Stolen iPad's Reported Location Not Enough To Warrant Search, Say Dutch Police 619
lbalbalba writes "A location message sent from a stolen iPad by an anti-theft application turns out to be insufficient evidence to issue a search warrant for the Dutch authorities. A Dutch man reported his iPad as stolen to the Dutch authorities last month. Despite the fact that the rightful owner was able to locate his iPad within hours of the theft, thanks to the anti-theft application he had installed, the Dutch authorities did not issue a warrant to perform a search. According to the prosecutors, a search warrant is 'a very heavy measure,' that should only be used when there is 'sufficient suspicion.' The theft report by the owner was viewed as 'no objective evidence' in the case."
Plan B. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
And once again we find that it's only true to a government if their own agencies or personnel tell them it's so. A private citizen should be able to produce evidence and have it considered with the same weight as something produced by a policing force. Providing obtaining that evidence didn't violate the law in any way.
You can bet that if it had been the police that can up with that GPS location they would have a warrant in hand tight now.
Re:Happened to a friend of mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plan B. (Score:1, Insightful)
In Holland, like in most of the civilized world, people don't have pistols in their nightstand.
Re:Happened to a friend of mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the way it should be. Any Joe Programmer can make an app that makes it look like stolen goods are behind that closed door. Taking evidence from theft prevention and tracking apps is the exact same as taking the victim's word for it.
Not Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not what this is about at all. The Netherlands is a country that takes its fundamental privacy-from-the-police assurances more seriously than the US does.
Funny... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like those guns are doing a great job of protecting you. It's almost as if a culture that regards force as a valid solution to disputes encourages crime...
Re:Funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
No Dutch police thought that the iPhone theft was none of their business because that happened on an entirely different continent.
Re:Plan B. (Score:2, Insightful)
'Tiny little Holland' is one of the densest populated countries in the world, what's your point?
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as if you don't know how statistics work. ("burglaries per 100,000 people").
If you want to keep chanting "we're #1", then please stop justifying gun ownership on the basis that you have lots of poor people.
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now look at education statistics in the US vs. Holland. We have so much crime here for reasons that have nothing at all to do with firearms. If we'd adopt something more like Dutch drug laws, or address inner-city education and culture issues, we'd have less crime. There are a whole lot more differences between the Americans and the Dutch that have nothing to do with guns.
Washington DC is one of the most crime-ridden cities in the US. It's also nearly impossible to legally own a firearm there. Same with Chicago.
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the figures are per 100,000 people, I see no reason not to compare them. Holland has a much greater population density giving greater opportunities for burglary. The two countries have very similar average incomes, though spread differently.I think the comparison is as reasonable as any country-to-country comparison.
Re:Plan B. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd gladly take the false 911 charges over being robbed and possibly killed.
Re:Happened to a friend of mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Liability. It always comes down to liability. Lojack stands behind their product and their training. That's why police departments trust it. It's the same with OnStar calling an ambulance on your behalf or your ability to prove that a car belongs to your by showing matching photo ID and vehicle registration. These are well funded systems with throngs of support people, very high risk, and thus very high insurance for their products and actions.
When liability is externalized and the PD can point to another entity to say, "Hey, it's their system. If they're wrong and we do wrong by trusting them, they will hold the liability." When they can't, they don't trust the external identification system.
If you want the PD to trust Apple's Find My Phone or similar programs, they have to start a relationship with various PDs, give them training, and have massive insurance themselves. Then the cost of such programs will go up and actually start to match the value of the service (just like Lojack).
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistics for burglaries per 100,000 people, using the most recent figures I could find (2006):
Looks like those guns are doing a great job of protecting you. It's almost as if a culture that regards force as a valid solution to disputes encourages crime...
On the other hand, in the UK whith some of the strictest gun laws in the world, there were 1,157.7 burglaries per 100,000 people (also, conveniently, in 2006 statistics). It's almost as if two data points are insufficient to establish a causative or even correlative relation of any kind.
Re:Happened to a friend of mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to consider what the other possibilities are.
I see a guy put an iPad in the trunk of his car. I call the police and say that my iPad was stolen, and describe the car and the license place number. So what do they do? Arrest the guy with the iPad, and let you walk with it?
Your evidence is shaky at best. So you put some tracking software on his device? You fabricated some evidence? It's not unreasonable to believe that you may spend a few minutes fabricating evidence to steal a $500 toy.
If it were something like a stolen car, you'd have a better chance with it, because the car is registered with the state. If you've identified him, file a civil charge against him.
We had an incident in California, where a friends store was shot up in the middle of the night. We compiled video evidence from the surveillance cameras. He circled the building once before shooting out the front windows. There were distinguishing marks on the vehicle. A couple store employees recognized the vehicle, and identified who the owner was. We went to the guys house, and I shot video of the distinguishing marks on the vehicle and license plate number. I wrote an affidavit stating the evidence discovered, the purpose of making the video of the vehicle, when and where the videos were made, and other details that I personally knew and discovered.
We provided the videos and affidavit to the police. It got stuck in a pile and ignored. It took about 2 weeks, and multiple calls from the owner of the store to finally get a detective to look at it. When he did review it, he thanked us for handing him the case on a silver platter.
They cross referenced it with other cases, and found the same caliber weapon was used in other incidents in that area, on the same night.
With this evidence, they got a search warrant for the guys vehicle and house. When they arrived, he told them everything. He was drunk, and pissed off, so he shot at businesses that he thought had wronged him. He told them where to find the gun, which was under the seat of his vehicle.
Video evidence of the crime. Identification of the person involved, and vehicle involved, with a few affidavits stating the facts. That's evidence.
If I just said "Hey, my iPad is in the trunk of his car, go arrest him" isn't evidence. Sure, they could ask him. What's he going to say? "No, that's my iPad." It falls into "unreasonable search and seizure" if they search his car anyways.
Consider the opposite.
I know you have an iPad. So I call the police and say you stole my iPad, because I can show the IP belongs to the same provider that yours does, or the GPS signal was last seen in the vicinity of your house. You'd be very upset to have the police knocking on your door, demanding to search the premises for a stolen iPad, and even more so if they seized *your* iPad with some schmuck saying "nope, that's mine".
Re:Happened to a friend of mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Had he not reported the stolen shotgun and the thief got caught shooting someone with it, they'll assume he sold the firearm to a convicted felon and arrested him.
Yes, if the thief is the victim of an attack, he'll certainly be a "person of interest" but do you rally think a criminal is going to call the cops because somebody beat the shit out of him? The thief won't even call the cops if your friend broke the thief's trunk open and got his phone and gun back.
Thieves generally avoid the police whenever they can.
Re:Plan B. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why this is so sad. A geek site? People supposed to be generally good at math? Yet you see just as many bullshit statistics thrown around here as on Fox News comment sections.
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's more to it than just population density. Compared to the US, Holland has a much better social net to prevent the proliferation of crime that poverty brings.
When you're hungry, it's easier to break laws to eat. A liberalized drug policy also doesn't force people to become criminals and basically lock them out of the career workforce by making recreational users felons and career criminals. I'll admit I don't know, but I'm pretty sure there isn't that disaffected youth "gang culture" that glorifies basically rejecting honest work, education, and trying to better oneself that seems to be pervasive with the poor within the US's densely populated cities.
Re:Plan B. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I think you just hit on the crux of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, all of that detective work is completely and utterly inadmissible in court. They need to do it, otherwise the chain of custody is broken and they can't prove it wasn't tampered.
I honestly don't know why they can't use that as a reason to investigate (i.e. go search the guy's house), since they'd then have proof that he was in possession of stolen goods, but that first bit is their logic.
It was the right thing to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Having a tracking software on your device is means next to nothing, as there is no way you can prove the police that it really is your device and it really is there. The only thing they have is your word, or maybe isn't even that, because you don't have control over the device anymore: the thief could just as well submit fake data. If this was enough for a search there would be hundreds of ways to misuse it to cause harm to someone, and people here would cry fascism and police brutality. But when there is a shiny Apple device at stake, civil liberties doesn't seem to be that important all of a sudden.
Re:Happened to a friend of mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's almost as if a culture with a huge population of poor people encourages crime. It's cute to compare tiny little Holland to the US though.
Don't forget retarded people, because it's the only country I know that doesn't understand concepts like "per person", "per square kilometer" or other forms of normalization.
"Guns in nightstands protect against crime" "Here's some crime figures per 100,000 inhabitants" "Cute, but you can't compare a big and small country" "???"
"We can't build fast Internet in the US, the population is too thin." "Uh but this country does with a lower population density than yours (people/km^2)" "Cute, but you can't compare a big and small country" "???"
"We're not so bad polluters, China emits more CO2 than us" "Yes but China is 1.33 billion people and you're 300 million, per person you emit more than triple what a Chinese person does." "Hurr durr, I ignore what you said and China is worse". "???"
Arguing here I get enough stupid from both posters and moderators to make me want to tear my hair out and then I remember this is supposed to be the intelligentsia of the US, the nerds. I guess that's true when I see the support a guy like Santorum has, but you're over a hurdle about two inches high. Could someone please teach Slashdot some remedial math classes so my intelligence stops being insulted? Believe it or not, it is possible to compare the US to other countries even if they have different sizes and populations. Everywhere else this is accepted but here I sometimes feel like I just preached evolution in a southern baptist church group.
iPad apps aren't perfect (Score:3, Insightful)
To put this in a slightly different context, raiding an address because of the location prodived by an app doesn't always work out [thisisnottingham.co.uk]:
It then goes on to quote an academic as saying:
So yeah, just because apps are handy doesn't mean they'll always provide enough evidence to raid somewhere on.
Re:Plan B. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just to chime in on this point, from what I've heard (I've never looked it up myself) the city in Texas I lived while I was in high school (late '90s, early 2000s) and where my parents are still living has the highest concealed carry per capita in the entire state, and also has the lowest violent crimes rate per capita in the entire state.
Again, this is just anecdotal, and one point of data does not a trend indicate, but I always found it interesting. I also found it interesting that I was never aware of anyone carrying (aside from officers and others who openly carry). Either I was very naive, very unobservant, or the people who are licensed to carry do a good job of concealing it like they're supposed to. I'm leaning towards a mix of all three.
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
Horseshit! Most people who own (hand)guns own them for "home protection", presumably burglary & home invasion.The problem with that is that most people never experience a home invasion, unless they're involved in the distribution or manufacture of illegal drugs. And burglars typically don't come armed, since if they're caught doing a burglary while armed the penalties are much harsher.
So these people who own guns for "home protection" are not typically carrying them when they are assaulted or robbed on the street.
On top of all that is the actual usefulness of guns in the first place. Unless you're well trained and practicing regularly, handguns are pretty useless for actually shooting a person who doesn't want to be shot. Ever go to a gun range? If you do, look at how ridiculously close most handgun shooters have their targets. At that range, you're better off running up to your foe and punching them. Shotguns and rifles are far better firearms for shooting under pressure of threat. But most citizens can't walk around their city armed with a rifle or shotgun.
Most of the arguments for handgun ownership are specious at best. And the most ardent gun advocates live in areas with very little threat from "the bad guys".
And for what it's worth, yes, I am a handgun owner.
Re:It was the right thing to do (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a tracking software on your device is means next to nothing, as there is no way you can prove the police that it really is your device and it really is there. The only thing they have is your word, or maybe isn't even that, because you don't have control over the device anymore: the thief could just as well submit fake data. If this was enough for a search there would be hundreds of ways to misuse it to cause harm to someone, and people here would cry fascism and police brutality. But when there is a shiny Apple device at stake, civil liberties doesn't seem to be that important all of a sudden.
I would think that he could get the paperwork showing the serial number of THAT device matches the deivce he purchased, Images of HIM/friends on the phone, etc.
Sadly, this "too much" effort isn't just for things like this. A few years ago, I had someone illegally use my CC # and make charges. I got the money back but I also had contacted every company where an illegal purchase was made, and finally tracked one that could correlate my home addy to the theif's order. I got their Name, Address, phone, etc.
When I filed the police report (per my Bank's orders), NOTHING happened. As far as I can tell, this person didn't get arrested and whatever had been shipped to him, he got to keep. (The only good thing was the companies he'd bought from flagged his name if he ordered again).
Re:Plan B. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You'll be hearing from the Thought Police. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a huge difference between USA == BAD and "hey, here's some other country that is doing better at something than we are, maybe we should take a closer look at what's going on so maybe we can improve our own situation."
But it's tough to point that out to the USA #1! crowd. To them, any acknowledgment that we aren't the bestest at absolutely everything is an attack on the US itself.
--Jeremy