At first I thought, how is this Ford's fault? How is this any different from someone just picking the trunk lock?<p>But then I realized: Ford <i>actively provided</i> the car codes to a car they'd sold, to someone who wasn't the owner, without the owner's permission. This is no different from the locksmith who installed the lock to your house, giving someone else a copy of the key to your front door "because they said they knew you".<p>Maybe Ford calculates that it's easier to just give out the codes to people related to the dealers, for convenience, but that needs to factor in that they <i>should</i> be forced to pay heavy, heavy fines or restitution when bad things happen.<p>And even worse, imagine if someone were raped or killed because of Ford's negligence concerning codes. People's security in their cars is a serious thing.
I'm not sure I'd call this Ford's fault.<p>>Lopez said the smuggling organization was able to get a duplicate key from a locksmith in El Paso, who got the codes after calling up a Ford dealership.<p>>An FBI affidavit says someone at a Dallas auto dealer accessed the codes in Ford's database, giving out more than 2,300 codes over an 18-month period.<p>I think dealerships, of all places, would be (should be) allowed to have codes for cars in their lot. I trust dealerships to have these codes. If they do nefarious things with them, they should be punished, but I don't think Ford should be punished for having a dealership-accessible database of key codes. Whoever was cooperating with the criminals is, to me, the person to blame here (along with the criminals).<p>I'd have sued that dealership, not Ford itself.
As implied in Cory Doctorow's "The coming war on general-purpose computation," modern cars are really computers with an engine and wheels. This event has proven that computer security breaches in cars can have real-world legal consequences for citizens. As a result, there may be a market in a hardening/privacy guide for new cars, similar to the kind sysadmins use to harden Internet-facing servers. Alongside your standard hacker-types, a guide like this probably has a market in survivalist/conspiracy circles.<p>The guide could explain how to change the code in the car's alarm transmitter as well as how to remove devices with privacy implications like OnStar.
Could have been much worse.<p>The crimincal case could have easily gone the other way: "The car was locked, locks are presumed secure, presence of a lock is proof that you were aware of the contents of your trunk." This is what happens in home burglaries: If your lock gets picked, insurers claim that the door was never locked.
What strikes me about this is that the criminals could have just as easily stolen the vehicles, but the value of the marijuana outweighed the value of the vehicles.
So, the poor bastard is out half a year of his life and who knows what other collateral damage (job, school, personal life, etc.)<p>Does the prosecutor here just go "Whoopsie, our bad!", or what?
I wonder how many bags of marijuana made it undetected in that car, since he was in the screened commuter lane.<p>And he's so lucky they had a record of accesses to the key code database. If they could have erased that record of the access, then it would have been a perfect crime.
How would this be different from a locksmith making a fake key for a more traditional lock and doing the same thing? Is it practically that much more difficult to do?
Unclear article, it seems like the smugglers were just playing a lottery with their stuff, hoping that the cars they chose wouldn't get investigated?