This is worse than the original problem. When did we become so comfortable with the government mandating presentation of papers and tracking of private transactions?
Effective, privacy-preserving law enforcement is difficult.
That doesn’t mean we should cut corners through ever-increasing state oversight targeted at the latest symptoms of criminality.
The choice isn’t between laws like this and having your catalytic converter stolen. The choice is between law enforcement actually doing their job, or invasive and ineffectual laws like this.
The justice department, in the very article we’re discussing, investigated and took down this ring without California’s new “KYC” regulations.
>> The choice is between law enforcement actually doing their job, or invasive and ineffectual laws like this.
I'm on guard for overreah all the time, but I'm OK with showing ID to buy alcohol, drive a car, fly on a plane, sell items that should rarely be done in bulk outside of rare conditions, like a bunch of catalytic converters.
you should probably re-evaluate your ideas about personal ID with regards to travel if you're interested in over-reach. These laws are routinely used as an anti-immigration method by ICE and equivalents, and there is very little proof that they do much to make the world any safer.
So now, the government keeps track of what and how much booze I buy. Ugh.
This is beyond stupid, as people stopped thinking I might be under 21 back when the buffalo roamed.
The few other states I could easily find online that had a similar law typically require that retailers either don’t store the data or that they delete it within X days.
But I already said government too much. This is all non-senses. Transactions should not be monitored.
Locally, a large (100+) chain (Plaid Pantry) of convenience stores also is scanning licenses. Saw somebody with an Olde English 40 and a passport.
It's not the law in Oregon (or Washington) but the article says it is in Tennessee. Also says you can ask them to type in the digits of your birthdate.
I took a flight today. I had to show my ID once at the start of the security line where they did NOT check my boarding pass.
Then at the gate they only wanted to see my boarding pass and not my ID.
So basically nobody actually cares about ID when flying. It would have been trivial to buy the ticket in a false name or "borrow" someone else's name without asking.
To be clear, this failing is all on the gate procedure. If security wanted to check boarding pass or if they have to hooked up on the computer there, a simple bypass would be to buy a cheap ticket in your real name and the ticket you intend to fly in some other name.
To get through TSA as a member of the general public, you have to have a ticket (or a non-traveler gate pass) in your real name (matching your ID, soon to be real ID requirement) for a flight leaving in the next N hours. International flights check your passport at the boarding gate. For domestic, sure, you could swap to another boarding pass purchased under a different name, but what's the threat model there? You've already been screened.
Say you've done a crime that will be discovered in a few days. You buy a ticket to Detroit and next week the fbi will be wasting its time looking for you in Michigan and trying to convince Canada to search for you in Ontario.
In reality you hopped on a flight to El Paso under a fake name and you are deep into Mexico by now.
Though totally agree you could fly on a different flight under a fake name assuming that the airlines don’t sync up their records with the IDs the TSA scans at the checkpoints.
I suspect there’s other less visible signals that would make this harder. For example your flight under a fake name might be flagged for being an unknown name/person. Also if you’re on the run it’s hard to buy a flight under a fake name anonymously without a paper trail back to yourself.
The police can — clearly, as per this article — do their job without yet another intrusive privacy overreach being put permanently on the books.
I'm hoping a law helps, but I won't hold my breath.
I'm a big proponent making police do actual police work to catch offenders.
In fact, police use of geo-fencing warrants, genealogical database mining, IMSI catchers and other invasions of privacy are all huge overreaches that should be slapped down hard.
That said, what reasonable mechanism do you suggest for police to use in identifying and deterring the catalytic converter (CC) theft market? Having "legitimate" businesses report on their interactions with CCs seems minimally invasive, as compared with other extremely invasive practices already being used by law "enforcement".
Given that (IIUC) most stolen CCs are broken down for the expensive metals they contain, rather than being sold in a black aftermarket, it's unlikely that police can just find a stolen CC and look at its serial number to determine whether or not it's been stolen.
Are you arguing that we should ignore the issue of stolen CCs because any action is worse, or do you have a reasonable suggestion as to how to address this issue? That's not a jab at you. You seem to have strong feelings about this (I don't), so I'd like to understand what potential alternatives might exist to the new California law. If you'd expand on that, I'd be most appreciative!
While I don't disagree with the idea that police should do, you know, actual police work, rather than trample on the privacy of the population (e.g., all these calls for encryption back doors as well as the stuff I mention above), it's not clear to me what the issue might be here.
Plenty of hackers, for instance, supported the creation of the EPA. I know plenty of permaculture hackers and mycologist hackers who very much want the government regulating pollutants and safety.
After Timothy McVeigh blew up a building with a truck full of agricultural supplies.
The actual bomb planning for the Oklahoma City bombing was less than a year and involved two people. So, seems like the bar was raised quite a bit.
It's not so much a big victory for the terrorists as a big black eye for America and our intelligence agencies.
One of the 9/11 pilots was reported to Federal agencies multiple times[1] and the hijacking still took place.
[0]https://theintercept.com/2021/09/11/september-11-saudi-arabi...
I mean sure, you could also ask how laws against shoplifting fail to stop bank robberies, and it would be just as coherent.
Japan would like to have a word with you.
I see that the “[feeling of] safety above all” contingent is quite voracious about defending this latest government intrusion, so I’ll stop giving them comments to downvote.
It can be as simple as this:
1. Joe brings in a cat
2. Store takes the cat, but writes down Joes important information (DL #, name, address, etc)
3. If Joe brings a new cat in within some reasonable time period factoring in possibly fixing a used car or something he's reported to the authorities for suspicion of theft.
Exceptions to (3) can be made to people who can present the valid credentials of an auto repair shop and are operating as agents of that shop. Then the shop can be placed in the record book and tracked with different standards.
With this in place you will only be able to fence X number of cats easily where X is the number of shops within some reasonable distance. You could even make this national if you really wanted to prevent transportation over a border.
Sure, you could argue this won't fix anything because shops that are dirty will remain dirty. This is simply solved by having an already existing traffic enforcement body once a year check books. If your books are out of order your business is closed and an investigation is done to see if you're acting as a fence. Same as pawn shops.
There is absolutely no "intrusion" to speak of here. You are in possession of a highly valuable, commonly stolen item. KYC by a company should be a minimum standard. Do you think that requiring a car title and asking for registration, etc when you sell a car to a lot is also an intrusion? I'm afraid to ask you if you even know what fencing actually is. No one is saying you can't cut your own cat off and sell it privately. The goal is to eliminate the easiest possible routes for fencing and make it not only difficult but also expensive criminally to continue.
Well, there is, actually. I think it's a bit histrionic to worry about it, but we definitely have intruded on Joe's freedom to buy and sell cats. Maybe he's into cat arbitrage. Maybe he makes them himself. Maybe he's got a lot of cars he doesn't need to drive and is strapped for cash. The point of the sticklers for freedom here is that regular citizens shouldn't need an explanation for why they're buying or selling a particular thing to another private party, and therefore tracking the fact that they did is an intrusion.
It's not technically wrong. It's an intrusion. It just happens to be an intrusion I think is reasonable.
No we haven't. Joe is free to resell converters, provided he proves he obtained them legally, which is trivial _if_ you obtained them legally.
... an increased burden over private sales of other goods (and over existing standards for sales of catalytic converters), which quite literally constitutes an "intrusion."
I have no interest in stopping Joe from selling to Bob, or going on craigslist and selling his wares if he, for some reason, has figured out a way to manufacturer with rare earth metals in his garage. Though I think this is a bit of a stretch of the normal argument. First, because catalytic converters are exceedingly hard to create. Second, because the profit is not in arbitrage but rather theft. Making a catalytic converter is very expensive. There are only a dozen or so companies with the infrastructure to make them at a scale that is profitable. Hence, if we could magically wish away cat theft it would not be remotely profitable to do some kind of rare earth arbitrage by the books. So, ipso facto, it is a good place to enforce at the very least a minimum amount of KYC with associated punishments when third party sales to businesses who do this sort of thing is involved.
I understand the arguments from the other side are the same arguments made for the KYC surrounding the $10,000 withdrawal limit to "stop drug money". I disagree with that kind of KYC. When in 99% cases they are ill gotten gains there must be something done because the alternative is foisting the cost ($300-$XXXX dollars) onto the innocent and throwing your hands up. Worse yet, it's not a one time cost and these criminals, undeterred, will simply return to steal the new one as well. This is no way to treat law abiding citizens.
(Some?) modern catalytic converters have much less rare earth minerals, making them less (not?) profitable to steal.
> this sentence is actually humorous if you dont know what cat is short for...
Your parent comment had me thinking you were making a weird cat analogy until the cutting part.
Have you ever run a business? You have to track a lot already. For the IRS, for your business license, for auditing, for compliance depending on what goods and services you sell. You know like firearms, tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals are big ones, but also animals, chemicals, certain kinds of technology. If you require a federal permit, if you sell goods across state, international, if you ship things. Like, I feel like this cat came out of the bag before the 18th century, based on my understanding of the regulation of businesses in the United States.
That's not true. First they don't just sell it to you, they take your ID, record your information, send that to the state, and then sell it you. Going to one store after another after another collecting lots of pills isn't the only thing that will trip people up either. I've had times when I was told I couldn't purchase allergy medication because I'd purchased some already. I had recently, for the family, but I was traveling and didn't have the medication with me.
I wasn't going around to a bunch of stores buying mass quantities of allergy medications, I'd made a purchase once and several days/weeks after tried to make a second purchase. I can't imagine I'm the only person alive who has failed to bring a medication with them while traveling, or suddenly had need for it when they didn't have some immediately on their person, or made a purchase and soon after lost it, and discovered that a pointless restriction brought about by a failed war on drugs prevented a simple purchase fully intended for treatment of a medical condition when it was needed.
Maybe a more sane threshold for treating people like criminals would help the situation, but honestly the entire program seems like a waste of time of money at this point.
Really, if we're this wound up about the situation, the answer is simple: just make Sudafed require a prescription, like a zillion other medications. The problem with Sudafed is extremely straightforward: it is a very trivial chemical reaction away from being methamphetamine.
Some states have made the requirement for prescriptions, but it hasn't done them much good https://www.huffpost.com/entry/meth-laws-oregons-prescriptio...
I'm no fan of meth labs, but this just seems like a bad solution being made worse by poor implementation.
Requiring a prescription for common cold medicine raises the price of cold relief from $12 to $100+.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of people buying allergy medicine have the sniffles, not a meth lab.
There’s always a “safety” justification for further privacy intrusions by the police.
If they can’t do their job without intrusive, non-targeted government monitoring of the general public, the police need to get better at their jobs.
Like... meth exists.
In Britain, criminals were stealing the thick, copper cables used for power and signaling of the railway. They wrapped a chain around cables near a road crossing, attached it to a truck, and dragged a significant length of cable away, to sell as scrap.
That naturally means the railway can't be used for many hours, occasionally over a day, and costs a tremendous about to repair. (It is one of the most safety-critical large systems around.) There's huge disruption, as 600 people per train every 20 minutes simply don't fit on any other means of transport.
Compared to catalytic converters, the disruption to society is far greater, the replacement cost much higher, and the scrap value relatively lower.
About 10 years ago, a law was introduced forbidding scrap metal dealers from paying cash, and requiring them to check ID. That led to a 30% drop in theft.
Is that a reasonable law?
My ass it did. I've worked in the metal recycling industry.
Getting payment in some form other than cash doesn't deter people who were already willing to commit a crime. They have a buddy scrap it and the buddy takes a cut for taking on the risk.
Yards don't want the .gov snooping around because that never leads to anything good. At the very best it's a delay and distraction. So if you come in with something the .gov is going hard on this month (cats, railway cable, whatever) they will tell you to fuck off to some other yard. And when it's a PITA to fence shit shit doesn't get stolen. That's where you're getting your 30% reduction, not the law. The government is just such a PITA to deal with that scrap yards would rather leave money on the table than have to deal with officer Donut coming by every now and then to check their books.
I think you might have a point that this law may have also deterred 30% of legitimate copper scrap transactions, if basically it made scrap dealers decide not to bother with copper at all…
The U.S. has always been like this, especially since taking down the mob in the 70's and the War On Drugs in the 80's. Out of all the laws, most people aren't going to be hemmed up with catalytic converter KYC compared to things such as the War On Drugs and the watering down of the 4th amendment.
An "a lot to unpack" comment adds little value by itself. It's basically a verbal reaction emoji.
‘Bills of sale evidencing acquisition of all major component parts used to restore the vehicle. If the vehicle was wholly or partially restored with “used” parts, the receipts must contain the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) of the vehicle(s) from which the part(s) were taken.’
The assumptions baked into your comment are probably the most Massachusetts thing I've heard all week.
The yard just has to check that the vins match the paperwork and that you match the name on the title.
Doors aren't serialized (models that put vehicle info on the driver's door not withstanding). Wheels aren't serialized. Those were sitting there because some employee wanted them, either for personal use or to sell.
Source: Worked in industry, in MA no less.
The fundamental problem here is that pretty much every car has a fairly unsecured cat underneath it and that law enforcement DGAF. The problem will persist until you fix one of those two.
I'd like to be respectable with regards to opposing views about this but wtf did people think would happen following these things?
California just passed a law to this end, which is pretty straightforward and effectively turns the grey market into a black market. A black market will still exist, but it will be a lot harder for legitimate junkyards, auto repair shops, and recycling facilities to look the other way.
It basically mandates KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures for companies that buy or sell catalytic converters, and it makes buying or selling a catalytic converter without documentation that it was obtained legally a crime. It won't completely eliminate the problem, and it'll be harder unless Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico also take similar steps. But it should also enable more targeting and auditing. One part of this case was filed in California, so I bet they had some kind of sting operation that was made a lot easier when they can lean on a low-level junkyard dealer to testify against the people higher up in the black market.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-25/newsom-s...