into 6 times and stolen once. One I installed a removable stereo, forgot to remove it first day, windows smashed, stereo gone. Got a new one, it lasted 2-3 months. After that had to use a cheap portable boombox (no money for new car stereo). That lasted a few months until someone bust into car in my apartment's garage and apparently tried to steal the car. The steering column was jacked up and the car repair said that was from trying to steal the car. Those were in West LA. My car itself was stolen in Costa Mesa. The replacement was a used Samurai Suzuki (all I could afford). It had a $10 cheapo radio that was stolen in Huntington Beach (no need to break into the car for that). The 2 times, one time I think I forgot to take down the dash cam. Another I forgot to lock it, there was nothing showing but apparently someone was just checking for unlocked cars.
Then again maybe I'm just used to living in a country like Japan where breaking into cars is mostly not a thing and so you can leave stuff in your car and you can have nice non-removable car stereos and not have to worry about your car getting broken into and getting stolen.
It's funny/sad to me how having grown up in the USA I just took it for granted than having your car broken into and/or stolen was just a normal part of life in the world. Luckily I learned it's not though it can be also be sad to have your eyes opened just how messed up your country of origin really is.
the police do not have incentive to do anything and because of lawmakers, especially in California, they are hampered by the very system. from raising the dollar amount to what is a felony vs misdemeanor to requiring proof a car was locked before you can charge someone with breaking and entering; yes even if the window is smashed it still requires proving a car was locked which is more difficult that it is worth to them.
we bemoan all the time we have too many people in jail when what we have is the wrong people in jail; namely anyone with personal use drugs and failure to pay fines. then to top it off we have a system where politicians daily tell people how they have been cheated or that other people cheated them to get what they have which just gives too many the excuse they need. after all, it isn't fair someone has nice things. people fail to understand how years of this talk messes with a population. divide by fear, divide by envy, divide by race, divide by class, well the payoff is this type of behavior.
Nobody wants to hear it, but crime and population density seem very linked. Where I live, we dont even lock our doors, while an hour away in the city, I cant even take one of my crs because it is too easy to steal even when locked. When you know your neighbors, you can't steal without everyone knowing. The psudeoanonmity offered by overpopulation makes crime pay.
Well, from an aggregate population level it naively seems cheaper (more efficient) to insure people against car break-ins rather than subsidize low-density housing infrastructure (roads, water, electricity, internet, etc.). That's apart from the productivity increase resulting from higher density (eg: see Geoffrey West's work on the nature of cities), and the loss of forest/agricultural land in rural areas. So, while low-density suburban housing avoids break-ins, it leads to bigger unanswered questions.
I think the argument is to say that to yourself before you’re taking a car’s / laptop’s / phone’s worth of money out of an ATM, get insurance, and give people with a knife what they want before they stab you.
Well, but you can't take that much money out of an ATM, in my experience. And if they stab you anyway, after you give them what you have, what do you say? "We had a contract!"
This is a security issue. Part of the solution is legal, part is technical.
If a type of house lock or alarm system is defective, it's still important for the problems to be fixed in the next generation and for owners to upgrade or patch the problem.
And the roots are socioeconomical. The only lasting solution is targeting the roots that motivate/force people to steal in the first place, but this is obviously a more complicated and long term endavour, which depends on a political will that is currently nonexistent.
In other nations with a better social system this worked quite well however.
Which countries have a significantly low car theft rate?
In the US:
>...in 2017. In 2018, 748,841 vehicles were stolen, down 3.1 percent from 772,943 vehicles in 2017.
Meanwhile in Europe:
>...Police in the EU recorded on average 697 000 car thefts yearly over the period 2015 to 2017, a 29% reduction compared to the period 2008 to 2010 (yearly average 983 000).
I dont have stats, but in the 00's, my brother who lived in west Seattle at the time, had his SUV broken into 3 times in a short period. They ignored the stock stereo, hundreds of CDs, expensive set of golf clubs. Besides smashing a window, what was the damage? They stole his headlights. This was back when xenon headlights were novel.
From what I recall, the police told him was something along the lines of "we'll never recover the parts and we'll likely never catch the crooks". Basically, they cant fulfill their job, and my brother was told to get ready for the insurance rate hike.
I am not sure your point. The original argument made by the parent was that "In other nations with a better social system this worked quite well however." Is your hypothesis that these better social systems lead to comparable rates of major crime but significantly lower rates of petty crime? On the face of it that seems unlikely, but I'd be interested in any evidence you have.
I don't have any evidence, but to my intuition it makes a lot of sense.
The amount of time, effort, and risk to sell a stolen car seems much higher than the amount of effort to sell the stuff you find in the back seat of a car.
Since most people resorting to crime for money are pretty desperate, I would imagine they would choose the easier, faster, and safer method.
I couldn't find any numbers to back this up though, most crime statistics I saw focused on violent crime.
You are right much of this might just be oportunity (e.g. if you leave the car jnlocked). But breaking into a locked car still demands a certain culture that provides you with excuses (to yourself) why it is okay for you to steal (e.g. “I deserve this because society never treated me the way it should”). People don’t really just think of themselves as the bad guy.
> The only lasting solution is targeting the roots that motivate/force people to steal in the first place, but this is obviously a more complicated and long term endavour, which depends on a political will that is currently nonexistent.
I don't think we understand why some people turn to theft while others, in seemingly identical life situations, don't.
>>> that thieves could scan and replay early remote commands to unlock cars (and still can for some models!) Was the answer to not use car remotes?
That is a bad example because the solution was a technical one, Auto Manufacturers changed the way the Remote controls work so you can not simply scan and reply.
> Get insurance, do the basic stuff you can to avoid having valuables in your car or advertising yourself as a mark...
Is obviously good advice, but
> Does anyone really think they're going to save themselves from thieves by turning off bluetooth? I hope nobody is that naive.
Do I think turning off Bluetooth will reduce the chance of a thief using a Bluetooth scanner to find something in my car? Why, yes. Yes, I do.
Obviously, the best answer is "don't leave your laptop and other valuable electronics in your car," but if that's not practical -- for instance, if you're traveling with both a work laptop and a personal one and can't realistically bring both of them into a restaurant with you -- then c'mon, take a couple seconds to turn off Bluetooth.
Technology can build in anti-theft systems. This is a feature of the new iDevices and T2 laptop line by Apple.
Fun story a colleague bricked a MacBook Pro by simply erasing the hard drive which kicked in the T2 anti-theft system. Top case (keyboard), logic board, drive, fans, T2 board, etc. all had to be replaced to restore it in working condition. That is a $1800 repair on a $3000 laptop. I think the parts may have to authenticate to the chip so a full parts replacement needed to be done. Or Apple was being wasteful, one of the two.
Insurance has nothing to do with this not the remote car anecdote. And yes, we are that naive!
It’s like leaving your nice bag on the seat. It’s better not to do that. Wheater you’re insured or not. Anyway I’m happy there are people like you around, it means I will get robbed less likely!
Sorry for my bad English
I don't buy theft insurance. In my country, the yearly premium is 1-2% of the value of the car, while the rate of theft is much below 1%. Seems like a terrible deal, unless you don't have the cash on hand to buy the replacement car.
Has anyone had any luck with faraday bags? I bought one a few years ago, which worked fine for my galaxy s6. I tried it not long ago with my galaxy s9, and I was able to call it from my land line even though it was covered by the faraday bag. Maybe changes in frequencies are to blame? Or maybe I didn't have it as sealed in as well as I thought.
That's simple and clever, knowing for sure what cars are worth breaking into. I imagine based on the BD_ADDR you can even surmise what type of device it is.
I stayed at a hostel in Montreal 7 years ago and the owners warned me about something like this. They said local thieves used scanners to tell which cars in their car park had electronics inside and were worth breaking into.
This was inevitable. I suppose Apple's new "Find My Device even if it's offline" mode, which uses bluetooth to emit devices location, will help thieves to find these devices as well.
People have already been lying [0] to the public about vehicle to vehicle communication protocols for a while now, saying that the radio signals will not propagate over long distances. Everyone who knows anything about radios knows that you can make the antenna more sensitive or directional on either side of a transmission.
If this stuff ever makes it into vehicles, it will be used by criminals (public and private sector) to track victims.
Lost the original link I had earlier today, but this one seems to make the same sorts of claims about the supposed limitations on the range of receiving the V2V signals.
> tablets, laptops, cameras, speakers, and phones—basically, most things a thief may want to steal, except for your keys and cold hard cash. (Although if you use a Tile or similar locater dongle on your key chain or in your wallet, then those are discoverable using a Bluetooth scanner, too.)
As in most security-related articles there's a lot of speculation and an overall fear-mongering tone here. Laptops don't propagate Bluetooth advertisements while closed and hibernating. The author's friend MacBook was stolen because it was close to the iPad that wasn't hibernating and had its Bluetooth on.
Also, almost all cameras don't advertise Bluetooth (it is too slow to transmit video and images), most BtLe speakers are too cheap to interest thieves and most people keep their cellphones with them.
Also, Tile trackers are mostly kept in things that people want to keep with them, one of their functionalities is precisely to warn the user when they're left behind.
At the end, all the author has is just a theory and a suspicion from a police officer.
My bluetooth headphones connect to my macbook pro when come home from work and my laptop is sitting on the kitchen table. My headphones tell me "two devices connected" when I walk in the door.
Although it seems like bluetooth _should_ be shut off by devices when not in use, I doubt most devices actually do that.
I'd really like to understand this deeper: are you sure your macbook was hibernating, even if it was closed? Are you sure the proximity advertisement came from the laptop? Usually it is the iPhone doing it.
I've seen that in airports and malls, more than 90% of the advertisements around are iPhones (Android doesn't do BtLe advertisement) and Windows computers (from the shops and stores). A small minority are beacons and wearables (iWatch, Fitbit, etc.) In libraries sometimes I can see Macbooks, but they all are non-hibernating.
My headphones are only paired with my macbook and my android phone. I always am walking with the headphones paired with my phone, so that's one of the two devices. The only other device is my macbook pro, that is often sitting on the kitchen table with it's lid closed, and unused for several days, and yet this happens every day. I obviously don't know what exactly is going on, but if they can "connect" then presumably something about the bluetooth is still functioning.
If you left the MacBook connected to the power supply and it is a 2016 model or later then it likely isn't really hibernating, even with the lid closed. By default, most of them remain active when connected to power.
However, you can disable the Bluetooth connection. Go to System Preferences > Bluetooth > Advanced Button and deselect "Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer."
I wonder who does the advertisements here. In BtLe the standard is to have the Peripheral (i.e: the headphones) doing proximity advertising and the Central doing the scanning. But, in principle, anything is possible.
"Also, almost all cameras don't advertise Bluetooth"
Many new cameras do. My Nikon surely does, and it keeps it on for quite some time after turning the device "off". Cameras use it to to set up adhoc wifi connections, and sometimes even for data transmission of preview images. I can't say whether laptops keep broadcasting or not (though I'd certainly make no assumptions given that BLE is made to allow virtually limitless use), however laptops are often stowed with a wireless mouse which gives the game up.
"Also, Tile trackers are mostly kept in things that people want to keep with them, one of their functionalities is precisely to warn the user when they're left behind."
The example they gave is a trailhead. There's a lot of shit you don't want to bring on a hike with you that you stow in your car, out of sight and hidden away for exactly the sort of discussion we're having.
Is it just a theory and suspicion? Maybe. But logically it makes a lot of sense, even if just "fear-mongering". It does rationally seem like something to contemplate, which is supposed to be the sort of subject HN was made for.
Out of curiosity I tried out a BLE scanner, finding 14 devices in my immediate proximity. Something I'd never really thought of before.
> Out of curiosity I tried out a BLE scanner, finding 14 devices in my immediate proximity. Something I'd never really thought of before.
I love to play with BLE scanners. It is interesting how the pattern of devices changes on each environment. On malls you'll see a lot of Windows computers and beacons. On school libraries you'll see a lot of Macs. At the gym you'll see iWatches, Fitbits and Garmins.
But the overwhelming majority are iPhones. Android are very quiet.
Every Mac has Bluetooth always on unless explicitly turned off. As another commenter mentioned, you can see this by turning on bluetooth headphones near a Mac with the lid closed. The Mac connects basically immediately.
That's a lot of stuff in the security world. Hypotheticals get spun into "hackers are doing this now!" when in the real world that almost never happens. I have to talk my clients off of ledges constantly and build security solutions for threats that aren't in the least bit real because of some nonsense reported in CIO Magazine.
Break-ins yes. But hibernating laptops being discovered via bluetooth? Cameras?
Thieves break into cars when they know there will be valuables inside the car. Now, are they running Bluetooth scanners to determine that, or is the fact that they're parking in an Apple parking lot enough?
From the article:
>San Francisco saw a 24 percent increase in vehicle break-ins between 2016 and 2017
Is that increase due to Bluetooth tracking? Or just all break-ins? This is exactly what I'm talking about... just because break-ins are happening more often and also unrelatedly Bluetooth can be discovered wireless, does not mean the two things are in any way connected.
Possible, yes. Actually happening in the real world? Well, we have an anecdote that the author promises us "isn’t just some crazy theory Joe and I have" and an anecdote from a police representative surrounded by statistics on all break-ins regardless of if Bluetooth was involved.
I mean... the story is about a thief who broke a window and stole a backpack that was in plain sight for anyone passing by the car. Absolutely nothing to do with Bluetooth at all.
It's simultaneously true that people believe or at least repeat any story that triggers their prejudices and that people discount anything that violates them, particularly when they haven't seen it firsthand.
So just because those impulses are opposed, doesn't mean that one is more right than the other in general.
Yes, but when should you decide to take action on that belief? At what point should people go out of their way to prevent an attack that may never happen? It's possible to steal passwords by listening to someone typing on a keyboard and reconstructing the key presses based on the sound. Should everyone stop using keyboard? Stop using passwords and stop using every service that requires a password?
In the security world we develop a risk matrix. This compares the likelihood of a threat compared to the consequences of that in order to determine how concerned you should be. Someone breaking into your car to steal things based on tracking the Bluetooth signal seems a lot less likely than someone breaking into your car because they can see your backpack laying on the back seat, but the consequences are exactly the same. So since thieves seeing your bag and deciding to break into your car is more likely, the natural course of action is to stop leaving your bags in a place that's visible to thieves. If someone then tears open your trunk to steal your bag, then you can worry about Bluetooth.
This article provides absolutely zero proof that Bluetooth was involved in this break-in, so why should anyone rush to the conclusion that Bluetooth was responsible for it? It's not an impulse or a prejudice, one is objectively more right than the other.
Blaming Bluetooth is begging the question when the backpack was visible through the window.
A person could assign enough risk to a proof-of-concept existing that the difference between a true and a false report of it in the wild seems rather small and unimportant.
Dye packs are used by banks which are insured by the government to make it easier for the government to catch criminals and recover their money through seizure/forfeiture (after which they can replace the dyed bills at low cost). The dye pack directly serves a victim of a bank robbery, i.e. the government.
A dye pack doesn't serve the victims of a break-in well. The owner's car and valuable gets splashed with dye and need expensive cleaning or replacement, and the owner's insurance doesn't have much practical opportunity to recover damages either.
What might be useful is a device that outputs arbitrary bluetooth codes and has a built-in tracker... although a police department might find it more cost-effective to just buy some real devices and install trackers on them.
Is an unconfirmed sense of schadenfreude really worth losing more money for a theft? Maybe it's worth it if the device is also streaming video so you can share the experience with the world, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo
Also, it's probably more likely that the device gets triggered accidentally than it is likely to get stolen.
I'm not a lawyer but generally boobytraps are illegal. You can't set up a device to damage someone if they commit a crime. Banks can get away with it because their dye packs are handed out to criminals with the crime in progress, they're not just left around for someone to accidentally stumble on to.
Look at it this way: a child confuses your car with the car of their parents, find that you accidentally left it unlocked, picked up what they thought was their Apple device so they could watch Peppa Pig, and the dye pack goes off. A 400F firebomb is now sitting in the hands of this non-criminal child, with aerosol being sprayed into the enclosed car they find themselves in.
Again, I'm not a lawyer... but boobytraps are illegal for a reason.
To show how old this concept is: the very first episode (1973) of the TV series "Police Story" featured a bait car being used to track Chuck Connor's character from theft of the bait car to a store robbery.
Bait cars are a police-state tactic. Just normal, Peelian-principled policing for me, thanks. Hunting and tracking, not fishing and trapping.
Which is to say make better efforts to actually solve property crimes that occur naturally, rather than manufacturing crimes for the purpose of resolving them more easily.
You’re probably right, but we can probably all agree there is a line somewhere that we don’t want police crossing with regard to baiting criminal activity.
I’d just rather us not have to debate where the line should be and be ever vigilant as police push the boundaries.
In the traditional crime triangle of motive, method, and opportunity, baiting and trapping artificially supplies the opportunity, and in some cases also the method, such that crimes that would not normally occur take place in such a way that it is easier to prosecute them than the naturally occurring crimes.
It replaces the pursuit and prosecution of people who have committed crimes in the community with jamming up all the usual suspects.
It's lazy, and it takes resources away from victims waiting for satisfaction. "Sorry, we aren't going to look for the person who robbed you, but we arrested 30 folks who are criminally predisposed to do exactly the same crime against cars similar to yours, if they're parked nearby, with unlocked doors, and pawnable valuables easily detectable inside. One of them might even be the person who robbed you! We're not going to check, of course, but you can maybe pretend that we caught them, to make yourself feel better."
Instead of setting a bait car, and watching just that one while it's out, watch over as many cars as possible to detect and prevent break-ins, all the time--as the community expects its police to do, to earn their pay.
It may be effective in the short term, but it also undermines community trust in the justice system, which is critical for policing to be effective in the long term. If you round up and persecute all the usual suspects at regular intervals, their friends and family will stop helping you, and start shunning you whenever you come 'round to "help".
I'd think people stealing bait cars are often the same people who would be stealing regular cars. So a successful bait car protects one or more regular cars. It is important to solve crimes that happened, but it is even more important to prevent future crimes. In fact, for property crimes, the overwhelming benefit of solving them is preventing future crimes. Except in backward countries with retributive justice system, like US, I suppose. (I want the guy who robbed me to suffer!)
Otherwise we, as a society, would simply get collective insurance to make victims whole and simply ignore property crimes.
Bait cars protect other cars as well, police is advertising their presence often, so everybody knows they are there. That has a chilling effect on crimes of opportunity.
In fact you don't even need to have any bait cars at a given location to reduce crimes, just say you do.
Would you be ok with private citizens, en masse, installing GPS trackers in their belongings, turning _all_ cars into bait cars btw? Would that also be considered entrapment?
Efficient is often lazy, but lazy is not always efficient. If the specific implementation of lazy is doing a different-but-similar job, rather than a different method for getting the same results, that isn't efficiency, it's substitution.
Preventing future crimes is important, but that is not the public mandate for police. Police are there to investigate crimes that occurred, collect the evidence, locate and arrest the suspects, and then turn everything over to the courts for further resolution. Future crime prevention is the responsibility of everyone living in civilization, in part by implementing security infrastructure under the control of those most directly impacted by the crimes in question. People want to feel safe, but not watched. It's not security, if the implementation makes you nervous about how it will be used.
Yes, I would be okay with private citizens, en masse, installing anti-theft devices in their belongings, provided that the tracking is under the control of the device owner. That's not bait, it's just another security measure. If it doesn't have a hook in it, it's just fish food; some worms get eaten, and others do not. You can't save them by taking a dozen fish out of the lake. They save themselves by developing camouflage, or a bitter toxin, or sharp spines, or slippery slime--whatever it takes to ward off the fish. Meanwhile, the anglers continue to use the bait that catches the most fish. They aren't out to protect worms; they just want to catch fish.
Another problem, of course, is that people already do that, with services such as LoJack, Prey, and Find My iPhone. When the owners take the location evidence to police, they do not always do anything with it. Someone can give a cop exact GPS coordinates, including elevation, with video recorded from their laptop with a clear image of the thief's face, and see no action. A television journalist can go to the thief's house, with cameras rolling, get a complete confession, air it on a national news program, and still not recover the property or see an indictment. Cops do not have a legal obligation to do anything for any particular person, as affirmed by several federal circuits independently, and then the Supreme Court. And private citizens and journalists do not produce a clean chain of evidence custody. The cops who don't pursue real property crimes that are trivially easy to resolve are being non-efficiently lazy, by doing an easier job.
As long as the priority is on bait vehicles and drug-related civil forfeitures and parallel constructions and other bastardizations of Peelian policing, the cops are not making the public feel secure in their liberties and possessions. They are not being what we wish them to be, and not doing what we would willingly pay them to do.
I agree with most of your post, except police mandate part (at least on paper, implementations vary). Prevention is explicitly in public mandate of Edmonton police (first thing I found). If you look at other programs police departments sometimes have (like public outreach about securing belongings and so on), it is mainly about reducing crimes of opportunity before they happen, and only partially PR.
And that bait cars are in the same category with civil forfeitures and other things you listed.
We have police exactly so we don't have to grow slimy toxic spines ourselves. Places with weak rule of law can get by with Honor culture for example, but that has a cost.
Anglers might not be out to protect worms, but they can destroy fish populations just fine nevertheless, most lakes need to be stoked in fact.
As for not pursuing real property crimes with digital evidence, that is often a question of not having a process and infrastructure for that and balancing time spent with likelihood of getting enough for convicting. Standards for admissible evidence are there for a reason, and relaxing them would give much more power to police than to private citizens. This is going to be much worse soon, when deepfakes become popular.
In a high enough crime area otherwise honest people are gonna engage in opportunistic crime because "if I don't someone will". That's also exactly the kind of place the police are gonna go fishing.
I know of more than one junk car that's been dragged out of a particular swamp (because scrap prices were high) with no attempt made to contact the rightful owner. That would get you a felony charge in my state (I'm sure a good lawyer could beat it but still). I know that that's not the same as stealing a bait car but it's pretty close.
>In a high enough crime area otherwise honest people are gonna engage in opportunistic crime because "if I don't someone will".
That is probably the weakest excuse for criminal behaviour I've ever heard. "Someone else was going to steal that car, so it might as well be me"? Bullshit.
If someone's an "honest person" who only engages in crime when they think they can get away with it due to it being unlikely the police will follow up, they never had personal integrity or principles to begin with - they just hadn't been put in a situation where the cost/value proposition of commmiting a crime was worth it.
Maybe stealing cars is a bit of the stretch but if you create more opportunity for crime there will be more crime.
A better example is when the cops stick an under cover officer on the street corner as a hooker and of course she gets picked up because someone who would never pick up a hooker sees one that doesn't have a million hard miles on her and decides to give it a go.
I know my local police used to leave rolls of copper wire on job sites to bait people to steal them. Of course nobody with a brain would leave an unsecured roll of copper wire around like that so the opportunity for the crime doesn't normally ever exist except when the police are baiting.
Both those examples are baiting people who wouldn't otherwise consider the risk reward to be worth it to engage in crime.
Your argument here is boiling down to someone saying "I'm normally a law-abiding citizen, but the crime was just so easy to commit, how could I resist?" To which the proper response is of course "Learn some self-restraint, that's how you could resist."
"You wouldn't be poor, if you worked hard enough to earn more money."
"You wouldn't be fat, if you ate a reasonable amount of healthy foods instead of calorie-rich junk."
"You wouldn't be a criminal, if you had enough moral fiber to obey the law."
I think you are intentionally ignoring a lot of circumstantial factors that have been scrubbed from the strawman hypotheticals.
I believe the canonical example for rating someone on a scale of morality is as follows:
Jack's child is very sick, and may die. The doctor gave him a prescription for a drug that would cure his child in one dose, but when he took it to the pharmacist, he found that they had some in stock, but that single dose cost more than he has ever saved at one time, and even if he could get a loan big enough to buy it, he would never be able to pay off the debt. Jack did notice some holes in the pharmacy's security, though. Should he break in to steal the drug, to save his child? Why?
There are a lot of ways to answer the why, for the question as posed. We are also adding some additional questions. When Jack is caught, how severely should he be punished? Does the reasoning behind the situation change if the police operate the pharmacy as a front, and intentionally inflate the price of life-saving drugs and weaken security, in order to more easily catch people who might rob pharmacies, if allowed the opportunity?
Well yes of course but people's morals get flexible when relatively (relative to them) large amounts of benefit to them (usually money) are involved.
For example, I'm too well paid to shoot you over $10, $100, $1000, $10k, etc. but you keep tacking on zeros and eventually it gets tempting. It's like that but with smaller dollar amounts. People rationalize petty theft all the time by saying things like "well it was there and they weren't using it and I was going to put it (or the money made selling it) to good use". They know it's wrong but they just can't help themselves.
Both of those examples (regardless of whether or not you think sex work should be a criminal matter) are still people knowingly committing crimes.
It doesn't matter whether it was a bait roll of copper wire or a real roll that some person neglected to secure properly, the problem is that they had an opportunity to steal, and took it. Intent matters.
Motive is only one third of the crime triangle. Method and opportunity are usually denied by even the least effort at security. As ancestor posts have mentioned, real people would no more leave a roll of copper wire lying around unsecured than they would leave a $100 bill under a paperweight on a city sidewalk.
The morality encoded into the justice system is not built for the benefit of the people typically getting sent to prisons. Those people may have some ethically defensible justification for having motive to commit crimes. It would not be an arguments the courts would care to entertain, of course. But the argument still remains for all those of us who are not judges. Property laws protect those who already own property, at the expense of those who do not. The enforcement of property law typically tells those who have suffered "petty" property crime to fill out a report and sod off, while those who suffered "grand" property crime get the benefit of police investigation. Ever had a bike stolen? Ever had a car stolen? If the bicycle is one's only means of transportation, and the police refuse to help, so they can investigate the theft of a car from someone that owns two, that person now has a reasonable motive to steal bicycles: society owes them one, and apparently does not consider it a crime worth investigating.
If the law does not equally benefit everyone, those who benefit least are not ethically bound to obey it. If the rules of the game stipulate that a given player cannot ever win, or even advance to second place, that player is justified in not playing the game, or in cheating. In such a situation, would it be better to be vigilant at all times, to stop everyone from cheating (including the winners), or to help the losers to cheat a little, then immediately report their cheating to the other players (eliding over the help that was given), so they can be further penalized? The latter is a dick move, and the former more desirable.
This is why you lock your bicycle to an immovable object during the day, and bring it inside at night. And this is why you secure the spool of copper wire before leaving the jobsite. And this is why you lock your car and don't store Bluetooth-broadcasting valuables in it. It is not necessary to understand why the motive exists, but only to realize that some people will have it, and are not necessarily evil because of it. Deny them the opportunity, and they will not commit that particular crime.
Bait vehicles reduce the crime to merely having the motive.
>Method and opportunity are usually denied by even the least effort at security.
At what point does it become non-opportunistic to steal something? if you have to cut a rope or chain? if you have to kick in a door to get to it?
>The morality encoded into the justice system is not built for the benefit of the people typically getting sent to prisons.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, do you want a justice system where "stealing something is OK as long as it was easy to do" is a core value?
> The enforcement of property law typically tells those who have suffered "petty" property crime to fill out a report and sod off, while those who suffered "grand" property crime get the benefit of police investigation.
This is just pragmatism. Police departments have limited budgets and the community is better served by putting those resources towards more serious crimes. Monetary value of damages is an easy metric to compare the seriousness of crimes, and to prioritise the allocation of budget towards investigations accordingly.
>that person now has a reasonable motive to steal bicycles: society owes them one, and apparently does not consider it a crime worth investigating.
This is incomprehensible thinking to me. Just because you have been wronged does not give you permission to wrong others. The person who stole the bicycle owes it to the victim (or the replacement value), not society.
>If the law does not equally benefit everyone, those who benefit least are not ethically bound to obey it.
If you don't agree with a law you can campaign to get it changed, or leave the jurisdiction where that law is in effect. You do not get a free pass for breaking the law just because you don't like it.
> It is not necessary to understand why the motive exists, but only to realize that some people will have it, and are not necessarily evil because of it.
Having a motive to steal something is not the same as acting on it and actually stealing the thing. Knowingly harming others is evil, to some degree. Obviously stealing some copper is far less of a crime than committing murder, but both are wrong.
>Deny them the opportunity, and they will not commit that particular crime.
Or they'll just go look for another opportunity. Baiting criminals proactively catches people who would commit crimes regardless.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." --Anatole France
I understand if criminal justice reform is not one of your political issues. It's easy to ignore what happens in the system if it is not. But I encourage you to look into it. After you do, tell me that it isn't mainly a mass of unfortunates being lined up to be kicked in the head, systematically, with the genuinely bad people--who really do need to be separated from the rest of us--as a minority of the cases.
Crime is down since 1980, yet prison populations are way up. Why is that? Who are the people getting put in the prisons? Who are the people profiting from this trend?
Having had my car stolen in the last couple years I want to say that I would feel no satisfaction out of getting revenge for my stolen car (it was recovered using GPS). There is a cost for cruelty even if it seems just in the moment. Stare into the void and the void stares into you.
Ok, so I have an alexa in near every room in my house. My kids lose their fire tablets all the time. It would be awesome if there was an alexa skill saying "where is Johnny's Tablet" and it could tell me which alexa it was closet to based on the bluetooth.
Alternatively, I'd prefer it if I could just set off the alarm on the tablet like I can via the "manage devices" section in amazon. But I'm not always at my computer and it is unwieldly as hell. But the bluetooth thing could help me find non-amazon devices like my ipad.
I played around with Bluetooth Low Energy beacons a couple years ago and it seemed really tricky to locate things. Reflections, walls, etc. just introduced too many random variables.
I'd love it to be better. (And maybe newer versions of at least full Bluetooth are.) Something I imagine to be useful if it were sufficiently reliable is some sort of "digital tether" between an Apple Watch and iPhone that buzzes you if you get too far separated. (Obviously not something to use all the time but could be useful in some circumstances.)
I keep thinking of trying a tile tracker except that seriously misplacing my keys or wallet is such an unusual event that it seems like sort of an expensive insurance policy given that (I think?) they all have a finite life with embedded battery.
They do have a finite life, but it's about a year. There are tiles with replaceable batteries (finally) but they're a bit thicker. I usually buy packs when they go on sale.
> Bluetooth device has a unique address called BD_ADDR. It contains two parts: company ID which is unique across the world, and device ID which is unique within the products of the company
Pretty sure this has been a problem at Disneyland for a long time already. I’m sure I read reports of thieves targeting the original Macbook Air back in the day.
"Don't leave valuables in your car that you don't want to risk getting stolen"
I guess the author is bringing this to light in the blog post, but don't people see this in parking lots of shopping malls or community centers to apply this everywhere?
It would be even more relevant, since you're going on a trail and aren't near your car for potentially days at a time depending on route you take... but still! :\
That's a little misleading. It's more like this technique has made stealing stuff from cars more rewarding than just swiping off-brand sunglasses and a CD wallet. It goes from smash & grab at quantity to targeted smashing for quality.
I'd say it's more about how thieves have started to use bluetooth scanners to determine if something very valuable is in your car. If they can tell a macbook is in your car, but your glovebox, center console or trunk are locked, they'll go to extra lengths to break into them.
I believe you can, but not when it’s off. It may depend on your sleep settings (“wake for network activity” or “power nap”). I’m not an expert though — just my recollection.
Then, would the computer not need to listen rather than broadcast?
PS: I know quite a lot about Bluetooth, although mostly about BLE. I don't see a reason why the device should be broadcasting anything. If it is scanning for BLE devices it can do "passive scanning". Is this about ordinary Bluetooth and is that different?
PS 2: Why is this different for Wifi? When a device is not connected to Wifi it sends probe requests for access points. My intuition would blame Wifi rather than Bluetooth. However, perhaps I don't know enough about old-fashioned Bluetooth. Or the device manufacturers have implementations that do not make sense from a privacy/security perspective.
Yeah the technique may be somewhat novel, but the solution (don't leave valuables in your car) is more or less the first thing I learned when I moved to a city 20 years ago.
This and don't overly tint your windows. My friends with tinted windows have suffered far more break ins in my experience. Even if there was nothing to steal it gave the impression of hiding something. Same thing goes for stickers that advertise products you've bought that might be in the car.
Tint used to be tied in closely to the car-audio community. It is also an indication you spend money on your car, and on other luxury items. Notice how often cars with obviously aftermarket tint also have aftermarket wheels. Pretty good target if you ask me. That said, if you leave your macbook on the seat in clear view, broadcasting bluetooth, or blasting music, the non-tinted car will suddenly be disadvantaged.
I used to like tint, but found it was a bigger cop magnet than a crime magnet personally.
No, it’s pretty common to assume that hiding things out of site is fine. Many signs in parking lots even explicitly state not to leave valuables visible.
You are right, but until now it was mostly safe to leave electronics hidden well enough.
For instance when on duty, it is very convenient to just keep a laptop buried in the trunk and go shopping or do anything you want as long as you can get back to the car fast enough.
If thieves start getting clever and putting the stolen goods in a Faraday cage, then add a camera to monitor and capture faces/plates. Hell, add hidden cameras to all major trailheads and don't even bother with the honeypot.
Obviously, there's funding and expertise issues with a solution like this. But is it really that significant or just law enforcement complacency?