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Can anyone just put a container on a ship? I'm curious why the senders wouldn't be registered, and then extra scrutiny is given to newly registered senders, and senders are blacklisted and fined/jailed if it's found they're attempting to ship stolen goods under false manifests.
> Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to operate and co-operate more freely than ever before, and establish global supply chains.

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?

> > Encrypted communications have enabled...

> 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.

cf. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crl873p51zro

It is pretty strange that a country doesn't control what is going in and what is going out. In a small European country I'm most familiar with, everything is checked by customs officers. Dogs, x-rays, customs declarations, import taxes.
Sounds like a market opportunity for cheaper phones and cars globally.
A high Chechnya bureaucrat was several months ago stopped by Dagestan police for reckless driving that happened to be DUI. Before Chechen SWAT came to rescue the police had managed to check the car, and it happened to be stolen in Canada. That was one of the several high-end cars Kadyrov publicly gifted to his ministers.
> There is also almost no deterrent: Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes (and 2% of vehicle thefts)

Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?

With all the technology that exists today, I'm surprised that we haven't invented something that would make it logistically and economically feasible to do a quick scan of e.g. all containers going into a port.
I know this opinion is anathema on HN, but this is one reason I like Teslas.

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.

Meanwhile police in Canada won't do anything about your stolen car even when you show them it's right there in a rail/shipping yard in your city.

- 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.)

130,000 car thefts a year. That's over £1bn loss, probably closer to £4bn. In this context the total police budget of around £20bn seems remarkably low!

You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!

Showing a completely legal electronics market in HQB in Shenzhen and claiming it's selling stolen phones is rather unfair - there is a building not far from that market that sells and recycles phones mostly by stripping them for parts and rebuilding them from scratch, but it's not that perfectly legal market that is so much fun to shop at