Up until recently, economies around the globe were on a fairly steady upward trajectory, a growth that put pricing pressure on some of the raw materials needed for both production and infrastructure. That pricing pressure has, in some cases, led to a bit of a black market where the materials are forcibly recycled through various forms of theft. Copper is one of these materials, and a variety of anecdotal news reports suggest that theft of copper from various places it's in use has been an ongoing nuisance in the US. Now, the FBI has performed an analysis of the situation that suggests copper theft actually poses a serious risk to the national infrastructure.

Copper's electrical properties and relatively modest price have made it a mainstay of wiring, and it has also been used for applications such as plumbing and roofing. As copper was even cheaper in the past, there's quite a lot of it out there already. A recent run-up in copper prices—the FBI says they rose 500 percent from 2001 to 2008—has made all of that installed copper appealing to thieves.

There are three problems highlighted by the report. The first is that a lot of the essential infrastructure that contains copper, ranging from pipes to electrical switching stations, are located where they're unlikely to be monitored. As such, it makes for a relatively tempting, low-risk target for theft.

A second issue is that this infrastructure has an importance that far outweighs its price. The report describes an incident where thieves stripped a live transformer (okay, so not all these thefts are low-risk) of its copper, which probably yielded them a couple hundred dollars worth of profits. For that money, nearly 4,000 people were left without power, and the utility rang up costs of about a half-million dollars. In another case, the theft of copper in irrigation equipment apparently wiped out the crops it was supposed to be watering, causing $10 million in damages. Other examples cited by the FBI involve basic public safety, as air traffic control and tornado warning systems have gone down due to the theft of copper wiring.

The economic meltdown has caused the price of copper to plummet since September, but the FBI report doesn't offer much comfort in that regard. It describes a number of rings of copper thieves that have been following house foreclosure announcements, and stripping the copper out of the abandoned houses. This is nowhere near as serious an issue as the thefts that disable major infrastructure, but it certainly isn't helping anyone.

The third problem identified by the report is that these groups that engage in copper theft tend to be local, diffuse, and often ad-hoc. Past arrests have identified both local criminal gangs and random groups of drug users involved in the thefts. Recycling copper and other scrap metal is a legitimate business, so the thieves have many potential outlets. All of this combines to make stopping the thefts a task for which there won't be a single magic bullet that works.

The report highlights how some states are getting tougher with their licensing and monitoring of scrap metal dealers, but it suggests that the key factor is that the actual thieves are rarely caught, and their crimes are often prosecuted as misdemeanors when they are. The implication appears to be that copper theft will be an ongoing risk to the infrastructure until that changes. Our managing editor suggested another partial solution: fiber to the premises would be immune to this theft.