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Yes, A Politician Really Did Suggest All Knives Should Have GPS Trackers Built-In

Ian Morris

England has a knife crime problem at the moment. Cities like Birmingham and London have experienced a rise in stabbings and it's deeply upsetting. Sadly it never takes long, during periods of national grief, for a politician to come up with a stupid plan that involves technology.

Today's lunacy comes from Scott Mann, who's the MP for North Cornwall. He suggested, in a Tweet, that all knives sold in the UK should have an embedded GPS tracker presumably so some shadowy knife agency can build a control room somewhere to watch what all the knives are up to.

But this is an idea so stupid that I'm fairly sure Mann is auditioning for a writing job at The Onion.

Here's what he said:



So let's break this down and understand why even a couple of seconds thinking before pressing send might have saved Mann from looking absurd.

Firstly, there are already quite a lot of knives in the UK. We often use them for things like cutting food and it's not uncommon for people to own several. I have six knives in my kitchen alone. There are 66 million people in the UK and around 13 million under-18s - so let's assume that every adult has three good knives, that's 198 million bladed cooking instruments already in existence.

What's the plan Mann? Retrofit all these knives with GPS trackers too?

Ian Morris

Then there's the notion that we can create a national knife database "like we do for guns". As I've just explained, a national knife database would probably just be a list of all the people in the UK, because pretty much everyone has a knife sharp enough to stab someone with. The British Government isn't good at creating databases, it can't even centralise people's health records without spending millions and then giving up on it without warning.

Even before we get to the absurdity of the GPS thing, imagine a database that contained every adult in the UK and, say, the serial number of every knife they owned. It would not be easy to manage, update and absurdly expensive to run and maintain. It also still ignores the fact that we have a lot of knives already and almost none of them has a serial number.

But let's assume that we're starting from scratch and that there are no existing knives in the country. We now have to build a new kind of knife that has GPS built in. But how do we power these trackers? I can't really see people wanting to plug their knives in at night, but perhaps we can make a GPS tracker efficient enough for it to last for a year or so on a standard AA battery.

We still have to work out a way of tracking the knives and what information does this even give us that's useful. Criminals would simply remove any tracking device or simply buy a black market knife - it's perfectly possible to buy guns in the UK even with our strict ownership rules, how would knives be different?

And how do we get this tracking information back from the knives about their whereabouts? Well, we'd need to also equip every knife with either Wi-Fi or 4G. Not only does this present further power issues, but it's also asking a lot of the cellular networks to support roughly 200 million new devices. The capacity of mobile networks will get an upgrade this year thanks to 5G, but even with that technology's much-improved device handling I'm not sure it could handle that many new devices all at once.

The good news, of course, is that as we move to IPv6 we do at least have enough unique network addresses for all these knives - 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, in fact - there are only 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses and most of those are used up already. So we can, at least, assign every knife an IP address thanks to technological advances.

There's also a serious point related to politicians here. As we approach Brexit the question of how to manage the UK's border with Ireland continues to be troublesome. It has been MPs who have suggested that we use a "technological solution" to satisfy the EU's requirements for a border. But as with this GPS knife idea the implementation of the actual system is nearly impossible with current technology.

So this needs to be a lesson to politicians - stop invoking technology to solve your problems, especially when your idea doesn't hold up to even the simplest scrutiny.

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