Wireless, GPS-Loaded 'Bait Car' Traps Thieves 794
captainClassLoader writes: "The Washington Post is reporting that a late-model car, loaded with wireless surveillance gear, a remote kill switch and GPS, is being left (unlocked, presumably) on the streets of the Washington, D.C. metro area as 'bait' for car thieves. This article reports that they've just made their first bust with the vehicle."
Hrm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Thieves in my area steal the cars with OnStar right off the light...sure, they catch them but usually it's a little too late.
Arlington, VA (Score:5, Interesting)
But I'm surprised the headline wasn't: Grand Theft Auto Illegal in Arlington, VA (yro, games)!
Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now thanks to the Wasington Post, I know there are a bunch of cars sitting unlocked, and all I need to do to steal them is bring some radio jamming equipment! Sweet!
Re:Fishing for dumbass... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then you grab their address books and check out their phone logs and see who they associate with...
More danger to people... (Score:2, Interesting)
Also I suppose the thieves can just observer the car for a while. If no one uses it for 2 or 3 days then it's a given that's a bait. The cops might have to have people using the car in some realistic way.
d.
Re:I wonder.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Entrappment silliness (Score:3, Interesting)
Entrapment is my promising to send you pictures of hot chicks, then sending you pictures of little kids, then arresting you for having them. You have been persuaded or coerced into committing a crime, whether you'd have committed it yourself later or not.
Bike Theives Must Die!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in NYC and nothing turns my stomach more walking down the sidewalks is seeing a bike chained to a pole stripped everything attached with a bolt. I am an avid cyclist in the city and I would never, ever leave my bike outside because of theft. Cops don't even care. They don't seem to realize that bikes can cost hundred and hundreds of dollars or like my Specialized, thousands. It is a big deal monetarily.
ABC had a 20/20 episode where they had a hidden camera and a bike chained to a post. It took only 5 minutes before the thieves went after it every time they set it up. Typical response of the thief was "Oh, I thought this was my bike. Sorry!", then they would run away.
Re:Out of Curiosity (Score:5, Interesting)
If a male officier acts like a drug dealer and busts a potential client is this entrapment? No.
Now wait a sec. It depends (or should, at least) on how hard the undercover cop insists on the victim (yeah, victim) accepting the illegal service.
I saw a documentary in which an undercover female cop in San Francisco addressed a passerby (yes, she talked to him first) offering a blowjob for $20. He said no. She insisted. She stuck to him. She bugged him to no end for about 5 minutes, slashed the price to $10 until he finally accepted. Then they made the bust. The cops involved swore to God it wasn't entrapment, and the guy had to go through a day-long ritual of hysterical humiliation in order to learn the most evil object in the Universe is the Y chromosome. Sick, I tells ya.
Re:footing the bill (Score:1, Interesting)
Protecting the law-abiding sounds like 'Pearl Harbor' mentality. Don't do anything unless bad things start happening.
Re:Good use of technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Even before that, some of my friends who had nicer hot rods than mine had Line-Locks [mpsmall.com], for which the control was just under the front of the driver's seat. They would set the lock when they left the car in an untrusted place, and if the car was stolen, the first time he hit the brake, it held the pressure.
It was a simple matter to reach down and push the plunger, but if somebody is smart enough to understand that, he'd have a job and buy his own car.
Only the GPS part is new (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:footing the bill (Score:1, Interesting)
Nonsense. The theft is not victimless in the mind of the thief, because he doesn't know that the car is 'bait'.
I'm all for elimination of prohibitions on truly victimless consensual 'crimes' like prostitution and (much) drug use. But calling the current case "victimless" is ridiculous.
Doing this yourself... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can do something nearly simliar with your own car if you want to pay the monthly service charges on CDPD or a similar packet data network. Basically grab a CDPD modem that is capable of telemetry. Tie a NEMA capable GPS receiver to it. When you need to know where your car is telnet to the CDPD modem on a particular port and watch the NEMA stream. Heck, redirect it to something like Delorme AAA Map'n'Go and watch your car drive down the road. I imagine it would be a simple exercise to direct the police to your vehicle.
Now, this working as an effective recovery device depends on the car being able to acquire a GPS signal and maintain it, ability to communicate on the CDPD network, and finding out your car is stolen before it is stripped or the battery is disconnected.
Re:footing the bill (Score:3, Interesting)
It is true that by using this car-bait technique the police will effectively rid the cities of criminals (at least car thieves, but there is no reason this principle could not be used to catch other criminals, such as gamblers and pedophiles). In this way, we achieve the ultimate protection. As one reply said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Likewise, the best defense is a good offense, and we should nip these kinds of activities in the bud.
I do no longer mind funding for as many of these sneaky cars as is necessary to finally clean up the streets of America. My one request is that they be utilized only in areas which have a surplus of parking, and that they not be driven during rush hours. Traffic affects us all in more ways than one.
Boomerang (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.boomerangtracking.com [boomerangtracking.com]
Because of this system many car thiefs in the Montreal area are working differently. Now they steal a car and will leave it in a public parking for a day or two. If the car is still there, i.e. the police did not pick it up, then they will steal it for good.
Re:I wonder.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Lojack blows. I bought that line of crap and purchased Lojack. My car was stolen in broad daylight from a bank parking lot. I was only in for 15 minutes, so I know I caught it in a reasonable timeframe. I called Lojack, they said just report it to the Chicago Police and the system will be activated. Not true. It got activated 4 hours later when the record was transferred from the Chicago computer system to the Illinois computer system. By then, the car was stripped and the Lojack disabled.
What I also learned in the process is the way Lojack works. When it gets activated it starts emitting a signal. When it gets near a lojack equipped cop car, the cop gets a signal then triangulates in on it. If they do not come near a cop car with the right gear, they are free and clear. If they steal it out of your garage at 11pm and you don't discover it until 7am, you are also SOL.
If any of you are thinking of this kind of thing, look for something that is more proactive like periodically (every half hour or so) sending in your location to a computer. Or, even better, sending in the location every minute when an alarm (possibly a silent alarm) has been triggered as this kind of minimizes privacy issues. This kind of thing would allow you to track after the fact where it is (or at least where it last sent a signal from).
Hopefully with GPRS (and/or "3G") packet oriented services this will be cheap to do, and even pretty easy to DIY as you could have it just send the data back to your computer.
Bottom line, Lojack failed me, the process is full of holes well beyond the obvious ones. Also note, their "guarantee" is not for life, only the "service" is. When I tried to collect, they said I was out of warranty and the fact it was not triggered in time was the fault of the Chicago Police, not theirs. It is a typical good idea, poor execution.