Slashdot Mirror
Stolen iPad's Reported Location Not Enough To Warrant Search, Say Dutch Police
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."
That is when you grab the pistol out of the nightstand, take a cab over to the criminals house, break down the door and take justice into your own hands. At least you tried the legal way first.
Whatever you do,
whatever happens:
Don't call the police.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
A friend of mine in California had his house broken into. His iPad and a shotgun were stolen. He tracked the phone to the trunk of a car, told the police, and they did nothing.
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.
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
Here they walk in and take all your meth, instead.
The Dutch police doesn't even enter an house when there are two of them and they literally hear someone get tortured to death. I'm not making this up; this actually happened. The officers in front of the house could hear screams and moans and did absolutely nothing.
Want more? Neighbors heard a woman cry and scream for help and it sounded so distressful that they called the police. The police came, rang the doorbell an after a small talk they left, never to bother with his again. 3 months later it turned out that the woman in question was being held by her will, prostituted, treated in extreme inhumane ways and well... "The police thinks they may have made a mistake by not entering the premices".
And the list goes on and on.
On the positive side. If you manage to speed a little on the Dutch highways (you know, reckless driving where you dare to drive 85 - 86 km/hr instead of the allowed 80 km/hr) then chances are very high that you will get a speeding ticket. That's where the Dutch police truly excels.
So quite frankly, within this context this can hardly come as a surprise.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
...they seemed to think it was enough when the iPhone 4 prototype was stolen.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
This also applies in Canada and the UK. Recovered my bicycle by intimidating everyone until I traced it to the person who stole it. Worked pretty well surprisingly.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
And if I am sitting on the jury after you are through, you are going in for assault with a deadly weapon. The guy you beat will probably do less time.
Despite what you read in comic books, vigilante justice is an oxymoron, tough guy,
No... not in the Netherlands.
He could file for trespassing at least (more if the door is not unlocked). But not for theft. And he would of course have to explain how the stolen iPad ended up in his house. So he probably wouldn't do it.
It might be worth to try and just walk up to the door and knock, then offer the person a chance to give the device back without involving the police.
next election, loudly support his opponent, making un-recovered property / un-acted upon information a major plank.
Because I know for damn sure if I was in the same situation I would go recover the stolen property myself.
This sounds like a great way to get the shit beaten out of you (unless it's one of your "friends" who stole the bike).
As evil as it is, this is why vigilantism exists.
All he has is a location his device was at, not who brought it there, or why it was brought there. He also only has his statement the device was there. Not a lot of evidence, all told.
Yeah, riiiiight.
Come on, that comment was funny, definitely not flamebait. Someone here has no sense of irony.
unlike the "Find my iPad" type apps.
The LoJack system only starts transmitting when the cops tell it to (perhaps whether or not the car has actually been reported stolen?).
A system that the property owner can activate independently of the cops just makes work for the police, without the possibility of being able to be used by the cops to track you without your knowledge or consent.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
If I lived in an area where people carried guns around while stealing *bicycles* ... well I would probably be in a different line of work, I doubt I'd be a slashdot reader or programmer; and those kinds of people wouldn't be stealing bicycles, they'd be stealing cars and mugging people. Also, mods, I wasn't trolling. To state as a fact how some people reclaim property is not trolling, grow up.
Somewhere between the growing totalitarian hell of the US and UK and the apparently overly-respectful approach of the Dutch... Somewhere, is there a sane country where I can live?
As evil as it is, this is why vigilantism exists.
That and because vigilantism incredibly cool, although I'm not sure the word vigilantism is cool...just vigilante. Clint Eastwood plays a fine vigilante. Men on film used to review vigilante films "A couple-a hot sweaty mens taking matters into their own hands and lookin' to each other for their strongth"
I thought the approach I mentioned and Zeromous vindicated was a perfectly normal masculine response to stolen property. Damn it's like I was the only person here to goto a public high school and to think defending myself and my property is normal.
My point is that most times dealing with stolen property doesn't NEED involve police. If you KNOW where your iPad is, what kind of person are you not to get it back yourself?
We pay cops to do violence on our behalf -- under the premise that the controlled use of violence is a specialized trade and that we ought to leave it to folks who are good at it.
The trouble comes when the cops are bad at their job -- what do we do then? Do it for them?
Reality is, cops generally don't want citizens "interfering" in the law enforcement process,in any way, shape or form. That's why you regularly hear stories of individuals getting arrested for chasing down a criminal who broke into their home, etc. etc. The typical line? "Leave that work to the police!"
Sure, they want you to call them and make the initial report (as long as they consider it something serious enough to be worthy of their time and energy -- which varies wildly by department and what they've got on their plate). But they don't want you to do any "detective work" for them.
A friend of mine had his truck broken into, right in front of my house, some years back. They stoke his new Alpine stereo head-unit, his cellphone and his wallet, which he had under the seat. He called the cops and besides dusting for fingerprints on his truck's door, they didn't do much of anything but take an initial report.
He got the idea to try calling his cellphone, and the thief actually answered the phone! He got the guy to agree to meet him in a public parking lot at a certain time, by promising him he'd pay him some cash just to get back his wallet with drivers' license and other info in it (and told him he could keep the stereo). He called the cops to tell them what he managed to arrange, and you know what their response was? They didn't have the time or resources to go out there and wait around for the thief to show up!
After that, he realized he was able to log into his cellphone provider's website and get a detailed call log of everywhere the thief called using his phone. The guy had been using it to call girlfriends, buddies, etc. etc. The log was 3 or 4 pages long with local calls the guy was making! He printed that out and gave it to the cops. Guess what? They still couldn't manage to do anything with it!
He wound up better off just claiming all the losses on his insurance and getting all new stuff .... but it just goes to show? Cops completely disregard any detective work done by anything other then their own people, even if it's really GOOD work that would make an arrest a piece of cake for them.
Demanding someone return property under the threat of violence is not itself violence. I don't need to rely on Big Brother to do every god damn thing for me.
Ad Hominem much?
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
Something I don't understand --
> 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."
So, what *would* be considered objective evidence? Does a law enforcement offer actually have to witness a crime before the authorities will pursue it? So, for instance, I'm robbed on the street, but there's no objective evidence that it happened because the crime was not observed? How does that work in The Netherlands?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You don't need a search warrant to ring the bloody doorbell and ASK about the stolen property. But even that was too much bother. Funny though, the police had absolutely no problems breaking into my house simply because my downstairs neighbor told the police I was away for a week and my cats were left on their own. I actually was away for 2 days and my parents fed them.
Remember the mantra: USA == BAD.
It makes things easier for so many people.
No brain, no pain.
I've taken the train from Amsterdam to Schiphol many time and never had a problem. I guess I just don't look like a victim.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yet if you don't do that detective work the police won't do anything because an ipod isn't worth investigating.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Anyone can use facts.
Do some work like the others, just base your opinions on how goood they make you feel.
Facts are for loser's and boring people.
No brain, no pain.
This reminds me of this story:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/02/2027210/did-apple-impersonate-police-to-recover-the-lost-iphone-5
The police assisted corporate security folks from Apple to search the house for their missing iphone. This guy had is house searched, even though he just found the phone laying there. But if you are the average Joe Schmoe and you actually got it stolen instead of left it at a bar like an idiot, then you are SOL.
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.
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.
There are cops and then there are cops. This reminds me of a coworker that received a phone call from the local police. It seems he had a bad break-up with his ex-girlfriend who called them and said he hacked her Facebook account.
Listening to the other end of this conversation was fun.
"Who is this?" Friend
"mumble,muble" Cops
"What the fuck? Really, I hacked her facebook account? I can't believe we are having this converstation. (Several profanities later) Goodbye" Friend
Cops then called his parents, who called him and things went away after that.
21st Century Renaissance Man
To put this in a slightly different context, raiding an address because of the location prodived by an app doesn't always work out:
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.
Oh, certainly. That's what I mean by "cops being bad at their jobs" -- and, besides, just because we pay the government to build roads for us doesn't mean that we shouldn't build our own roads, too, when the situation warrants it.
My point was really that when the cops *are* bad at their jobs, we *have* to take their jobs back into our own hands, since we're the ones who gave them to the cops in the first place.
For those playing at home: network tracking and identification isn't enough to even grant a search warrant for theft of physical property, but it's enough evidence to convict in a case of "theft" of intellectual property.
Double standards much?
But nice to know that the police are not as invasive as they are in the US, unless of course they were just to busy at the donut shop to follow up on the iPad, or whatever passes for donuts in that part of the World (smoke and a pancake?)
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It naturally depends on your financial situation, but to me it would be worth it. I'm not going to be a willing victim just because the police refuse to do their jobs.
That's not entirely true. The phone records from his own cell phone account are fine, although the cops might have to request a copy themselves to be sure of their validity. And the person doing the detective work can testify about the things they found. Those things might not be able to be presented as evidence items themselves but they can still be testified about.
Each side has their own version of events. When it comes to conflicting stories from a university professor and a cop, I'd take the word of the professor every time.
Not that profs never lie. But I know cops lie regularly.
You are among the majority of people who think that the police should have special privileges beyond the minimum needed for the performance of those among their duties which are just. I do not agree.
Police officers are individuals. I've seen them be far more nasty than the situation required. I've seen them receive abuse without responding, that no person should have to endure. The fact that there aren't a whole lot more Darwin award recipients among those abusing policemen is a great commendation for the police in general.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I am dutch, in Amsterdam the Bijlmer is a high-rise area that used to be thought of as the way of the future, relatively large high-rise apartments with lots of greenery, a subway and train station... it failed and became an area where... well there is no nice way to say it, the blacks live.
Not to long ago during a police raid on an apartment some jumped down and died. The claim? The police should in future call ahead that they were going to come for a raid so that the criminals they had come to arrest wouldn't feel the need to jump down to flee... and people wonder why the majority in Holland is fed up with the bleeding heart approach of Job Cohen, a man under whose wise rule as mayor of Amsterdam saw racial tensions increase, race riots, the rise of the right, Muslims attacks on gays, the failure of costly new projects to try to house the layers of society together (IJburg where it was tried to get mixed incomes in the same apartment blocks). Also the guy managed to get mushrooms banned which are a drug with ZERO bad effects on society (no crime, no drug addicts, no health effects).
Holland is smaller and you can't compare the Bijlmer with possibly Harlem of the past but what is ALSO lacking is things like the guardian angels where the locals cleared up their own mess.
Holland tried one approach and failed at it. See the current "uproar" about the website for reporting trouble caused by polish people in Holland. This is scary as hell, especially in how the left reaction just fuels the growing hatred. Godwin be damned, but just as MS didn't win so much because it was so good but won because everyone else sucked even worse. Hitler didn't get to power because he was so brilliant, he got to power because the opposition was so ineffective.
that is why the US has such though anti-drugs measures, because the pro-people are completely unable to form an effective opposition. See the distancing of medical drug users from the abusers. 4/20 is supposed to be a celebration of responsible recreational and medical drug users, not get high as a skunk day.
The best way to loose your battle is to choose representatives that rub everyone else the wrong way. I am personally not that intrested in drugs one way or another, but talk to one doper for a minute and I start think that shooting all of them would not be a bad idea at all.
See this very story, AND the other story about some idiot getting caught with weed. Cosh, I wonder how many who want the police to burst in on the evidence of an app, ALSO protest the police searching a car in which drugs were found on the evidence of a trained dog... Want to make me believe in your cause? Try to at least be consitent with in the same paragraph.
Anyway, Holland is no paradise. The left forgot that a social society has to be supported by the middle class and thought that all the justification needed was "because we say so". Then the right marched in with scare stories and the left totally forgot how to win a debate with strong factual arguments. Every single debate between Wilders and Cohen was a bloodbath with Cohen totally unable to counter the rabid hatred of Wilders. I fear Hitler less then I fear the likes of Chamberlain.
See the current Republican candidates in the US. They make Bush look sane, even reasonable. You would almost hope that it was a plot to ensure Obama wins the next elections by creating a opposing candidate nobody would vote for... but people are voting for these rabid loonies. This time, it is not even a clear win for the least loony.
Prepare for a LOT more crazy stuff, both in Holland and the US. Good times are not coming.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Liked your phone calls list, that reminds me of the time someone stole my wife's personal info and set up a phone line under her name.
A HOME phone line.
They then racked up about $1,000 worth of calls from their residence in another state. Then I get the bill. Right... I don't live there, I live here... never been there. "No problem, obvious case of fraud, we cleared your bill".
Great! No problem right? Then the cops won't investigate it. It was a landline! Not only that, the phone company sold their loss to a debt collection agency and they've been hounding me over it for 8 years now.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Dutch people have iPads now? Neat.
And you obviously don't know many profs.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I live in the Canadian prairies. Around here if you have a car accident you need to call the cops if anyone was injured or if the damage is above a certain dollar amount.
I don't know about the might Dutch, but we can do Citizen arrests here in the fuckup land of the hyprocrits, i mean, the USA.
Get your friends, go to where the iPad is, do your best to figure out exactly who has it, wait, when you can get them alone, preferbly with the ipad, then "arrest" the fool.
Yes, I have a lot of spelling errors in this post, don't care.
Be seeing you...
Some of us nerds can handle ourselves. Especially if one has confidence to deal with those more threatening.
The last time I was 'beat down' I was sucker punched for defeating a SF2 opponent with a throw. That's just how we rolled back then I guess.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
It shouldn't have to be this way. We should be able to have the police catch those who steal property before they can steal MORE, not after the fact. Unfortunately police have not made securing the public a priority in recent times.
The problem is talking to police these days in the US and Commonwealth can get an innocent guy in to a heap of trouble.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
note to self: treat police like you treat your ISP technical support.
"hi, a guy robbed my expensive device and i followed him to his home, here's the address. I clearly saw him by the window using it. And yes, it's running windows XP and I did reboot just now."
I had to resort to plastering the guy's block of units with the screen captured photo of the location, *and* deduce his employer's name, and send the address there with an explanation. Turns out the guy just 'found' it and was meaning to return it anyway. Uh-huh.
So anyway, when the cops take the report, tell them (when they ask) that the ipad contains information which may be of use to terrorists. Your porn stash might give aid and comfort, right? At that point, I imagine, they will be bashing the door down to get it back.
Finally, and most surprisingly ... Apple will happily continue to allow the thief to download new software (including, of course, reflashing the device) even if you inform them of the theft, and even if you accompany it with a police report of the theft ... why should Apple care, they're making money both sides of the deal, right? Apple 'support' 'explained' to me that it was technically impossible for them to refuse to allow a thief to make use of Apple's facilities to reflash the iPad into a valuable commodity. Apple 'support' admitted that there was a hard-wired serial number, that the iTunes crapware could read it, and that it could send it to the servers, but ... no ... technically impossible. It'd be a different story if someone were stealing something of theirs, I guess.
Apple Scum.
My next iPad will be a Samsung.
"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order." Ed Howdershelt
Correcting someone's abusive behavior is within the minimum. Being abusive like that prevents the cop from doing his job, takes time he could use in police duties.
Gates should consider himself lucky. If he had encountered a cop who was actually racist as he accused this one, he might have been beaten or even shot.
In 2002 my home in Amsterdam was invaded by gun-wielding criminals who tied me up, blindfolded me, threatened me with torture and death and who stole almost everything of value from my house. When I eventually escaped to a nearby friend's house I called the cops who explained that I needed to go and report the incident in person at a police station rather than over the phone. So I went to the nearest police station and, after spending 20 minutes trying to get someone's attention, was told I'd come to the wrong police station and I need to walk down to another one. I did that and was told by those cops that I was still at the wrong police station for crimes in my area and I needed to go to the one closest to my home. I pretty much lost it at that point and the cops drove me to the right police station where I spent 6 hours filing a report that they then promptly lost.
A few days later I went back to my home and found a hoodie that had been worn by one of the criminals. I took this down to the police station and they explained that
1) the officer who took down my details had moved to another station,
2) they had lost my report of the incident, and
3) what did I want them to do with the hoodie anyway?
Naturally they showed zero interest in catching any criminals, or indeed doing any work. Lazy and incompetent don't even begin to describe the dutch police.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it