> 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.
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.
Ever been to a pawn shop? Everything in a legit operation runs through this process.
>> 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.
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 asked a checkout worker about this once (in Ohio), and they claimed they were made to do it so that the state could pressure people with expired drivers' licenses to renew them. (This was right about when they were ending COVID-related extensions on the expiration dates.) I don't agree with using liquor age laws for that either, but I think if the state wanted invasive personal data, they'd just ask Kroger for it.
Is this a law that mandates scanning of IDs for authenticity purposes or storing that data?
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.
The shop might store the data or misuse it. This is already a solved problem. A privately signed identity that can be verified without transferring any of the data using a device the government provides.
But I already said government too much. This is all non-senses. Transactions should not be monitored.
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.
This new procedure and equipment is partially rolled out at TSA checkpoints across the US, has been for a couple of years now. The agent's computer shows the flight information. No reason to have an extra step to scan a boarding pass since the computer pulls it all up anyways.
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.
Wouldn’t it be pretty obvious you never actually boarded your flight to Detroit? They scan your ticket when you board.
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.
>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.
Sure they do, but in an ostensibly-free state is "you must unlock your devices and give immigration full access to the data within" really a reasonable position? If you wanted to bring sketchy data into the country, surely it'd be easier to do it via a VPN, right?
> When did we become so comfortable with the government mandating presentation of papers and tracking of private transactions?
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 because the allergy medicine might as well just be methamphetamine. That's really more or less what it is, modulo a reduction step. Nobody cares about your allergies, and if you go to buy Sudafed, they're just going to sell it to you. The only thing that will trip you up is if you go from store to store collecting lots of it.
> Nobody cares about your allergies, and if you go to buy Sudafed, they're just going to sell it to you. The only thing that will trip you up is if you go from store to store collecting lots of it.
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, only to discover that a pointless restriction brought about by a failed war on drugs prevented a simple purchase fully intended for treatment of a medical condition.
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.
How much Sudafed did you buy?! The daily purchase limits are pretty high. Did you max out your monthly limit in your hometown before traveling?
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.
Only one box each time, what specific number of pills were included I couldn't say, but these were normal packages and not some costco-esque barrel full of bulk drugs.
It's also the dumbest, worst kind of meth: the kind you make in a 2-liter bottle using camping gas as a solvent, carefully burping it every 5 minutes so the ammonia gas buildup doesn't rupture the bottle. It could be rational to regulate Sudafed even if lab meth was widely available on the street; the lab meth isn't setting huge building fires.
Just as a note, this didn't work at all. They came up with a better chemistry and now there's more meth than there was before. Breaking Bad dramatized this aspect of it (though their chemistry wasn't correct on purpose).
Mexican superlabs put an end to the shake-and-bake method of making meth. And the biggest problem with shake-and-bake meth was the externalities of people making it at home, including bottles that would burst with caustic chemicals, and properties being condemned from the phosphorous in leaching into the walls.
No there’s plenty of meth around, don’t just guess about things. They’re making meth with a new process at industrial scales these days, by the ton. Fentanyl gets a lot of air time on the news these days but don’t confuse that for prevalence in reality, problems aren’t proportional to the amount of attention they get.
The decrease in domestic terrorism is due to societal changes and better old-fashioned policing of home-grown extremist groups. We didn’t somehow make it impossible (or even difficult) to improvise large explosives.
Well, those folks had to spend a few years planning, take flying lessons, dry run everything a few times, and then pull off the most complicated and coordinated terrorist attack in US history.
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.
You're giving the 9/11 terrorists far too much credit.
They were supported/financed by the Saudis[0] and America dropping the ball was the only reason they succeeded.
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.
How well did laws to stop isolated crazy people killing lots of people stop … um … a group of countries investing large amounts of money and years of time into planning and training for the largest single attack on a civilian target in history?
I mean sure, you could also ask how laws against shoplifting fail to stop bank robberies, and it would be just as coherent.
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.
>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.
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’m not sure I understand why you think this reduction can’t be attributed to the law?
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…
They deal with copper, just not copper that obviously is rail. Bring in some old plumbing parts no problem. The only people scrapping railroad parts are being paid by the railroad.
If you make them a lot bigger, copper is an excellent conductor. Silver is better yet, but not by enough to be worth the cost (contrary to popular belief, gold isn't very good, though it is better than iron) aluminum is often used as it is cheaper by enough, but it turns out of have weird properties and so extra care is needed to use it.
>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 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 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.
Is this really the case? Isn't a great deal of stolen art not shown around so it can't be identified? I wonder if most stolen art is kept in vaults and never shown to anyone.
It's funny how you have to argue on HACKER news against government overreach and you get downvoted. It's actually not funny. It's sad. I remember a time the hacker community was very weary of the government. Today they seem to defend it no matter what.
Hackers in the sense that HN uses the term have never been a monoculture. "Government" isn't a monolithic concept either. Some is good but some is not.
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.
The hacker ethos is not limited to computers. The medium doesn't matter. It can be programming or gardening or art or body modification or whatever. The important part of 3 the experimental, curious, often "hacked together" nature of the projects combined with a sort of joy in discovery. Stallman has, for instance, called out particular poets and musicians as hackers.
Ridiculously targeted laws like this are quite a new invention.
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.
I don't think a law like that is really a problem. There are already laws on the books similar to it (pawn shop laws and such) where KYC is a big thing to prevent the fencing of stolen goods.
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.
> There is absolutely no "intrusion" to speak of here.
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.
... an increased burden over private sales of other goods (and over existing standards for sales of catalytic converters), which quite literally constitutes an "intrusion."
There is quite literally a difference between selling a cat to your friend and selling it to a business that makes money liquidating cats (this sentence is actually humorous if you dont know what cat is short for...).
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.
Laws requiring you to provide paperwork don't make you guilty until proven innocent. And there are a lot of laws like that (filing your tax return anyone?).
Maybe it's how you frame anyone who wants actionable solutions as screaming "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?"... Applying very narrow information collection requirements on a rare act that is prone to illegal activity is exactly the type of "government intrusion" we should welcome. If you want a hill to die on, pick something more meaningful.
>...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?
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.
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.