7 ms·

The big drug database in the sky: One firefighter’s year-long legal nightmare

72 points by Errorcod3 11y ago

JshWright 11y ago
So, if the officer _had_ gotten a warrant (which I assume would be more limited in scope than 'everyone'), and had come across similar information, it would be completely reasonable that he investigate it, right? I'm also curious if they caught the original perpetrator. Tampering with narcotics would be tough to pull off in our agency... To get access to the narcs you have to swipe a ProxCard and enter a pin to access a safe (logging a timestamp attached to your identify), which gets you to a locked metal box and a numbered seal (which is checked twice daily). Any tampering would be caught within ~12 hours, and would be easily traced back to the card and pin number of the person who accessed it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewpi 11y ago
  The officer never would have had probable cause for a warrant for this individuals information though, since he didn't even work at the sites that had the missing/tampered drugs.
  - JshWright 11y ago
    Sure, obviously the warrant would likely be far more limited in scope (i.e. only people that had access to the drugs at the time), but the same scenario is certainly still possible.
- blackguardx 11y ago
  I think in most states, when you obtain a warrant you can't collect evidence for an unrelated crime and use that for future prosecution.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > I think in most states, when you obtain a warrant you can't collect evidence for an unrelated crime and use that for future prosecution. As I understand it, generally: If, in the course of executing a warrant, you find items that meet the description in the warrant but which provide evidence of a different crime than the one that motivated the warrant, you can seize them and use them for future prosecution. If, in the course of executing a warrant, you discover items that are not what is described in the warrant but which would provide evidence of another crime, you generally, IIRC, cannot seize them, but your discovery of them during the execution of the warrant can support an affidavit for a new warrant identifying them.
daily_dose 11y ago
It's your fault, not the doctors that legally gave you drugs goy!
- IvyMike 11y ago
  Doctor shopping usually means going to multiple doctors and keeping them in the dark about each other. Whether or not you agree this should be a crime (see UnoriginalGuy's comments), current laws do make this a crime. And it's hard to imagine how the doctors could be implicated in that crime--essentially, they are the ones being duped.
  - phkahler 11y ago
    But isn't the point of the database to allow doctors to know if there are interactions with other things a patient may be taking? Is other prescription information hidden unless there is a conflict, or does each doctor have access to the patients prescription history? If they can see the history, then they should be able to decide if he's seeing multiple doctors to get more drugs. If that history is hidden from his doctor, why should the police get to look just because? At a higher level, let's assume for a moment that 3rd party data should not be protected by the 4th amendment. That does not mean the database maintainer is obligated to hand over records to the authorities. It just means they can if they want to without violating a persons rights. The DB owner is certainly allowed to say "come back with a warrant" with will of course require probable cause.
UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
Someone please explain: Who are the victims in this supposed "crime?" It would be a huge understatement to claim that the US has a strange obsession with so called prescription narcotics. Sending doctors and patients alike to jail for supposed overuse or over-subscription. Look, yes, there is a public interest case where someone is known to be selling or allowing others to be selling such medications onto the black market. But in many of these case (most?) that isn't really the case, or at least they have no evidence of that. So, again, what exactly is it they're trying to accomplish? Why is the victim? Why do they care? On a related note, I have a family member (in the US) who works in a clinic, the sole purpose of this clinic is to get people with chronic or in some cases even terminal conditions off of narcotic painkillers. These people provably are in pain, but the system in the US is such that they'll kick people off of painkillers who actually need them simply because of some kind of "narcotic painkillers are bad" circular logic which nobody can explain to me. I'd really like someone to explain to me why the prescription of painkillers isn't a matter best left to patients and doctors in most cases where there is no suggestion of resale or other corruption. It just boggles my mind that the police are getting into people's personal treatment plans and calling their painkillers illegal.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 11y ago
  > Someone please explain: Who are the victims in this supposed "crime?" Children, spouses, parents, family, and friends of people whose free will is compromised by their addiction to prescription drugs? It's a "victimless crime" only from a very narrow perspective of what constitutes social harm.
  - tospplobcat 11y ago
    And the solution to prescription drug addiction is prison time or fines? How does that help the families?
    - rayiner 11y ago
rayiner 11y ago
I disagree that third party doctrine is outdated, as the article states. The fact is this: the Constitution says nothing about "privacy" or "information." The literal text of the 4th amendment prohibits essentially what are trespasses (to one's house, person, papers, or effects) in the name of gathering evidence. The whole "expectation of privacy" concept is itself a judicial bolt-on, and to go further and pretend that people have an expectation of privacy in records that were never their own property to begin with strains reason. It's not like third party records did not exist in 1791. The framers, being lawyers and businessmen, would have been intimately familiar with the concept of entrusting their person information to the documents of third parties. Had the framers intended "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" to actually mean "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects [and their doctors' or accountants' or lawyers' concerning them]" they could have written the text that way. They didn't.
- bargl 11y ago
  The constitution was meant to be a living document. That is why it is amenable. Also the idea that the framers could have seen anything like digital data collection is preposterous. Just because they had records doesn't mean they had any sort of access to the monitoring of your documents like we do today. The scale just want there. There is an episode on true detective where one of the detectives goes through old case files. He has stacks of then and has to search them onelaw at a time. Compare that to a key word search or a elastic search. Could the third party law apply to Dropbox or Google drive. Those are my documents, but stored by a third party. I sure hope warrants are needed for officers to go through my files on Google servers. We need to look at the constitution with new eyes and re work it for a digital age. Sorry for any Grammer issues I'm on my phone.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    So amend it. Don't create a privacy right out of whole cloth. Respect for a court's authority comes from the premise that they're at least somewhat neutral arbiters of the words on the page. When legal interpretations become divorced from the text, that undermines the legitimacy of the courts. Re: Google docs. Third party doctrine definitely should apply. If a Google engineer doesn't need a warrant or your permission to dig through your files on Google's servers, they should be fair game for a subpoena compelling them to turn over those documents. No different than how subpoenas can compel accountants to disclosure financial documents pertaining to their clients.
danschumann 11y ago
This seems like a Rand Paul issue.
tinco 11y ago
There's something super strange about how this article is written. There's a very heavy emphasis on how the government invaded this poor fireman's privacy and endangered the adoption process of two young children. The fireman is emotional, and feels victimized by the police and is even sueing the mayor, the main argument of the article seems to be that the police has too much information about people. But when you extract just the factual statements from the article there's a whole different picture. The police was investigating a pretty serious crime. One of their tools in this investigation was checking medical records of employees of the fire department to find irregularities that might point to someone with motive to steal opiates. Instead of finding a direct motive they found out a person was committing fraud with prescription drugs. The person was charged, but eventually the charges were dropped because they couldn't round out the evidence, the reason is unclear. Did this person really commit prescription drug fraud? Did he make money off that? Is that the sort of crime that should throw a wrench in an adoption process? I obviously don't know the guy, but it seems a bit weird to me to just disregard the idea that the authorities have hard evidence of him circumventing a law. Using the properties of that guy that make him seem like a stand-up guy just to make a larger point about privacy feels a bit disingenuous.
- SoftwareMaven 11y ago
  Marlon Jones (the Deupty Fire Chief mentioned) had "a double-knee replacement in 2009 and had been dealing with chronic back pain since 2000. His three doctors prescribed different painkillers and muscle relaxers."[1] That was enough to get him charged for prescription fraud. That doesn't seem over-zealous to you? Further, these are medical records. You know, things that we all get HIPAA notices for every time we go to a doctor. I have to go through a pain in the ass process every time I want to get two of my own doctors to talk. Police could just bypass that, without any probable cause (Feds still can). Phone record searches require probable cause. Financial and personal records require probable cause. Prescription records? Wide open to the police to comb through any time they like. As a person who has had different controlled substances prescribed by three doctors this year, this is frightening as hell. As for Mr. Pyle, "Firefighter Ryan Pyle had also been dealing with chronic back pain, and after a five-day stint in the hospital for an infected tooth, was also prescribed painkillers on several occasions. Police saw these prescriptions in the database and charged Pyle with one felony count."[1] The assumption of guilty until proven innocent (and he must be guilty if the police were looking at him, right?) is revolting. The ability of police to peruse records at a whim and destroy people's lives is even more so. 1. http://www.kutv.com/news/features/local-news/stories/Utah-39-s-bitter-pill-56073.shtml#.VVKZ6eQ2xC0 http://www.kutv.com/news/features/local-news/stories/Utah-39...
SoftwareMaven 11y ago
According to the order of dismissal, the state admitted that it had “insufficient evidence to establish the culpable mental state of the Defendant beyond a reasonable doubt, and that dismissal prior to trial is in the interest of justice.” I'm sure it had nothing to do with his attorney filing an appeal, showing he was ready to fight a law that was far too lenient towards police access, which might get the law overturned and make other, easy convictions suddenly impossible to get. The Third Party Doctrine needs to go.
nickodell 11y ago
I feel conflicted about this. On one hand, a nice guy has had his life upended during the most stressful phase of parenthood. On the other hand, having a sympathetic defendant has paved the way for meaningful reform of third-party doctrine.

72 points by Errorcod3 11y ago

So, if the officer _had_ gotten a warrant (which I assume would be more limited in scope than 'everyone'), and had come across similar information, it would be completely reasonable that he investigate it, right? I'm also curious if they caught the original perpetrator. Tampering with narcotics would be tough to pull off in our agency... To get access to the narcs you have to swipe a ProxCard and enter a pin to access a safe (logging a timestamp attached to your identify), which gets you to a locked metal box and a numbered seal (which is checked twice daily). Any tampering would be caught within ~12 hours, and would be easily traced back to the card and pin number of the person who accessed it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
andrewpi 11y ago
The officer never would have had probable cause for a warrant for this individuals information though, since he didn't even work at the sites that had the missing/tampered drugs.
- JshWright 11y ago
  Sure, obviously the warrant would likely be far more limited in scope (i.e. only people that had access to the drugs at the time), but the same scenario is certainly still possible.
blackguardx 11y ago
I think in most states, when you obtain a warrant you can't collect evidence for an unrelated crime and use that for future prosecution.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > I think in most states, when you obtain a warrant you can't collect evidence for an unrelated crime and use that for future prosecution. As I understand it, generally: If, in the course of executing a warrant, you find items that meet the description in the warrant but which provide evidence of a different crime than the one that motivated the warrant, you can seize them and use them for future prosecution. If, in the course of executing a warrant, you discover items that are not what is described in the warrant but which would provide evidence of another crime, you generally, IIRC, cannot seize them, but your discovery of them during the execution of the warrant can support an affidavit for a new warrant identifying them.

daily_dose 11y ago

It's your fault, not the doctors that legally gave you drugs goy!

IvyMike 11y ago
Doctor shopping usually means going to multiple doctors and keeping them in the dark about each other. Whether or not you agree this should be a crime (see UnoriginalGuy's comments), current laws do make this a crime. And it's hard to imagine how the doctors could be implicated in that crime--essentially, they are the ones being duped.
- phkahler 11y ago
  But isn't the point of the database to allow doctors to know if there are interactions with other things a patient may be taking? Is other prescription information hidden unless there is a conflict, or does each doctor have access to the patients prescription history? If they can see the history, then they should be able to decide if he's seeing multiple doctors to get more drugs. If that history is hidden from his doctor, why should the police get to look just because? At a higher level, let's assume for a moment that 3rd party data should not be protected by the 4th amendment. That does not mean the database maintainer is obligated to hand over records to the authorities. It just means they can if they want to without violating a persons rights. The DB owner is certainly allowed to say "come back with a warrant" with will of course require probable cause.

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago

Someone please explain: Who are the victims in this supposed "crime?" It would be a huge understatement to claim that the US has a strange obsession with so called prescription narcotics. Sending doctors and patients alike to jail for supposed overuse or over-subscription. Look, yes, there is a public interest case where someone is known to be selling or allowing others to be selling such medications onto the black market. But in many of these case (most?) that isn't really the case, or at least they have no evidence of that. So, again, what exactly is it they're trying to accomplish? Why is the victim? Why do they care? On a related note, I have a family member (in the US) who works in a clinic, the sole purpose of this clinic is to get people with chronic or in some cases even terminal conditions off of narcotic painkillers. These people provably are in pain, but the system in the US is such that they'll kick people off of painkillers who actually need them simply because of some kind of "narcotic painkillers are bad" circular logic which nobody can explain to me. I'd really like someone to explain to me why the prescription of painkillers isn't a matter best left to patients and doctors in most cases where there is no suggestion of resale or other corruption. It just boggles my mind that the police are getting into people's personal treatment plans and calling their painkillers illegal.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 11y ago
> Someone please explain: Who are the victims in this supposed "crime?" Children, spouses, parents, family, and friends of people whose free will is compromised by their addiction to prescription drugs? It's a "victimless crime" only from a very narrow perspective of what constitutes social harm.
- tospplobcat 11y ago
  And the solution to prescription drug addiction is prison time or fines? How does that help the families?
  - rayiner 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago

I disagree that third party doctrine is outdated, as the article states. The fact is this: the Constitution says nothing about "privacy" or "information." The literal text of the 4th amendment prohibits essentially what are trespasses (to one's house, person, papers, or effects) in the name of gathering evidence. The whole "expectation of privacy" concept is itself a judicial bolt-on, and to go further and pretend that people have an expectation of privacy in records that were never their own property to begin with strains reason. It's not like third party records did not exist in 1791. The framers, being lawyers and businessmen, would have been intimately familiar with the concept of entrusting their person information to the documents of third parties. Had the framers intended "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" to actually mean "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects [and their doctors' or accountants' or lawyers' concerning them]" they could have written the text that way. They didn't.

bargl 11y ago
The constitution was meant to be a living document. That is why it is amenable. Also the idea that the framers could have seen anything like digital data collection is preposterous. Just because they had records doesn't mean they had any sort of access to the monitoring of your documents like we do today. The scale just want there. There is an episode on true detective where one of the detectives goes through old case files. He has stacks of then and has to search them onelaw at a time. Compare that to a key word search or a elastic search. Could the third party law apply to Dropbox or Google drive. Those are my documents, but stored by a third party. I sure hope warrants are needed for officers to go through my files on Google servers. We need to look at the constitution with new eyes and re work it for a digital age. Sorry for any Grammer issues I'm on my phone.
- rayiner 11y ago
  So amend it. Don't create a privacy right out of whole cloth. Respect for a court's authority comes from the premise that they're at least somewhat neutral arbiters of the words on the page. When legal interpretations become divorced from the text, that undermines the legitimacy of the courts. Re: Google docs. Third party doctrine definitely should apply. If a Google engineer doesn't need a warrant or your permission to dig through your files on Google's servers, they should be fair game for a subpoena compelling them to turn over those documents. No different than how subpoenas can compel accountants to disclosure financial documents pertaining to their clients.

danschumann 11y ago

This seems like a Rand Paul issue.

tinco 11y ago

There's something super strange about how this article is written. There's a very heavy emphasis on how the government invaded this poor fireman's privacy and endangered the adoption process of two young children. The fireman is emotional, and feels victimized by the police and is even sueing the mayor, the main argument of the article seems to be that the police has too much information about people. But when you extract just the factual statements from the article there's a whole different picture. The police was investigating a pretty serious crime. One of their tools in this investigation was checking medical records of employees of the fire department to find irregularities that might point to someone with motive to steal opiates. Instead of finding a direct motive they found out a person was committing fraud with prescription drugs. The person was charged, but eventually the charges were dropped because they couldn't round out the evidence, the reason is unclear. Did this person really commit prescription drug fraud? Did he make money off that? Is that the sort of crime that should throw a wrench in an adoption process? I obviously don't know the guy, but it seems a bit weird to me to just disregard the idea that the authorities have hard evidence of him circumventing a law. Using the properties of that guy that make him seem like a stand-up guy just to make a larger point about privacy feels a bit disingenuous.

SoftwareMaven 11y ago
Marlon Jones (the Deupty Fire Chief mentioned) had "a double-knee replacement in 2009 and had been dealing with chronic back pain since 2000. His three doctors prescribed different painkillers and muscle relaxers."[1] That was enough to get him charged for prescription fraud. That doesn't seem over-zealous to you? Further, these are medical records. You know, things that we all get HIPAA notices for every time we go to a doctor. I have to go through a pain in the ass process every time I want to get two of my own doctors to talk. Police could just bypass that, without any probable cause (Feds still can). Phone record searches require probable cause. Financial and personal records require probable cause. Prescription records? Wide open to the police to comb through any time they like. As a person who has had different controlled substances prescribed by three doctors this year, this is frightening as hell. As for Mr. Pyle, "Firefighter Ryan Pyle had also been dealing with chronic back pain, and after a five-day stint in the hospital for an infected tooth, was also prescribed painkillers on several occasions. Police saw these prescriptions in the database and charged Pyle with one felony count."[1] The assumption of guilty until proven innocent (and he must be guilty if the police were looking at him, right?) is revolting. The ability of police to peruse records at a whim and destroy people's lives is even more so. 1. http://www.kutv.com/news/features/local-news/stories/Utah-39-s-bitter-pill-56073.shtml#.VVKZ6eQ2xC0 http://www.kutv.com/news/features/local-news/stories/Utah-39...

SoftwareMaven 11y ago

According to the order of dismissal, the state admitted that it had “insufficient evidence to establish the culpable mental state of the Defendant beyond a reasonable doubt, and that dismissal prior to trial is in the interest of justice.” I'm sure it had nothing to do with his attorney filing an appeal, showing he was ready to fight a law that was far too lenient towards police access, which might get the law overturned and make other, easy convictions suddenly impossible to get. The Third Party Doctrine needs to go.

nickodell 11y ago

I feel conflicted about this. On one hand, a nice guy has had his life upended during the most stressful phase of parenthood. On the other hand, having a sympathetic defendant has paved the way for meaningful reform of third-party doctrine.