Don't Steal From An Electronic Surveillance Wonk

Julian Sanchez was burglarized. He's trying to use the power of Big Brother for good:

The police arrived and duly dusted for fingerprints, but I wasn’t holding out any hope of recovering anything until it occurred to me a few hours later that the PS3 is, after all, a network device with a unique MAC addressand a lot of the cool stuff you can do with it requires connecting it to a network. A little Googling and, sure enough, Sony has the capability, at the request of law enforcement, to flag a stolen system and record the IP address from which it’s connectedeven if the thieves (or an unwitting buyer) wipe the machine and try to create a new account. From there, you’re a §2703(d) order away from getting a physical address. The folks I spoke to at MPD sounded as though they were unfamiliar with the capability, but willing to look into it… which means, I suppose, that spending as much time as I do thinking about the ways people can be tracked online could wind up having some direct practical benefit.