17 ms·

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s (2013)

240 points by ctingom 10y ago

schoen 10y ago
(2013); related to current reporting discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788853
gourou 10y ago
Looks like The Wire could make a come-back
pschneidr 10y ago
It's crazy that "decades of Americans’ phone calls" is even a thing stored some place.
- llamataboot 10y ago
  and text messages, and skype calls, and...
  - gourou 10y ago
    I thought Skype calls used to be P2P
    - Alupis 10y ago
      Only sometimes, when it couldn't make a great connection between the two callers. Now, from my understanding, Microsoft has re-worked Skype to always connect via their Skype servers (as the middle man).
    - verytrivial 10y ago
      The Skype developers tried to let us know many many years ago: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fishywang/318591561 https://www.flickr.com/photos/fishywang/318591561
    - Phlarp 10y ago
      Used to be, yes.
  - visarga 10y ago
    Especially now, that speech recognition is close to human performance.
- greendragon 10y ago
  On the other hand it'd be nice to be able to get dead relatives' archives.
  - rch 10y ago
    That's extremely creepy.
    - greendragon 10y ago
      The better insult would be 'pathetic', you know.
      - rch 10y ago
        Sure, but it wasn't an insult.
- pixl97 10y ago
  Why not, once the digital age started, the price of storing records has dropped dramatically. Yea, it was really expensive back in the day, but don't forget how much we paid for phone service back then too.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >Why not, once the digital age started, the price of storing records has dropped dramatically. How come your default is "why not"? Shouldn't there be a justification for indefinitely storing these types of records? And "might commit a crime in the future" doesn't qualify. Yes it's cheap to store them. So what?
    - pixl97 10y ago
      >Shouldn't there be a justification for indefinitely storing these types of records? As the devils advocate, why should their be? Also, deleting stuff in the business world is a major pain in the ass. Do we delete it after X years? What if part of that data is involved in a long term lawsuit, how do we only delete the part that is not? Will the information have historical value at some point? And the big one, the telephone company has worked with our governments for decades sharing this information. The real question is "How long has the .gov been paying the telcos for these records". This is probably why they are stored forever.
llamataboot 10y ago
The Drug War seems so out of control and Orwellian at this point, that I unfortunately can't think of any way to stop it, as long as the general public thinks that it's somewhere in the range of "overbearing but necessary" to "annoying and probably evil but doesn't really affect me". I'm excited by the chinks in the armor that have come with marijuana legalization/decriminalization, and I think once that spreads across much of the US, some of the Drug War will have lost its teeth, but I don't imagine it will make a large dent the surveillance industry. Now that we have built the infrastructure, conceived of parallel construction, etc there will always be a shadowy enemy lurking in our midst that we need to turn it on. Its kinda like having a giant military-industrial complex. You really can't sustain it without war, yet it has its own momentum and seeks to sustain itself, so it makes war more likely.
- knz 10y ago
  > Now that we have built the infrastructure How successful is the drug war? The recent headlines related to heroin seem to imply that it's been a failure. Before that there was a meth crisis and before that there was likely something else. Is enforcement actually reducing the negative social impacts of substance abuse? It would be interesting to see the ROI for enforcement.
  - llamataboot 10y ago
    It is very successful in incarcerating a ton of people and providing lots of money for people involved in it. It's worse than useless (like negative net effect) in terms of protecting society and individuals from the harms of drug abuse.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      It's a national make-work program that builds broken lives.
      - sfrailsdev 10y ago
        Hey don't forget super cheap labor in the form of prisoners
envy2 10y ago
This should be flagged as being from 2013...
- werdna123 10y ago
  Yep! HN loves ancient news stories.
JoshGlazebrook 10y ago
Seems kind of fishy the timing of this. Right after AT&T announced plans to purchased Time Warner. edit: Nevermind I'm blind.
- reefoctopus 10y ago
  The article was published on SEPT. 1, 2013.
- algorithmsRcool 10y ago
  This article is from 2013.
- rhizome 10y ago
  What is fishy about this, if anything, is that if it's supposed to be a hit on AT&T there was a much more recent accounting of their troubling shenanigans in facilitating parallel construction just yesterday: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spy... Maybe the repost is supposed to be a diversion, is what I'm implying. However, I see the new story has been posted already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787065
readhn 10y ago
Ohh that BS war on drugs again! How come banks get to get away with measly fines for laundering cartel drug money for do long? 100s of billions of dollars per year of drug money flow through the banking system, sure its profitable to pay the fines when you have so much guaranteed cash flow every year. Banks Get caught red handed laundering drug money. Banks don't Get shut down, CEO s don't go to jail?! Wtf? Ohh no messing with banks is hard , let's just wiretap every potential criminal in the country citizens won't do anything to resist this any way. They will just swallow this BS war on drugs story. I'm just a regular citizen I got nothing to hide!
- rhizome 10y ago
  Banks have better lobbyists.
  - readhn 10y ago
    Scarface was not too far from the truth. Except these days they don't bring in bags of money through the front door.... Well I take it back. May be in Mexico it it's still the case! Lol
- Joof 10y ago
  Banks are currently 'too big to fail' to borrow some words. The ramifications for normal people would be too disastrous. So I hear anyway.
- emiliobumachar 10y ago
  Ironically, even as you protest the war on drugs, you seem to defend its expansion and hardening. There's always people we don't like, and brutality always seems more reasonable if it's against them. That's what got us into the current mess.
dmix 10y ago
Sadly not much has changed since 2013 and now that we can (hopefully) move past the Trump train wreck and look towards the future via Clinton's policies, it seems to can expect even more of the same from the next president. Leaked emails shows she sides with law enforcement regarding encryption, publicly she is calling for an "intelligence surge" as a core part of her national security strategy, and in interviews she still strongly stands by her support for the Patriot Act: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-wont-budge-mass-surveillance-stance-leaked-emails-reveal-1586175 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-wont-budge-mass-surveillanc... The people who will end up getting appointed to the various leadership roles is the other big question. Hillary's advisers contain many hold-overs from the Bush-Cheney era, including ex-DHS lead Michael Chertoff who strongly supported the TSA full body scanners (made by the company he went on to work for), who I hope aren't given big roles. Regardless, all of those cyber contractors in DC, Maryland and Virginia must be excited that their gilded age was given a 4yr extension and likely a further expansion. Not that they were ever at much risk of losing it - given the majority of the candidates were hawkish from the start of the primaries, the pull of influential thinktanks, and of course the media, with the NYT - in between fawning over Hillary - publishing daily articles citing 'anonymous intelligence sources' supporting various causes. There's also been almost entirely silence over surveillance policies from the tech industry/community as far as I can tell. Although typically our industry isn't very political or partisan (until things actually go down like SOPA), so this is not entirely atypical. Note: most of this is regarding military/defense but it seems to spill over into federal drug and criminal investigations. Drug policies are another big elephant in the room.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >it seems to can expect even more of the same from the next president This is the saddest thing about this election. Everyone is so distracted by the Trump buffoonery that a Generic Politician (tm) is going to take the reins and continue policies we've been bitter about for years. And most will see this as a "good thing" ("At least it's not Trump!")
  - llamataboot 10y ago
    To be fair, having a professional political class, having politics infested with large amounts of money, and having a two party system make it pretty sure odds that by the time someone gets to the level of "serious presidential contender" that they want to preserve the status-quo in most of these things. We did get two decent outsider runs this year, and I do wish Bernie Sanders was mopping the floor with Trump, but there are limits to the amount a President can do when the entire process rewards pay-to-play, incremental change, and preserving business-as-usual. And, to be fair, it's pretty great that it's not Trump. But yes, it was a horribly sad election. In some ways HRC represents everything that is wrong about politics in the US, and Trump represents everything that is wrong about, well, pretty much everything.
readhn 10y ago
I have easy solution to really cripple global drug trade. Stop drug money flows = cripple drug flows. If a bank gets caught with drug money laundering - all executives loose bonuses and golden parachutes, their salaries go down to average household salary for that year. Done! Watch them Then really clean up the banking system in a couple of years!
- rwmj 10y ago
  An "easy solution" in the Trump sense, ie. simplistic and ignoring common sense and reality.
  - readhn 10y ago
    Banks launder drug money. It is a fact. HSBC, BofA, JPM ... all of them are involved. Fines clearly dont work. We have drug epidemic currently in the united states. What other solutions do you suggest that will stop the drug money flows? I say bend over the banks - but no one of course will do that ;)
    - gajjanag 10y ago
      I wish someone did a detailed analysis on the whole drug supply chain, in order to determine the best place in the chain for intervention. I bring this up as I remember a fascinating security economics paper that examined the economics of spam and its non-obvious conclusions regarding a good intervention point: http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/trajectories.pdf http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/trajectories.pd... Does anyone here know of a similar study for the drug supply chain?
      - readhn 10y ago
        The best places for intervention: 1. banks and offshore accounts (full transparency) 2.Transportation via private planes. Make it impossible to move large amounts of money using non transparent mechanisms. Make it impossible to move drugs via private planes. (most large drug shipments are moved via private airplanes). http://nypost.com/2015/05/22/smuggler-with-ton-of-cocaine-crashes-his-plane-into-the-ocean/ http://nypost.com/2015/05/22/smuggler-with-ton-of-cocaine-cr...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
joesmo 10y ago
The drug war is not about drugs, never was, and never will be. Only really stupid, foolish idiots think it's about drugs and those people are used to carry out its atrocities (certainly not the first time in history that's happened). I'm tired of mincing words: If one supports the drug war, one supports murder, slavery, hate, and oppression. It's not possible to support the drug war and be a decent, moral human being.
mbloom1915 10y ago
anyone else laugh at the 2003 version of powerpoint for those sweet pie graphs... are we really that worried?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
aRationalMoose 10y ago
Piece in the Daily Beast says it's not just Drug Agents, but that it's also used by local municipalities and to investigate medicare fraud among others.
- hackuser 10y ago
  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spy... However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud. Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.
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darawk 10y ago
I'd like to take this opportunity to enumerate some of the benefits of legalizing all drugs: 1. Instant 50% reduction in prison population. More than half of all prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. It costs 20-40k/year to house a prisoner [2]. There are approximately 2.2 million prisoners the US [3]. That equates to an instantaneous savings of $6.6 billion. 2. Elimination of the DEA. Instantaneous savings of $2 billion [3]. 3. Massive reduction in crimes that are caused by drugs. E.g. theft, assault, etc. Personally, i'd estimate that as making up the bulk of the other 50% of all crime. Of course, I can't back that up with any data, but it makes logical sense to me that the majority of crime that happens is in one way or another connected to drugs. 4. Drug cartels disappear essentially overnight. Yes, they might switch to kidnapping or extortion or something. But those are not hyperscale businesses. They would evaporate to the point of irrelevance almost immediately. 5. Street gangs disappear or dramatically lose influence. Why fight a turf war if there's no money to be made on the turf? Sure, some will still happen. But they'll be dramatically reduced and the ones that remain will be severely underfunded. 6. Police and the communities they serve will no longer be enemies. Drug use is a victimless crime, and people resent being shaken down and arrested on suspicion of drug dealing and/or using. If drugs were legalized, police would only arrest people who are antagonizing others. This would go an enormous way towards healing the divide between police and citizens. 7. No more impure, uncertain drugs. Things would be labelled correctly and their doses standardized. This should dramatically reduce accidental overdose deaths, and improve the health and wellbeing of addicts by eliminating the nasty stuff their drugs are cut with. 8. Reliable, cheap supply for addicts. Being an addict involves an enormous amount of wasted time and money. It's extraordinarily difficult to hold a job, because just getting the drugs takes lots of time, waiting, and exposure to risk. Now, there are other reasons it's hard to hold a job as an addict, but these are big factors. 9. Massive reduction in social stigma around addiction and drug use. This is a double-edged sword, of course. But I think on balance it'd be a good thing. It would make it easier and less shameful for addicts to seek treatment. Taking it out of the underworld would make families more aware of their member's possibly spiraling problems, and give them an earlier opportunity to do something about it. 10. The way i'd like this to be structured would be that the government would sell these drugs in unmarked shops at essentially their marginal cost of production (which is extremely low). They wouldn't advertise, obviously, and you could implement reasonable age controls by checking ID in a similar way to alcohol. Now, that system is imperfect obviously. But that's ok I think. It's not like kids don't have access to drugs now. Monitoring and maintaining open lines of communication with these people will allow them to be studied and given access to treatment options and help. They can be guided into jobs and offered medical help with detox. I say all of this as a former heroin addict. It's easy availability would make it somewhat harder for me not to use it. On balance though, it seems extremely clear to me that it's the right thing to do. The synergy of all the policing/crime benefits would be extraordinarily profound. The enormous reduction in crime and improved relationship between police and their communities would make police even more efficient at stopping what remaining crime there is. It would not surprise me in the slightest to see something like a 75-80% reduction in all crime within the first couple of years. That isn't even to address the benefits to narco-states like Mexico. There it would be truly transformative. Terrorism would lose its largest funding source [5]. Border patrol agents would stop facing well-funded adversaries. The civil war in Colombia would stop. Corruption in government would be reduced to standard corporatism. The list is just endless, and it's not like drugs aren't available now. What, really, is the marginal harm of making them slightly more available, when weighed against all of this? In my opinion, the drug war and its effects are the greatest ongoing crime against humanity in the world right now. [1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... [2] http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost-to-house-inmates-in-prison/ http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administratio... [5] http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-financing/tracking-down-terrorist-financing/p10356#p1 http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-financing/tracking-down-terrori...
achievingApathy 10y ago
"The Northwest HIDTA has recently utilized Hemisphere to track known Canadian phones roaming in the U.S. on the AT&T network" -- we are really going to have to do something blatant and disrespectful for Canada to finally hate us, aren't we? This seems well outside the scope of the DEA. Monitoring the phones of citizens of other countries can't lead to good/happy things.
dredmorbius 10y ago
EFF has further information on this: https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere I ran across this trying to see if there was earlier public mention. Rather good conspiracy containment if not.

240 points by ctingom 10y ago

(2013); related to current reporting discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788853

gourou 10y ago

Looks like The Wire could make a come-back

pschneidr 10y ago

It's crazy that "decades of Americans’ phone calls" is even a thing stored some place.

llamataboot 10y ago
and text messages, and skype calls, and...
- gourou 10y ago
  I thought Skype calls used to be P2P
  - Alupis 10y ago
    Only sometimes, when it couldn't make a great connection between the two callers. Now, from my understanding, Microsoft has re-worked Skype to always connect via their Skype servers (as the middle man).
  - verytrivial 10y ago
    The Skype developers tried to let us know many many years ago: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fishywang/318591561 https://www.flickr.com/photos/fishywang/318591561
  - Phlarp 10y ago
    Used to be, yes.
- visarga 10y ago
  Especially now, that speech recognition is close to human performance.
greendragon 10y ago
On the other hand it'd be nice to be able to get dead relatives' archives.
- rch 10y ago
  That's extremely creepy.
  - greendragon 10y ago
    The better insult would be 'pathetic', you know.
    - rch 10y ago
      Sure, but it wasn't an insult.
pixl97 10y ago
Why not, once the digital age started, the price of storing records has dropped dramatically. Yea, it was really expensive back in the day, but don't forget how much we paid for phone service back then too.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >Why not, once the digital age started, the price of storing records has dropped dramatically. How come your default is "why not"? Shouldn't there be a justification for indefinitely storing these types of records? And "might commit a crime in the future" doesn't qualify. Yes it's cheap to store them. So what?
  - pixl97 10y ago
    >Shouldn't there be a justification for indefinitely storing these types of records? As the devils advocate, why should their be? Also, deleting stuff in the business world is a major pain in the ass. Do we delete it after X years? What if part of that data is involved in a long term lawsuit, how do we only delete the part that is not? Will the information have historical value at some point? And the big one, the telephone company has worked with our governments for decades sharing this information. The real question is "How long has the .gov been paying the telcos for these records". This is probably why they are stored forever.

llamataboot 10y ago

The Drug War seems so out of control and Orwellian at this point, that I unfortunately can't think of any way to stop it, as long as the general public thinks that it's somewhere in the range of "overbearing but necessary" to "annoying and probably evil but doesn't really affect me". I'm excited by the chinks in the armor that have come with marijuana legalization/decriminalization, and I think once that spreads across much of the US, some of the Drug War will have lost its teeth, but I don't imagine it will make a large dent the surveillance industry. Now that we have built the infrastructure, conceived of parallel construction, etc there will always be a shadowy enemy lurking in our midst that we need to turn it on. Its kinda like having a giant military-industrial complex. You really can't sustain it without war, yet it has its own momentum and seeks to sustain itself, so it makes war more likely.

knz 10y ago
> Now that we have built the infrastructure How successful is the drug war? The recent headlines related to heroin seem to imply that it's been a failure. Before that there was a meth crisis and before that there was likely something else. Is enforcement actually reducing the negative social impacts of substance abuse? It would be interesting to see the ROI for enforcement.
- llamataboot 10y ago
  It is very successful in incarcerating a ton of people and providing lots of money for people involved in it. It's worse than useless (like negative net effect) in terms of protecting society and individuals from the harms of drug abuse.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    It's a national make-work program that builds broken lives.
    - sfrailsdev 10y ago
      Hey don't forget super cheap labor in the form of prisoners

envy2 10y ago

This should be flagged as being from 2013...

werdna123 10y ago
Yep! HN loves ancient news stories.

JoshGlazebrook 10y ago

Seems kind of fishy the timing of this. Right after AT&T announced plans to purchased Time Warner. edit: Nevermind I'm blind.

reefoctopus 10y ago
The article was published on SEPT. 1, 2013.
algorithmsRcool 10y ago
This article is from 2013.
rhizome 10y ago
What is fishy about this, if anything, is that if it's supposed to be a hit on AT&T there was a much more recent accounting of their troubling shenanigans in facilitating parallel construction just yesterday: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spy... Maybe the repost is supposed to be a diversion, is what I'm implying. However, I see the new story has been posted already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787065

readhn 10y ago

Ohh that BS war on drugs again! How come banks get to get away with measly fines for laundering cartel drug money for do long? 100s of billions of dollars per year of drug money flow through the banking system, sure its profitable to pay the fines when you have so much guaranteed cash flow every year. Banks Get caught red handed laundering drug money. Banks don't Get shut down, CEO s don't go to jail?! Wtf? Ohh no messing with banks is hard , let's just wiretap every potential criminal in the country citizens won't do anything to resist this any way. They will just swallow this BS war on drugs story. I'm just a regular citizen I got nothing to hide!

rhizome 10y ago
Banks have better lobbyists.
- readhn 10y ago
  Scarface was not too far from the truth. Except these days they don't bring in bags of money through the front door.... Well I take it back. May be in Mexico it it's still the case! Lol
Joof 10y ago
Banks are currently 'too big to fail' to borrow some words. The ramifications for normal people would be too disastrous. So I hear anyway.
emiliobumachar 10y ago
Ironically, even as you protest the war on drugs, you seem to defend its expansion and hardening. There's always people we don't like, and brutality always seems more reasonable if it's against them. That's what got us into the current mess.

dmix 10y ago

Sadly not much has changed since 2013 and now that we can (hopefully) move past the Trump train wreck and look towards the future via Clinton's policies, it seems to can expect even more of the same from the next president. Leaked emails shows she sides with law enforcement regarding encryption, publicly she is calling for an "intelligence surge" as a core part of her national security strategy, and in interviews she still strongly stands by her support for the Patriot Act: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-wont-budge-mass-surveillance-stance-leaked-emails-reveal-1586175 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-wont-budge-mass-surveillanc... The people who will end up getting appointed to the various leadership roles is the other big question. Hillary's advisers contain many hold-overs from the Bush-Cheney era, including ex-DHS lead Michael Chertoff who strongly supported the TSA full body scanners (made by the company he went on to work for), who I hope aren't given big roles. Regardless, all of those cyber contractors in DC, Maryland and Virginia must be excited that their gilded age was given a 4yr extension and likely a further expansion. Not that they were ever at much risk of losing it - given the majority of the candidates were hawkish from the start of the primaries, the pull of influential thinktanks, and of course the media, with the NYT - in between fawning over Hillary - publishing daily articles citing 'anonymous intelligence sources' supporting various causes. There's also been almost entirely silence over surveillance policies from the tech industry/community as far as I can tell. Although typically our industry isn't very political or partisan (until things actually go down like SOPA), so this is not entirely atypical. Note: most of this is regarding military/defense but it seems to spill over into federal drug and criminal investigations. Drug policies are another big elephant in the room.

forgetsusername 10y ago
>it seems to can expect even more of the same from the next president This is the saddest thing about this election. Everyone is so distracted by the Trump buffoonery that a Generic Politician (tm) is going to take the reins and continue policies we've been bitter about for years. And most will see this as a "good thing" ("At least it's not Trump!")
- llamataboot 10y ago
  To be fair, having a professional political class, having politics infested with large amounts of money, and having a two party system make it pretty sure odds that by the time someone gets to the level of "serious presidential contender" that they want to preserve the status-quo in most of these things. We did get two decent outsider runs this year, and I do wish Bernie Sanders was mopping the floor with Trump, but there are limits to the amount a President can do when the entire process rewards pay-to-play, incremental change, and preserving business-as-usual. And, to be fair, it's pretty great that it's not Trump. But yes, it was a horribly sad election. In some ways HRC represents everything that is wrong about politics in the US, and Trump represents everything that is wrong about, well, pretty much everything.

readhn 10y ago

I have easy solution to really cripple global drug trade. Stop drug money flows = cripple drug flows. If a bank gets caught with drug money laundering - all executives loose bonuses and golden parachutes, their salaries go down to average household salary for that year. Done! Watch them Then really clean up the banking system in a couple of years!

rwmj 10y ago
An "easy solution" in the Trump sense, ie. simplistic and ignoring common sense and reality.
- readhn 10y ago
  Banks launder drug money. It is a fact. HSBC, BofA, JPM ... all of them are involved. Fines clearly dont work. We have drug epidemic currently in the united states. What other solutions do you suggest that will stop the drug money flows? I say bend over the banks - but no one of course will do that ;)
  - gajjanag 10y ago
    I wish someone did a detailed analysis on the whole drug supply chain, in order to determine the best place in the chain for intervention. I bring this up as I remember a fascinating security economics paper that examined the economics of spam and its non-obvious conclusions regarding a good intervention point: http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/trajectories.pdf http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/trajectories.pd... Does anyone here know of a similar study for the drug supply chain?
    - readhn 10y ago
      The best places for intervention: 1. banks and offshore accounts (full transparency) 2.Transportation via private planes. Make it impossible to move large amounts of money using non transparent mechanisms. Make it impossible to move drugs via private planes. (most large drug shipments are moved via private airplanes). http://nypost.com/2015/05/22/smuggler-with-ton-of-cocaine-crashes-his-plane-into-the-ocean/ http://nypost.com/2015/05/22/smuggler-with-ton-of-cocaine-cr...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

joesmo 10y ago

The drug war is not about drugs, never was, and never will be. Only really stupid, foolish idiots think it's about drugs and those people are used to carry out its atrocities (certainly not the first time in history that's happened). I'm tired of mincing words: If one supports the drug war, one supports murder, slavery, hate, and oppression. It's not possible to support the drug war and be a decent, moral human being.

mbloom1915 10y ago

anyone else laugh at the 2003 version of powerpoint for those sweet pie graphs... are we really that worried?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

aRationalMoose 10y ago

Piece in the Daily Beast says it's not just Drug Agents, but that it's also used by local municipalities and to investigate medicare fraud among others.

hackuser 10y ago
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spy... However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud. Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

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darawk 10y ago

I'd like to take this opportunity to enumerate some of the benefits of legalizing all drugs: 1. Instant 50% reduction in prison population. More than half of all prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. It costs 20-40k/year to house a prisoner [2]. There are approximately 2.2 million prisoners the US [3]. That equates to an instantaneous savings of $6.6 billion. 2. Elimination of the DEA. Instantaneous savings of $2 billion [3]. 3. Massive reduction in crimes that are caused by drugs. E.g. theft, assault, etc. Personally, i'd estimate that as making up the bulk of the other 50% of all crime. Of course, I can't back that up with any data, but it makes logical sense to me that the majority of crime that happens is in one way or another connected to drugs. 4. Drug cartels disappear essentially overnight. Yes, they might switch to kidnapping or extortion or something. But those are not hyperscale businesses. They would evaporate to the point of irrelevance almost immediately. 5. Street gangs disappear or dramatically lose influence. Why fight a turf war if there's no money to be made on the turf? Sure, some will still happen. But they'll be dramatically reduced and the ones that remain will be severely underfunded. 6. Police and the communities they serve will no longer be enemies. Drug use is a victimless crime, and people resent being shaken down and arrested on suspicion of drug dealing and/or using. If drugs were legalized, police would only arrest people who are antagonizing others. This would go an enormous way towards healing the divide between police and citizens. 7. No more impure, uncertain drugs. Things would be labelled correctly and their doses standardized. This should dramatically reduce accidental overdose deaths, and improve the health and wellbeing of addicts by eliminating the nasty stuff their drugs are cut with. 8. Reliable, cheap supply for addicts. Being an addict involves an enormous amount of wasted time and money. It's extraordinarily difficult to hold a job, because just getting the drugs takes lots of time, waiting, and exposure to risk. Now, there are other reasons it's hard to hold a job as an addict, but these are big factors. 9. Massive reduction in social stigma around addiction and drug use. This is a double-edged sword, of course. But I think on balance it'd be a good thing. It would make it easier and less shameful for addicts to seek treatment. Taking it out of the underworld would make families more aware of their member's possibly spiraling problems, and give them an earlier opportunity to do something about it. 10. The way i'd like this to be structured would be that the government would sell these drugs in unmarked shops at essentially their marginal cost of production (which is extremely low). They wouldn't advertise, obviously, and you could implement reasonable age controls by checking ID in a similar way to alcohol. Now, that system is imperfect obviously. But that's ok I think. It's not like kids don't have access to drugs now. Monitoring and maintaining open lines of communication with these people will allow them to be studied and given access to treatment options and help. They can be guided into jobs and offered medical help with detox. I say all of this as a former heroin addict. It's easy availability would make it somewhat harder for me not to use it. On balance though, it seems extremely clear to me that it's the right thing to do. The synergy of all the policing/crime benefits would be extraordinarily profound. The enormous reduction in crime and improved relationship between police and their communities would make police even more efficient at stopping what remaining crime there is. It would not surprise me in the slightest to see something like a 75-80% reduction in all crime within the first couple of years. That isn't even to address the benefits to narco-states like Mexico. There it would be truly transformative. Terrorism would lose its largest funding source [5]. Border patrol agents would stop facing well-funded adversaries. The civil war in Colombia would stop. Corruption in government would be reduced to standard corporatism. The list is just endless, and it's not like drugs aren't available now. What, really, is the marginal harm of making them slightly more available, when weighed against all of this? In my opinion, the drug war and its effects are the greatest ongoing crime against humanity in the world right now. [1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... [2] http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost-to-house-inmates-in-prison/ http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administratio... [5] http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-financing/tracking-down-terrorist-financing/p10356#p1 http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-financing/tracking-down-terrori...

achievingApathy 10y ago

"The Northwest HIDTA has recently utilized Hemisphere to track known Canadian phones roaming in the U.S. on the AT&T network" -- we are really going to have to do something blatant and disrespectful for Canada to finally hate us, aren't we? This seems well outside the scope of the DEA. Monitoring the phones of citizens of other countries can't lead to good/happy things.

dredmorbius 10y ago

EFF has further information on this: https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere I ran across this trying to see if there was earlier public mention. Rather good conspiracy containment if not.