AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/att-gives-dea-26-years-of-phone-call-records-to-wage-war-on-drugs/

by mikeevans • 13 years ago

201 208 13 years ago

arstechnica.com

joeldidit• 13 years ago

...yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, that's why.

Not!

ryusage• 13 years ago

Interesting. At first glance, this feels wrong, but thinking about it more, the only significant issue I really have with it is that it seems strange for the DEA to be allowed to issue its own warrants.

moens• 13 years ago

...and for there to be a war on drugs in the first place. Eliminate the fundamentals, and there should be no issues at all, really.

devx• 13 years ago

Then there would be a war on piracy. How would you like it if they kept 20 years of your downloading habits? Do you think that in 20 years time they could find something to incriminate you?

And that's why it's so wrong to keep data for so long, and actually be able to use it.

btown• 13 years ago

s/Drugs/Terror

genwin34• 13 years ago

I have a problem with a war on marijuana, or violating the Constitution during the war on drugs. But otherwise I don't have a problem with a war on meth or crack or other drugs that increase the odds that I'll be a victim of violent crime or robbery. (I'd punish simple users with rehab rather than prison.)

chris_mahan• 13 years ago

Eliminating drug use mostly means eliminating mild depression (notwithstanding the medical uses of drugs), which mostly means giving people a reason to feel good about themselves and their future, which mostly mean providing an environment where they are free from oppression, constant surveillance, and a multitude of contradictory laws, along with good means of making money, which means education, positive work and life experiences, and a vibrant economy. Note that anything the individual is forced to do against their will without appropriate compensation is out of the question; such as bad schools, prison, and, dare I say it, American team sports?

Yes some people are more prone to addictive behavior than others, and yes severe depression is a serious disease which must be handled by professionals. However, the malaise in America is not clinical depression: it's the lack of opportunity to learn, excel, and be rewarded for such excellence. Yes, this opportunity exists for many people, and many do take advantage of it, to great benefit. Many others, though, for a variety of reasons, lack that opportunity. It is generally these people who fuel demand for drugs, to escape the misery and blight of a dead-end future. These people are not losers, but people to whom the dealer of cards dealt a poor hand, and who have not been told by the media and their peers that no hand is a bad hand, that there are opportunity in adversity, that it is through failure that success comes. They, alas, believe that their lot is to suffer, then die, not having achieved anything worthwhile. So, in their desperation and utter loneliness, they seek a fleeting pleasure, a personal high, to momentarily drift away from the relentless and inexorable approach of Death.

Do you wish them well? Do you seek to help them? Change yourself. Show them by the example of your own life that adversity can be overcome. Show them by the kindness in your speech, by your countenance, by your actions, that they are not ostracized from human society, but rather, as fallen and wounded, deserve further aid, further care from the rest of us.

Or do you wish them away? To be put in prison and removed from your neighborhood, your city? Do you blame them for the poor choices they have made? In their lack of ability, they fell, and unable to stand, they stayed down. Are they weak, ill-fitted for society, and perhaps their premature death at the hand of violence, poverty, and the lawman, is the just reward for their inability to thrive in the Modern Age?

As I see children in the playground at my son's elementary school, I see them all alike: full of joy, vitality, and wonder. As children, we too were alike. Then life happened. For some, with privilege and wealth, to great achievements; and for others, with violence and meanness, to suffering and loneliness.

axus• 13 years ago

Somehow I doubt the database detailing the history of subpoenas is as accurate as the one containing all the phone records.

Is there anything like the FISA court for these subpoenas? I couldn't find any kind of checks on their power.

socillion• 13 years ago

The DEA uses "administrative subpoenas", which they are allowed to unilaterally issue for anything relevant to an investigation.

Here's an older article on them: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/administrative-subp...

aet• 13 years ago

Burner phones?

jacobquick3• 13 years ago

They call non-smartphones 'feature phones' and unlike 3g network phones, they all have gps as part of the CDR. LTE has it as well, only 3g doesn't. 3g network stuff uses old PPoE because phone companies are lazy.

MichaelGG3• 13 years ago

You're saying every low-end phone has GPS active, then gets and transmits a fix for every phone call?

mseebach• 13 years ago

There is no 'gps' in CDR, there is the ID of the tower, which can be mapped to a geolocation. Especially in urban environments, the location of the tower is pretty tightly correlated with the location of the phone. Looking at CDRs over time, you can get an even better idea.

3G is not immune from this. There is a record of which tower the phone was registered at.

The GPs solution is good, but it requires a lot of phones and SIMs, as well as very good discipline, to properly mask your activities.

TrainedMonkey2• 13 years ago

So AT&T kept records for 26 years and counting. Information that includes location of caller. I am very happy drug dealers were caught, but 26 years? There is some serious potential for abuse.

jacobquick3• 13 years ago

I was at a different telecom a couple years back and legal handed down a ruling that we couldn't keep things beyond two years, even though we were research instead of billing. Research was the last group at the company to have to delete all that stuff, and we only had space for five years anyway, and even that was stripped down to 10% of its original data. However the researchers felt very safe in assuming that since the government has all of the data reflected off the antenna base station switches through its own network, there's no way they're deleting anything.

It's weird that at&t had to give them that data, unless you assume that up til now they had access to the nsa's copy and now the justice department says they have to have their own.

TrainedMonkey2• 13 years ago

Just read article in depth and found two more significant "features". First one - database build by AT&T can identify if target individual uses multiple phones (So if say I was engineer Joe and wanted to get sell private cell number(s) for Angelina Jolie how much would you pay?). Second - they can identify if you switched to a new number. Even if you threw out your phone. (So speaking of numbers, how much would you pay for a yearly subscription previously offered 'product'). Seriously if AT&T doing this, there is no reason to believe that other providers do not.

metageek2• 13 years ago

Seriously if AT&T doing this, there is no reason to believe that other providers do not.

The article says AT&T has the data for any telco that uses AT&T switches. This is a little odd, given that the company currently known as AT&T is not the same company that used to manufacture switches; but, if this has been going on for 26 years, I suppose the government would have insisted it continue across corporate splits and mergers.

diminoten• 13 years ago

A question no one on here gives a shit about but is of critical importance is, "Was there actual abuse?"

joering2• 13 years ago

Interesting to note here is that the ATT _gave_ those records "on its own", versus being subpoena via DEA by a judge, something that 99% of judges in their sound mind would have never ever ever agreed on, even in today's world.

I had a hard time believing that ATT would have done something like this out of their own free will, as they would have never done anything that could undermine their sales and bottom line (potentially) so severely.

I put "on its own" in quotes because knowing the way Government thugs are conducting themselves, most likely the ATT had been heavily blackmailed under the table this or another way and at some point they have given up (Wikipedia: tyranny). Don't be surprised if in couple of years from now the administration will change, and the management of ATT will change, and then you will see some tiny PR-lawsuit surfacing that yes indeed ATT were pushed by DEA and now they are "suing".

jivatmanx2• 13 years ago

The Telecoms have long given total cooperation in exchange for monopoly privileges in cable and internet.

Carrot before stick.

hga• 13 years ago

Better, Wikipedia a former Qwest (US West/Mountain States T&T, Northwestern Bell, Pacific Northwest Bell) CEO, Joseph Nacchio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio#Qwest

smsm42• 13 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure AT&T didn't do it entirely on its own. In our crony capitalism times, being friends with the Big Government is a very good strategy for Big Business. Lobbying is the most profitable investment known to man. If giving records to DEA means access to juicy government contracts or a nice regulation that ensures the interests of AT&T are properly protected - then bottom line comes out nicely. That provided anybody besides a handful of geeks would actually care - after all, you'd never do something as vile and disgusting as sell merchandise that the government does not approve, right? So you have nothing to fear and there's no reason for concern at all.

mrinterweb2• 13 years ago

So assuming worst case scenario that the DEA actually was able to make a whole bunch of arrests based on this historical data, would we really want to pay to jail that many more inmates? What could be the point of this?

samstave• 13 years ago

would we really want to pay to jail that many more inmates

This implies you have any choice in the matter.

Its starkly obvious these days the actual relationship between the US "citizenry" and their government.

genwin34• 13 years ago

The point could be private prisons and the lobbying $$$$ they funnel to politicians.

diydsp• 13 years ago

Pressure against individuals: To put pressure on people to get them to do your bidding. To compel people to turn up evidence on bigger fish or your family members. To compel someone to be a patsy for a different crime. To compel celebrities to come out in support of the security state.

Nationally (or bragging rights): To look good to other countries when we ask for loans ("we're a secure nation- we could arrest all of these people if we wanted to."). To negotiate with prison-building companies (untapped arrests are potential prisons). To compel additional budgeting for high-tech crime-fighting research and equipment. To inflate one party's credibility pre-election ("we turned up all these bad guys."). As bargaining tokens in international deals ("we'll turn in this bad guy of yours if you buy our $million radar"). To bolster Big Pharma's stance that mass-narcotics are necessary ("look how many people self-medicate with dangerous cannabis, they should be taking prozac instead.").

mrinterweb2• 13 years ago

Yikes. I prefer to think that the government would not be that evil, but then again, that's just me choosing ignorance/optimism over thinking about how bad things could actually be.

shitlord• 13 years ago

would we really want to pay to jail that many more inmates?

I would much rather have some of these people in prison than in society. Bomb makers, drug lords, and other violent types absolutely deserve to be put in prison (regardless of the internet's incessant whining about the drug war).

edit: As an observation, whenever any sort of political thread comes on HN, the comments overwhelmingly tend to be paranoid horseshit. This is not a judgment about the parent comment, just the entire thread in general.

w0rd-driven• 13 years ago

Now it makes me wonder what the turnover rate will be once all those drug dealers learn that AT&T is bad for their business. I wonder if anyone is even measuring those stats to know.

This is by far not free and I really wonder what AT&T is getting out of the deal. They're devoting a small but significant amount of internal resources for what? Does the DEA overlook their transgressions or just the CEO? I have a hard time believing that AT&T would do this "out of the kindness of their hearts." I wonder now that this is exposed and the real costs of this project will come to bare if they'll keep it up. They certainly have enough money to throw at it, though.

wmf• 13 years ago

I would assume that the DEA is paying AT&T whatever they ask, so it's hardly charity. (I wonder if AT&T tacks on mystery fees to the government like they do with consumers.)

MichaelGG3• 13 years ago

A: The information AT&T is handing over covers far more than just their own subscribers. They're also providing wholesale information, so even if you're not an AT&T subscriber, your provider might eventually buy from AT&T, and they'll get the call detail record for some of your calls anyways.

B: Is it known that the other major providers are not in on this just like AT&T?

kordless• 13 years ago

And moreover, calls to non-AT&T mobile users are in there. That means you are in there if someone called you from AT&T and/or you called them on AT&T. With a bit of legwork, you could reasonably infer phone number changes on non-AT&T networks given the same people on AT&T and you kept calling each other after your number change.

jivatmanx2• 13 years ago

This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually be more dangerous to Liberty than the war on terror.

No doubt it's basic premise, that putting a substance into one's own body is a "crime", is a pernicious lie.

The War on Terror's pernicious lie is twofold: Terrorism isn't a crime, and thus isn't subject to any laws, that this war is eternal, and the whole world is a battlefield.

Certainly in practical effects the Drug war is worse: Minorities whose communities are regularly raided by soldiers, depopulated, and placed into our glorious, humane prison system with the highest incarceration rate in the world, than stripped of voting rights and essentially blackballed from employment afterwards, would think surely so...

My natural tendency has so far been to see the war on Terror as worse, this may be me I, like many HNers with dissident political opinions, am more likely to see myself as an actual target in the War on Terror. That, and being an Orwell fan...

_bfhp• 13 years ago

Read "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander and then start reading up on the history of civil rights activism and the beginning of the war on drugs

tel• 13 years ago

You can also take a look at the worldwide impact it's had through empowering Colombian cartels for instance.

sharkweek• 13 years ago

The Economist rants on this every couple of months, and I couldn't agree more.

The war on drugs is a terrible misstep. Drugs should never have been a criminal issue, they should be strictly a public health issue. But we're far too entrenched to make that change now.

Watch "The House I Live In" (streaming on Netflix) for a ridiculously detailed picture of the problem

csmatt• 13 years ago

"The House I Live In" was an eye opener for me. Also, one of the directors, David Simon, is the creator of the HBO show 'The Wire' which dealt heavily with the side effects of the war on drugs.

'The Wire' is the first thing I thought of when reading about this story.

anigbrowl8• 13 years ago

The most impressive bit of THILI for me was the two cops that you saw ~15 years ago as young idealistic tough guys in a reality show, and now as jaded cynics who have mostly given up hope.

mpyne8• 13 years ago

And now you know why David Simon was one of the few people speaking up about why PRISM wasn't really a big deal, as he has seen firsthand the effect of the War of Drugs on minorities through his work on The Wire.

If the government should have the power to do these types of investigations (and the people keep voting people in who are 'Tough on Crime' so apparently they feel the government should have that power...), then at least the NSA's abuses are essentially equal opportunity with some form of judicial oversight applied. Minorities don't seem to even get that much when we're talking about DEA, FBI, etc.

toyg• 13 years ago

as he has seen firsthand the effect of the War of Drugs on minorities through his work on The Wire

Or rather through his 16 years as journalist on the police beat at the Baltimore Sun, from which he got enough material to write 3 books and 3 TV series, including The Wire.

It's really weird how TV just outshines everything else as soon as it gets in the picture. Simon will forever be "the guy who wrote The Wire", like he was a barista in Hollywood who just sat down at the kitchen table one day and made up all of it in his head and then proceeded to film it for TV.

(And no, I don't agree with him on the subject: the fact that evils come in different forms and shapes doesn't mean we should ignore one or the other.)

jlgreco19• 13 years ago

The jump from "The War on Drugs is worse than PRISM" to "PRISM really isn't a big deal" is rather large...

"If the government should have the power to do these types of investigations..." See, they obviously shouldn't. Justifying PRISM because the DEA is doing something that they shouldn't is silly. Both deserve criticism, and we should not curtail criticism of PRISM just because the War on Drugs isn't getting nearly the criticism it deserves.

David Simon's complaint is just "hipster outrage" bullshit: "I was upset at something before it was cool!" It is just the flipside of the people who get frustrated with recent attention to surveillance because "Of course this is going on, haven't you heard of Room 641A? I've been talking about this for years! Grrr, I am upset that I am no longer unique for my suspicions."

viggity• 13 years ago

I can appreciate where you're coming from with regards to the basic premise of the war on drugs. Like the old adage says: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The thing that tears me up about it is that some of these drugs (primarily meth and to a lesser degree heroin) completely obliterate lives and leave a huge cost to the general welfare of society. I don't think that we should be throwing users in jail instead of treatment, but a place where methamphetamine is legal and freely available is a scary place. I think there is a line between legalizing and decriminalizing and I'm not sure I'd want to see some drugs legalized. Weed, MDMA, I can see being legalized, but the hardcore stuff I'd be more comfortable simply decriminalizing usage.

WildUtah2• 13 years ago

"a place where methamphetamine is legal and freely available is a scary place"

Like the USA in the 1960's? Benzedrine was sold over the counter to children and widely used throughout the country.

Now benzedrine is probably less dangerous than methamphetamine because it's slightly less hydrophobic, which often makes addiction less trouble. Meth showed up as the very similar black market substitute when benzedrine was made prescription only. It turned out methamphetamine was easier to make with household solvents in trailers; users would probably prefer benzedrine.

Both methamphetamine and benzedrine are available with a prescription. Benzedrine is the active substance in Adderall; in fact, Adderall is only a hair's breadth different from methamphetamine.

The difference is that today it's only black market customers that use methamphetamine. If we re-legalized dexedrine or benzedrine over the counter, the trouble would mostly go away.

betterunix• 13 years ago

"the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

What good intentions? The war on drugs has never been about good intentions. It has been a combination of racism, power-grabbing, and lobbying by big business from the start. Look at the things that were said in newspapers and to Congress in the early days of drug prohibition, back when cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola, if you do not believe me.

"The thing that tears me up about it is that some of these drugs (primarily meth and to a lesser degree heroin) completely obliterate lives and leave a huge cost to the general welfare of society"

The funny thing about methamphetamine is that it has medical uses -- it is used to treat narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD. Yes, the same drug that people smoke out of broken light bulks happens to be available by prescription and sold at your local pharmacy. You know what the most important difference is? Quality control.

See, pharmaceutical drugs have regulated purity, dosage, and ingredients. You know that the methamphetamine your doctor prescribe will actually be methamphetamine and that it will not be contaminated with oxidizing agents. Methamphetamine is not the safest drug to use to get high (the dose is higher than it would be for medical uses) but even at medicinal doses the black market version is not safe. Likewise with heroin: adulterants are a bigger problem than the drug itself, and pharmaceutical opiates are safer because their production is nice and clean.

"Weed, MDMA, I can see being legalized, but the hardcore stuff I'd be more comfortable simply decriminalizing usage."

There is a bit of irony in saying that you think MDMA should be legalized but that methamphetamine should not be. MDMA is not all that different from methamphetamine (in terms of chemistry, effects, and danger to users) and quite a few "MDMA" pills actually contain methamphetamine (as a mixture, or maybe just methamphetamine depending on how unscrupulous the producer is). MDMA carries with it all the negative effects on amphetamine withdrawal (the "crash").

Really what we need is to legalize and regulate all recreational drugs. A world where methamphetamine is legal but regulated is better than a world where it is decriminalized and unregulated. If someone checks into the hospital because of a bad reaction to drugs, they should be in a position to tell their doctor exactly what drugs they took -- and their doctor should be able to assume that those drugs were not laced with heavy metals.

prawn3• 13 years ago

Is the War on Drugs just modernised slavery? Privatised prison system with the profit-based incentives to take on more and more prisoners.

ballard5• 13 years ago

Most slaves turn a profit, while most prisons require funding.

Prisons are garbage processors for grinding up as many undesirables as possible, for as long as possible. Whom is chosen is somewhat random, but usually people that are undesirable: ugly or antisocial. As for the minor point of finding guilt: a crime can always be found, so that's not a limiting factor.

The majority have already volunteered to be slaves. Healthcare and visa status the whips for native and immigrant employees respectively, especially in the US. Debt and consumption alike further captivate these unfortunate creatures on an unending treadmill of pseudo-affluence they will never attain.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I think a total boycott of ATT would be a good start, since it appears ATT actually was out in front of Verizon and T-Mobile and Sprint on this. I'd probably trust T-Mobile and Sprint more than either ATT or Sprint based on corporate history, too. Still totally untrustworthy, but there probably is a difference.

It's getting to the point where a good alternative to how cellphones work might be worthwhile, to keep location data more confidential. A broadcast "ping", and then some form of tunneled return connection, rather than routine registration with location.

Doing it all in a way which doesn't touch PSTN and thus doesn't call under a sane interpretation of CALEA, plus a provider willing to challenge the constitutionality of CALEA and at minimum require full warrants for all cooperation, probably would be a good deal better, too.

qwerty_asdf• 13 years ago

Good luck. How do you boycott a backbone network provider thatmay ultimately service your chosen ISP anyway?

Sure, you harm their consumer and residential retail operations, but that won't cripple their business to business operations, which is where all the real money is anyway.

dllthomas5• 13 years ago

Mesh networks?

rdl2• 13 years ago

I think when you're boycotting a huge company, you can just avoid them where possible. If you can't tell if the company is a vendor to a vendor, that's ok. It doesn't need to be a material impact on their financials -- just the marketing and PR value which keeps the issue in place is important, and maybe it keeps smaller companies from playing along, too.

I'd probably not buy transit from them, certainly not when given a choice (I'd obviously still peer/etc. if I needed routes to ATT), too.

consider_this• 13 years ago

You don't need to boycott AT&T, although, that would be nice.

They, Google, Level 3, etc. all own so much of the network backbones...it's impossible not to route through an adversarial trunk.

The answer is now encryption. End-to-end, and everywhere. Email should be considered as dead as the landline. Secure-IM and chat...along with self-hosted data services[like Owncloud] are the future. Or at least they should be.

Information is power and your adversaries will not give it up, ever. The only way to take that power is to scramble the bits.

tsotha2• 13 years ago

It doesn't surprise me the government would be able to find people swapping out phones on a regular basis using this data.

I once worked in the fraud department of a major US mobile carrier. At that time analog was on its last legs, and the new money-making opportunity was bog-standard identity theft. People would sign up for new phones using stolen information and then rent out minutes to immigrants from the back of a van until we found them out and shut down the phone. We had a system that "fingerprinted" usage patterns such that we knew with a fair degree of certainty when a new account was fraudulent based on his usage patters and the people he called.

I don't see any reason why the same technology wouldn't work to identify criminals with boxes full of prepaid phones.

asn0• 13 years ago

DEAT&T would have dominated the FTC RoboCall Challenge http://robocall.challenge.gov/ if they would have entered. $50K to boot.

When a phone spammer uses fake Caller IDs, the FTC would subpoena the records through DEAT&T to find out the real caller, then $fine$ them into oblivion.

Actually, AT&T should offer a service "WhoReallyJustCalledMe" so I can track down and sue the spammers myself. I'd even pay a % of my winnings.

quahada• 13 years ago

This "dropped phone" search in interesting. This could be the most dangerous aspect of this program.

Chances are little scientific research was done on the accuracy. What is the false positive rate? Are there policies and procedures in place to determine if the phones actually matched the individual? This can't be done without the voice data.

Are the analysts savvy enough about the limitation of the underlying algorithms?

If these questions have not been addressed, it's possible innocent people have been prosecuted.

shawn-furyan7• 13 years ago

As a meta-commentary on this category of issues, I tend to be against these sort of substance bans (PEDs[1] in sports is another timely example), and I often see that people who support such measures tend to talk about what things would be like if these substances were completely gotten rid of[2]. To me, this is complete fantasy because there's never been a substance ban that has been very effective at reducing usage of a popular substance, instead such bans simply create black markets out of open markets. But when there's this idea, mostly but not exclusively on the pro-criminalization side, that we can completely stamp out markets where there is inelastic demand through bans/criminalization and enforcement, then you get justifications for more and more extreme measures from the enforcement side. In reality though, we tend to see hugely diminishing returns accompanying these measures, and the numbers in the article demonstrate these diminishing returns well (i.e. the program is incredibly broad, yet the spoils being bragged about are incredibly paltry compared to the size of the related markets).

The assumption that bans/criminalization can significantly reduce demand for substances with inelastic demand is completely unreasonable given the track record of such measures. For example, demand for PEDs in professional sports is particularly inelastic because the rewards for even marginal increases in performance are so high and the penalties are so rare and low as to easily be subsidized by the increased salary resulting from use of PEDs, not to mention the cognitive and social biases that favor optimizing short-term over long-term performance.

In discussing such issues, I think that actual outcomes of previous and current banning/criminalization policies has to start being favored as the baseline effect of future policies rather than this pie in the sky idea that these sort of policies can have at or near 100% efficacy. Then perhaps we can move on from the inane moralizing that tends to accompany such discussions to a point where we can have results oriented discourse grounded in reality on these topics.

[1]Performance Enhancing Drugs, actually used more broadly to label all performance enhancing substances including human hormones and blood oxygenation.

[2]this really isn't a straw man, I've been involved in a few discussions in the last couple months in which the ban/criminalization proponents (about 4 or so different people) were arguing their position from the assumption that bans/criminalization can lead to reduction of substance usage to negligible levels.

[edited to fix formatting and to clarify footnote 1]

api• 13 years ago

Depending on the drug, are you sure you'd even want them completely gotten rid of? Ban psychedelics and you'd have a lot less good music and art.

shawn-furyan7• 13 years ago

Puritanical stuffiness seems to be popular in domestic policy. Coffee is my vice of choice, but I personally don't begrudge others their own, whether or not they wound up on the legal or illegal side of the game of substance ban musical chairs. That being said, and I'm not going to push this point too hard, there is a counterpoint to the relationship of drugs to the arts in that we've seen a lot of tragedy come out of that relationship as well. I wouldn't presume to tell people what they can and can't use, but I likewise wouldn't deny that there are both positive and negative effects of using such substances. I take from your comment though the idea that we overwhelmingly emphasize the negative aspects of substance use/abuse. Obviously people enjoy them, but that never seems to come up.

drblast• 13 years ago

It would be interesting if politicians had to argue for the drug war using the actual effects as the reasons.

"Proposition 843 will raise the price of cocaine and heroine and make possession illegal so as to create a massive demand for it among a newly expanded criminal class. We'd like to ensure that the price is so high that the enforcement agencies are outspent and outsmarted at every turn by extremely well-funded drug cartels. We will pay the additional enforcement costs through increased taxes and seizure of private property and assets. Additionally, we plan to make selling these drugs so lucrative that it becomes one of very few attractive career options for our nation's poor."

mtdewcmu• 13 years ago

To me, this is complete fantasy because there's never been a substance ban that has been very effective at reducing usage of a popular substance

That statement is more or less true in a broad sense, but at the level of individual substances, bans can be quite effective. There have been cases of recreational drugs effectively disappearing due to changes in law or de facto bans. It has happened especially with pharmaceuticals. Quaalude, a prescription sleeping pill, was popular recreationally in the 70s and early 80s (see, e.g., Cheech and Chong's Up In Smoke), but it was put into schedule I of the CSA in the mid 80s, which made it illegal for all purposes. Supposedly, there were bootleg versions for a short time, but it has long since faded into legend (control of precursor chemicals might have been the final decisive blow). The same happened with many prescription drugs of the 60s and 70s, which were either banned outright, severely restricted, and/or voluntarily withdrawn by the manufacturer due to pressure. Barbiturates used to be popular, but, although they're currently in schedule II and not banned outright, they're prescribed so infrequently that they're as good as gone. The most recent prescription to disappear due to gov't action was Rohypnol (but I suspect the popularity of this drug was overblown). If you read the text of the CSA, you'll find a long list of obscure names of drugs of all types that are not actively traded anywhere on earth, some of which probably never had significant markets, but others of which certainly did, or could have. It's true that overall, drug prohibition has been fantastically ineffective at eliminating drug use; cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana continue to flood in, supplied by international drug trafficking organizations. But there's a cat-and-mouse game that goes on, and some drugs more than others are vulnerable to government action.

ballard5• 13 years ago

One readily inferred tip on changing burner phones is to physically change locations* before using a new one (battery removed when not making/expecting a call, of course). * Say the tube at rush hour.

AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

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