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...

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

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

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.

"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."

> Grrr, I am upset that I am no longer unique for my suspicions."

The first part is entirely true, but the second part is a misplaced caricature. If one wasn't operating with this threat model pre-Snowden, they mustn't have been analyzing the situation too hard.

The people who saw the Snowden revelations as inevitable had to endure being buzzkills for the past several years while everyone else leaped at the chance to party with the "cool kids" as geeks entered the limelight. It was clear that Apple's/Facebook's/Twitter's advances were primarily in the marketing department, but it was easy to ignore this to avoid being negative when you're finally gaining long-craved social acceptance.

Now that the herdthink has shifted towards privacy, we're seeing the same wishful marketing being applied to a lot of non-solutions to privacy (encrypting servers like Lavabit, remote code like Hushmail, facades of anonymity like Bitcoin, etc), when the reality is that solving (as opposed to merely obfuscating) these problems is extremely hard and any solution requires users to start taking a modicum of responsibility for their computing environment. But lowest-common-denominator faux solutions cannot address this inconvenient truth, so they give people the illusion of doing something while wasting away this iteration's outrage.

The people who complain that it is now receiving attention are doing it, I think, out of frustration that they are not being adequately recognized for being ahead of the curve. They feel vindicated but they think that nobody notices that, so they lash out and complain about the wrong thing.

I see a parallel between this and David Simon's stance. He is upset that people are concerned about PRISM not because he has a good reason to be unconcerned about PRISM but because he wants that outrage reserved for his pet issue. He lashes out at the wrong thing; it should not concern him that people are concerned about PRISM, rather it should concern him that they are not also concerned about the War on Drugs.

(I picked the "upset at not being vindicated" example because it is a position I find myself tempted to take. I feel qualified to talk about the mentality behind it because I understand and resist the urge to adopt that mentality myself.)

Communications freedom is basically my pet issue. I'm glad the issue is getting attention, but don't feel enthusiastic about how the reaction is playing out.

The primary response seems to consist of politically-aimed incredulousness, as if the NSA will ever stop intercepting everything they physically can. It could have purpose if this were going to be the event that caused dismantling of USG, but it's not.

What's really lacking in the popular dialog is self-reflection about how the pervasiveness is entirely due to people's own poor, compulsive, and lazy technology choices. The status quo in the non-privacy threads is still enthusiasm for the latest shiny centralized trap from Google/Apple/Facebook/Dropbox/otherWebStartup.

The tide of awareness has not actually shifted until it starts being socially uncool to use a Gmail.com address, let Facebook mediate your social life, electively upgrade your pocket tracker for a new facade, rely on software that's controlled by someone else, or build new products in walled gardens.

So it seems like dispassionate/condescending "I've been telling you this all along" is an appropriate way to point out that there's been plenty of people who've been preaching the solution before you bothered to realize there was a problem. And if you'd actually like to empower yourself, you really do need to follow their inconvenient advice instead of seeking easy gratification through the latest fad kickstarter campaign or https site with flawed marketing spiel.

I would agree that both deserve equitable argumentation.

However the choices appear to be to completely upend the way the legal system and law enforcement handles investigations (which the people have voted against time after time), or to keep the systems that exist and tighten the oversight and transparency.

I suppose your choice on that will fall towards whether you are more distrustful of the government or crooks. But essentially the same logic would appear to apply to both.

So lets say that War on Drugs reform is impractical as it would upend the legal system or whatever bullshit. I disagree, but lets go with it...

How does it follow that we should then make sure the shit is evenly spread on everybody? Is this the Harrison Bergeron school of social justice? We cannot stomach treating this segment of the population decently, so in order to make this fair, we are going to treat the rest of you like shit too?

However many of the legal and investigatory techniques used to investigate drug-related "crimes" are perfectly cromulent ways to investigate many other actual crimes. I would like to keep those techniques available, in general. Each technique may or may not have it's place, for sure.

But a useful, cost-effective tool that's not otherwise unconstitutional should be used. We should then make sure that the oversight and transparency measures for each type of tool is in place to ensure that such measures are not abused.

The government is pretty much literally the only thing we the people have any input into... functions which rightly belong to "the people" at large should be placed into the government. Where government screws those up, the answer should be to fix the government, not for the people to completely abdicate that responsibility.

> How does it follow that we should then make sure the shit is evenly spread on everybody?

You're basically asking why a given system should be fairly applied? I would reverse the question completely and say that any given government system should start off completely fair and only deviate from that for very good reason.

Avoiding "Misery Loves Company" is a good reason, mind you. We levy administrative fines on people who actually screw up, for example.

But the Simon logic is, why is it permissible to surveil tens of thousands of cell phone calls within a predominantly poor, black & Hispanic neighborhood for literally years at a time, looking for evidence of small-time drug dealers, but it's not possible to get the same type of court order to surveil other communications (even at larger scale) for something that's actually important to society at large?

There is a difference in scale, that's for sure. But the difference is not really as large as the difference between no surveillance and what the police/FBI/others are already doing (and have been doing) throughout America. And so that's his point, if America agrees that this type of investigatory powers should be used (the kind that have always permitted incidentally collecting too much, or searching through all records reasonably relevant to a case, etc.), where and why does the framework behind those powers actually end here when it didn't there?

There may very well be a good reason, but if that reason is "we don't trust the government" then by what logic do we let the DoJ in general investigate criminal acts? I guess what I'm saying is that I really wish we would get back to a framework of control of government (like the EFF, ACLU, etc. have been pushing to do for years) instead of instinctive distrust of the idea of government.

But whatever we do decide the government rightly has the power to do, we should at least be consistent with it.

I think that all legal systems should be fairly applied.

I think that when abuse or imbalances become apparent, we should correct that imbalance by pulling back systems and ending enforcement, rather than applying more pressure on other areas.

After the imbalance is corrected, then we can discuss how to reapply the system in a fair balanced manner.

So, in concrete terms: The surveillance/law enforcement techniques being used in the War on Drugs may very well be something that we, as a society, could accept. However the War on Drugs is imbalanced and unfair in a very bad way. We should therefore throttle back on everything, correct the underlying issue, then determine if we still think that those surveillance/law enforcement techniques are still warranted.

Throttling back on these surveillance/law enforcement techniques is extreme, but I think that the accusations leveled against the War on Drugs (basically, that it is a form of class warfare, born of blatant widespread racism) are serious enough to warrant an extreme response.

Simon is pointing out a very clear problem; my suggestion is that we pull over to the side of the road and try to figure out just what the hell went wrong. The sooner we pull over, the better, because we seem to be doing a lot of damage.

But it's not obvious. Lots of people disagree with you and consistently vote for draconian approaches to law enforcement, immigration etc. I know a lot of people that simultaneously think Obama's a wicked tyrant and that Civil War 2.0 is inevitable, and who are also heartily in favor of the death penalty, mass deportations of illegal immigrants, militarizing the border with Mexico, and (insert hardline view here).

These are things put in the realm of "opinion", but I think we can safely discard fringe notions like "the world is 3000 years old" or "the disparate effect of the War on Drugs on minorities that is accelerated by hard-line stances and rapidly advancing law enforcement technology and techniques is acceptable."[0]

[0] Read: "That stuff that concerns David Simon, @jivatmanx, and myself."

You weaken your own argument when you go around stating your opinion as fact, and it's not very different from people saying things like 'obviously long prison sentences reduce crime' or 'obviously excluding immigrants will relieve unemployment' or 'obviously the point of prison is punishment.'

(You are the later, of course?)

Arguing that your opponent's argument is a "fringe notion" and throwing it in with another irrelevant example of a fringe notion is a pathetic excuse for a counter. You actually have to write a direct counter-argument instead of relying on dismissiveness and fallacy. But hey, acting like an asshole is definitely the easier way.

anigbrowl is being pedantic about the term "obvious" but does not seem to actually disagree (The thread you are responding to is about effective communication, on which anigbrowl and I disagree, but I do not think that he is an idiot for disagreeing with me on this point.)

mpyne doesn't seem to disagree that it is problematic (he brought up David Simon after all... in fact his response to me makes me think that we both agree that both situations are problematic), but thinks it is not practical to change the state of affairs. I, again, disagree with that, but I certainly do not think that he is an idiot for thinking that the realities of the situation preclude meaningful change.

mindsling takes exception to my caricature of privacy advocates who are frustrated with recent media attention to their cause, but I think I have explained myself there well enough. I do not think that mindsling is an idiot.

(If I've mischaracterized anybodies position here, please correct me, but as I have interpreted everyones' comments currently I don't think that anybody here is an idiot.)

And even where it does start affecting other people, there are probably much better ways to regulate that effect than prison, and we should be using those ways instead. And we should switchover yesterday.

It's probably not yet practical politically to fix that (especially as its so tied toward racist tendencies dog-whistle style), but that would not be a reason for me to argue in support of it.

However I also don't presume that shedding the War on Drugs would eliminate crime, or the need to investigate and prosecute such. So we'll still have government enforcing law, protecting public security, and the like. And so I get very, very tired of the argument that government trying to get power $FOO to do such things is necessarily a dystopian power grab.

Don't get me wrong, it may actually be a bad idea for government to do $FOO, but no one is generally going to convince me of that by hyperbole or invoking the Sheeple Mantra (not saying you're doing that here, btw, just remarking on some HN threads I remember in general).

Wait a minute, you didn't say anything about 'a thread about geology.' In fact, I was the person who brought that into the conversation. Discussions and misapprehensions about the age of the earth seem more likely to crop up in conversations about religion or general science or ancient history.

You've got a nerve critiquing me for being a pedant when you're retroactively redefining the terms of your argument like that.

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.)

You know I almost mentioned that, but then I had the horrifying thought that he might have had someone on the police beat on his production team and that it may not have been Simon himself with that experience, and I didn't want to spout anything factually incorrect so I left it out completely.

I'm glad to be corrected on that, hopefully I'll remember for the next time it comes up.

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.

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.

We'd have:

Rehab for getting women off of diet pills.

Same thing for truckers, just for a different reason.

And we'd read about students abusing diet pills to study with.

But we'd also shut down a violent black market industry that gets $50 billion a year and kills 25,000-50,000 people in the USA and Latin America each year. That's most of the trouble. Skinny ladies with diet pill issues are small time in the face of mass death. We'd eventually defund most of the expanding police state, too.

Yup.

>That's most of the trouble. Skinny ladies with diet pill issues are small time in the face of mass death.

Eaxctly.

>We'd eventually defund most of the expanding police state, too.

I'd love to be able to pry back the Castle Doctrine. I may be crazy but I honestly fear a wrong-address or otherwise mistaken police raid more than hostile activity from illegal drug smugglers/sellers.

The frameworks we would desire in a legalized environment are already here, but for some reason truckers and women make it an insurmountable challenge. Something about tattoos and/or menstruation? I'm not sure I follow the logic at work here.

Basically, a portion of the money currently going to prisons would be redirected to medical assistance, which is not the worst result emerging from recent history that I can imagine.

Yes, almost nothing would change WRT abuse of drugs.

>I'm not sure I follow the logic at work here.

Logic? In the War on Drugs?

>Basically, a portion of the money currently going to prisons would be redirected to medical assistance, which is not the worst result emerging from recent history that I can imagine.

Hopefully a lot of money would be diverted from law enforcement to mental health treatment.

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.

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.

The agencies that administer prisons get their funding from taxes, and the the level of funding maybe based on population.

But ultimately, society (taxes, etc.) pays for it.

Have any countries humanely monitized inmates? That is provide a choice to meaningfully work while incarcerated.

Not even relevant in private prisons, many of which put their prisoners to work and provide third-world wages to their inmates. And the funding comes from the government.

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.

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.").

This implies you have any choice in the matter.

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

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".

Carrot before stick.

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.

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.

I suspect that current infrastructure is the "AT&T switches" that are relevant here.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I could just get these things cheaply and easily, I would gladly use them. Right now so many of them seem more experimental than ubiquitous.

I'd be one of the first people in line to install a mesh network at my residence and work, but it would be pretty useless unless there were others contributing, else I'd have a pretty lonely network.

Which is to say, I'd also very much like to see such a consolidation of resources.

http://stackexchange.com/sites

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

Let me put you in rehab for your coffee addiction or beer habit, ok?

Does making meth and crack legal make less crime (violent or robbery) than if their usage was nil? I highly doubt it.

It's a dangerous drug. It makes people violent. People drink and drive and kill people. Let's make it illegal too, eh?

Drug addiction is a health issue and should be treated as that. Making drugs illegal CREATES MORE CRIME.

We could stop this madness if only people would STOP SUPPORTING THE MADNESS.

Sorry to shout, but I'm sure you're an otherwise intelligent individual, but you are failing in this subject.

You mean, it could be legalization, taxation, and using taxes to fund intervention, referral, and treatment programs, and not be opposed to legalization at all?

If so, then its obviously not what people supporting legalization are arguing against when they are arguing againt the War on Drugs.

I wouldn't stop at using the taxes from the sale of hard drugs to reduce their usage. If spending $X against drug usage lead to $2X in net benefits, I'd support spending $X no matter how much higher it was than those taxes.

A key component would be rehab, in which case it might be tough to make the drug legal. Suppose crack is legal and so there's some parent high on crack all day, providing only the most basic of care for the kids. If it takes keeping crack illegal to legally force that parent into rehab, then I'd want crack to stay illegal, but change the consequence to rehab.

If the "most basic care" is adequately meeting the society's minimums, this obviously doesn't justify criminalization.

If it doesn't, then child neglect can be made illegal (hint: it already is), independently of whether it results from drug abuse.

> If it takes keeping crack illegal to legally force that parent into rehab

Compulsory-as-an-alternative-to-prison rehab obviously requires that something be illegal, but it doesn't require that the illegal thing be the drug of abuse. Rehab as a condition of a suspended sentence could conceptually be tied to any crime for which drug abuse was a contributing factor even if the drug was legal (IIRC, this is sometimes done with alcohol in, e.g., the context of DUI, even though alcohol is legal.)

So, the premise here that making the drug illegal might be essential to make compulsory-as-an-alternative-to-prison rehab an available tool is simply false.

I accept that. I support whatever it takes as a minimum to get the person into rehab, even if the minimum bar for parenting is raised so that crack addiction doesn't reach it. If the majority of crack users could be model citizens while high then my mind could be changed.

That's not one of the available options. I mean, looking back at the article, the spoils of this program are incredibly paltry given the enormity of the data set. Criminalization of drugs and Militarization of enforcement groups is not significantly deterring usage because they are so ineffective even with so many resources and so little respect for the civil rights of users and non-users alike. All these programs have been effective at is raising the bar for drug distribution organizations to a point where militarization and violence is necessary for operation.

>Coffee addictions don't lead to more violent crime or robbery, as far as I know.

Perhaps they would if they were criminalized. There's nothing very violent about marijuana use except the militarized distribution chain and criminal enforcement apparatus. If 7-11 could sell it from behind the counter, I expect that you would see marijuana related violent deaths drop precipitously.

But why would it be criminalized? For that to be justified it needs to be a drain on society in some significant way.

I don't support the current flawed war on drugs, especially forfeiture of property and imprisonment for users. I don't support a war on drugs that are essentially victimless, like on marijuana. I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to show that it does more good than harm).

Substance bans do not /at all/ have a track record of being grounded in quantifiable measures of societal harm. That is to say, the current substance restriction policies are more or less completely arbitrary. The arbitrariness of current policies gives a natural experiment opportunity to assess the harm of the criminalization policies themselves by comparing the societal impact of substances such as caffeine, tobacco/nicotine, and alcohol with those of marijuana plus the associated negative impacts of marijuana criminalization. At least in the case of marijuana, the cure seems to be significantly worse than the disease.

>I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to show that it does more good than harm).

I wrote a more generalized comment[1] on the idea of an "ideal war on drugs". The gist is that I think it's a completely fantastical idea. The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so. Further, I think that it's harmful that such an idea persists, because it allows for the justification of more and more extreme enforcement measures. Arguments like "If we got rid of meth then society would be significantly improved?" are based on a false premise. This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs, yet such reasoning is continually used as a justification for more and more extreme enforcement measures that have increasingly diminishing returns as well as an increasingly negative impact on broader society as a whole.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6324214

Agreed, I'm talking about justifying criminalization in an ideal way, not the current way.

> The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so.

The demand comes after the addiction. Remove addiction and the demand is reduced.

> This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs...

That's the current war, not the one based on evidence. What if the evidence showed that a different war could improve society on average and reduce hard drug usage? For example, instead of taking away a user's property and imprisoning them, you give them rehab and (if needed) job skills and actually find them a job, and any other assistance that costs less to provide than the monetary value of the drain on society they'd otherwise be?

> The demand comes after the addiction. Remove addiction and the demand is reduced.

To me the latter statement reads like: "If you can create a perpetual motion machine then energy would be free"

This is the very problem, using impossible potential ends to justify means.

>> This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs...

> That's the current war, not the one based on evidence. What if the evidence showed that a different war could improve society on average and reduce hard drug usage? For example, instead of taking away a user's property and imprisoning them, you give them rehab and (if needed) job skills and actually find them a job, and any other assistance that costs less to provide than the monetary value of the drain on society they'd otherwise be?

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't see anything that's at all hinted at a remotely workable solution that would have such an effect. You seem to be assuming that we can somehow overcome all of the imperfections of past policies but do not offer a clear, strong novel mechanism by which that can happen. In the meantime our current policies are enormously destructive, and I see that as the more pressing issue. Really, solving addiction and substance abuse is a problem that is not very closely related to criminalization policies, but it's those criminalization policies that are leading to broad 4th Ammendment violations, police militarization, and unnecessary deaths and incarcerations.

[edited to remove the implication that no solution was offered, but rather that a new solution wasn't offered that could reasonably be expected to end addiction and substance abuse in a significant way]

Actually I think what I propose has nil chance of becoming reality in my lifetime and maybe for centuries in the future, if only because the masses wouldn't support it. That doesn't stop me from supporting the best possible solution to hard drug addiction.

I support ending the current war on drugs almost wholesale, because it's so inefficient and even unconstitutional as you note. But I'd concurrently want to see some movement toward the ideal. I definitely don't buy an argument that nothing better can be done now than ending the war on drugs in its current form. I believe there's always room for improvement even within the confines our current misguided society. Maybe I'm an optimistic pessimist?

This isn't really quite what I'm saying, per se. I would rather say that I think that currently people tend to couple the idea of changing the status quo with the introduction of superior policy. I'm skeptical that significantly superior policy can be achieved, so I would prefer that the two problems be decoupled. We shouldn't be letting blood just because it's the only action that we've come up with to respond to an intractable disease. We should stop the blood letting (pursuit of harmful policies), and then work on actual cures to the difficult problems of addiction and substance abuse thereafter. The harmful policies only serve to give the illusion of addressing the problem, and so actually hamper the search for effective policies. And if we maintain the status quo for lack of a superior alternative, then I fear we'll never see the end of it.

> The harmful policies only serve to give the illusion of addressing the problem...

Politicians currently have the incentive to give such illusions rather than true solutions. That's another problem, close to the root cause, that I support fixing.

An addiction to morphine is really little different than an addiction to heroin, except society has a greater understanding of addiction to morphine as an illness, not a crime. Treating morphine abusers like we treat heroin users would be devastating to society. It would be a ludicrously senseless step backwards. Your perspective on drug use is absolutely insane.

No, rehab for them and all other people addicted to hard drugs. I'd seek criminal prosecution against the pushers who knew or should've known the drugs hurt much more than they help.

You would really prosecute the psychiatrists? Good for you.

"CHILD DRUGGING: PSYCHIATRY DESTROYING LIVES" : http://www.cchr.org/cchr-reports/child-drugging/introduction...

"Rebecca Riley": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Riley

Quote: "Rebecca Riley (April 11, 2002 – December 13, 2006), the daughter of Michael and Carolyn Riley and resident of Hull, Massachusetts, was found dead in her home after prolonged exposure to various medications, her lungs filled with fluid. The medical examiner's office determined the girl died from "intoxication due to the combined effects" of prescription drugs. Police reports state she was taking 750 milligrams a day of Depakote, 200 milligrams a day of Seroquel, and .35 milligrams a day of Clonidine. Rebecca had been taking the drugs since the age of two for bipolar disorder and ADHD, diagnosed by psychiatrist Kayoko Kifuji of the Tufts-New England Medical Center."

"When Is a Pain Doctor a Drug Pusher?" : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17pain-t.html?pag...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

I don't think it's a stretch to believe that legal things become more prevalent than illegal things, especially highly addictive things. Believing that requires no more support than disbelieving that.

I don't see how that's defensible. You seem to be talking only about people with zero money, which is few people even among jobless (even homeless) people. Surely the price of the drug, all else being equal, would strongly correlate to the number of crimes committed to obtain the drug.

> I don't think it's a stretch to believe that legal things become more prevalent than illegal things, especially highly addictive things.

I absolute think that's a stretch to believe, at least for things like drugs in large areas like the USA, where physically preventing their existence altogether is (apparently) not feasible.

The difference is that normal people work at jobs to obtain money for food, but serious drug addicts are incapable of working a regular job and so have to steal to support their drug habit (and for their food as well).

So in fact, crime is proportional to how much drugs interfere with ability to hold a job.

You have a good point there. If I was wrong and crack and meth became dirt cheap and there was no long associated violent crime and robbery, to no longer support a war on it I'd have to see that its legality lead to no significant drain on society in other ways. That would include parenting, job performance, accidents / injuries, etc.

The level of crime (and particularly, the level of violent and organized crime) surrounding alcohol jumped up sharply with prohibition, and dropped back down with the end of prohibition. I don't see why you'd expect that to be any different for any other drug.

> Even at a dollar a hit a jobless person tends to need to steal to get that dollar, in addition to money for food.

If its legal, a person has less social pressure to not to admit use, and therefore there are less social pressures against them admitting their problem and seeking treatment before being compelled to as a consequence of criminal activity.

Further, when becoming involved with a substance as a user makes you a criminal and violator of societies rules, there is less holding you to observe those rules once you have decided to violate them in the first place.

You don't know at all, because it's never been illegal. However, there is plenty of evidence that making it illegal would indeed lead to robbery and violence.

Crack is also particularly bad for your health outside of just being extremely addictive. If it wasn't a Class A drug people would rapidly end up in treatment for it anyway.

Ultimately there's hardly any actual science involved in the War on Drugs, just as there wasn't during prohibition.

According to this spurious page [0], "up to 75% of those who try cocaine will become addicted." Of course, the page also says "an estimated one-in-four Americans between the age of 26 and 34 have used cocaine at least once in their lifetime, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy." Since it looks like around 15% of Americans are between the age of 26 and 34, that would mean that "up to" 11.25% of Americans will become addicted, which seems unlikely. We need some better data.

[0] http://www.treatmentsolutions.com/cocaine-addiction-treatmen...

Hello, old friend.

Then stop talking out of your ass and do some research before machine-gunning the thread.

> This isn't going to happen because a bunch of people in line at an airport isn't a high-value target.

Can you point to research?

> I mean it would suck, of course, but 'bunch of people get blown up at an airport' isn't nearly as worrying as 'large plane falls/is steered out of the sky and into downtown.'

Proof that it isn't as worrying?

> It doesn't have much value to terrorists because it's not as scary and it won't generate vast numbers of photographs.

How do you know it's not as scary? Have you measured?

Yes, I'm being rude, because by your own admission you are arguing from a position of ignorance and inaccurate prejudice.

Have you researched this, as you suggested I do, or is it just what you believe?

More troubling however is community-consuming gang violence. The sort that we see today and the sort that we saw during prohibition.

Safe to assume a very small percentage of alcohol users, which makes the difference here. Safe to assume that during Prohibition the vast majority of alcohol users could have been sober during working hours to pay for it.

This myth of "alcohol is not a 'hard drug'" needs to die. Prohibition of alcohol wasn't somehow a different animal than the prohibition of other drugs, you just relate to alcohol more than you relate to cocaine.

[1] http://www.drugsense.org/tfy/addictvn.htm

You ever caffeine withdrawal? Yeah, during that week-long vacation last year when you stopped going to Starbucks every morning. Most of us have gone through that; it is a bitch and lasts longer than most hangovers.

You ever get pot withdrawal? Yeah, me neither.

Whatever, lets say for the sake of argument that pot and caffeine are on par with each other despite the obvious discrepancies. It is undeniable that pot prohibition is harmful to society; why would caffeine prohibition not be?

@whyleyc is asserting that drug "hardness", not drug prohibition, is the cause of the societal harm associated with drugs. I am pointing out that we see similar harm with marijuana, which everyone here accepts as not "hard", but which is prohibited.

It therefore stands to reason that if prohibition can cause harm to society with a "non-hard" drug like marijuana, it would cause harm to society with a "non-hard" drug like caffeine.

I mean, that is the sort of shit that spawned the temperance movement, but when prohibition came into effect, did the temperance movement actually see the sort of social change that they anticipated? I doubt that the 1920s were some sort of utopia for battered children and spouses...

Its not. Its representative of what its producers think will appeal to its target market.

I don't have any stats for crack cocaine, but look up the effectiveness of diacetylmorphine maintenance programs in Switzerland and the UK - these are government-run programs in which heroin users are given access to pure, unadulterated heroin so that they can have steady day jobs.

Spoiler: These programs have been proven time and again to be effective in reducing crime.

Crack cocaine is biochemically identical to powder cocaine (the main difference is the means of ingestion, not the chemical compound). And I can assure you that many cocaine users hold very steady, very high-paying jobs (in certain industries more than others).

One of them is the drug itself, and since I am not familiar with crack (thank god), I would consider alcohol a good example. It's legal, "dirt cheap", and can utterly destroy lives with a completeness few drugs seem to be able to match. Everybody knows what alcohol can do, yet it still happens a lot (to put it mildly). So yes, making stuff legal and having information instead of disinformation is not a magical solution.

But that doesn't mean illegality and misinformation cannot make things even worse. Legality does affect price and safety, I think it's very hard to deny this or show otherwise (feel free to try). If a dealer sells rat poison instead of Ecstasy, it's not like the buyers can go to the cops about it, for example... and I'm not saying Ecstasy if safe no matter how it's used, I'm saying rat poison is harmful in all cases. And dealers are operating in the underground anyway, so they have little reason to care about adding on top of that. I'm not sure about "gateway drugs", but I am pretty sure about "gateway criminality" being a real thing, and it also applies to addicts, not just dealers.

Why do you assume this? Do you think people so inclined have any trouble getting "meth or crack or other drugs"? Prohibition only raises the price, and I could make the argument that just means addicts have to rob people more often before they start having medical problems.

Why do you think that the war being fought on those drugs isn't reducing the risk of you being a victim of violent crime or robbery? Or do you just assume that the existence of those drugs create a risk which justifies the war, even if the war makes that risk even greater?

But what's the constitutional justification for having any war on drugs in the first place? Alcohol prohibition took a constitutional amendment, and that's been repealed.

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.

Oh, and somehow ignore the First Amendment and ban American citizens from insulting certainly notable religious figures. Then they will surely leave us alone.

"The War on..." is a phrase that signals to us that we should be on the lookout for crude solutions that do more harm than good. It is a crude phrase that perfectly embodies the simplistic attitude that inevitably backs whatever program the phrase is being used to describe.

Wherever there is a "War on..." there is almost certainly something that we could be doing smarter, rather than harder.

I don't personally live under the false dichotomy that an unending "WAR ON TERROR" is required to suppress terrorism. But nor do I fall into the trope that the solution is to simply let anyone inflict any attack that they wish.

As you say, it is possible to actually fight terrorism without destroying our rights and liberties, and I agree wholeheartedly.

My point was simply to object to the idea that doing nothing and simply pretending the outside world doesn't exist or that there aren't people who wish us harm out there is a Bad Idea™.

I do of course agree that open ended campaigns which cripple our rights without clear and predictable expectations is very bad, if not as bad.

To rephrase, then: I want to address and fight terrorism, but I don't want a blind or self-harming "war" on terror.

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

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

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.

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]

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.

"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."

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.

With two towers receiving a cell phone's signal, the phone can be located along a line. With three towers, it can be located as a point. It's all to do with the cell signal's arrival time, and it's sort of like radar in reverse.

No GPS needed. A GPS-equipped phone provides more accurate positions, but the passive cell-towers method is suitable for many applications.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3278/2867853394_7703d6c99f.jp...

That even has a compelling public safety justification (911 calls) so it wouldn't surprise me if phone companies were already doing that as a matter of course.

Towers, not tower. With two towers receiving a cell phone's signal, the phone can be located along a line, with three towers, it can be located as a point -- not as accurate as GPS, but reasonably accurate.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3278/2867853394_7703d6c99f.jp...

If you're a GSM user you don't need to update the phone's PRL list to hijack its tower connection, so you could do something similar yourself with an OpenBTS setup (though without the tower information to correlate, you'd be doing a lot more driving)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-a...

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.

The method described by multiple people in response to my post is how they attempt to triangulate 3g phones for law enforcement, and if a local sheriff from Cracker Barrel, Arkansas or something requests the data that's what they get: the subset of the call record and the estimated location along with a big disclaimer "THIS MAY NOT EVEN BE ACCURATE TO WITHIN 2KM!" We did constant hands-on tests trying to refine it. Statistically it seems like a good idea but when research tried it on specific people (ourselves) we ended up with no confidence it would work accurately even 3/5 times. We tested it in suburbs, cities, rural, all have different weird factors and significant problems associated with the technique. As a basic example you can be near a cell tower, which have directional antennae, standing at a specific angle to a couple tall buildings and the reflected signal will appear to have you standing in two places at once, or even teleporting between two locations on a minute by minute basis, at which point the data is useless. In theory we can model what highway you're driving on, in reality it's a coin flip what area code you're in.

I think this is also critical if you're thinking of law enforcement applications of this: the base station switches do not report the data back instantly or even in the order they receive it. So our fastest estimate if everything worked perfectly was a 3-4 hour turnaround. Sometimes one of the relevant CDRs for triangulation comes back THREE DAYS after the call is made. Incidentally this is the same data that would be collected by the NSA under the Snowden thing, so military applications would also be limited at best. I mean, if they were dumb enough to try to use it that way they might end up hitting schoolbuses or weddings with cruise missiles or something, and no one wants that.

The result of this was a heavy focus on femtocells, which have such a small area they know where you are because you can't possibly be outside the Starbucks or whatever. It turned out to have other smaller problems: femtocells get overpowered by nearby base stations all the time. I don't know how they were trying to use the one in the van when they caught those boston bombers but I expect the idea was the phone only knows to jump to the strongest signal and that way they could just stop any calls they made. In a neighborhood with a close base station this would be a lot less effective even if the femtocell was massively overpowered, the base station stuff is just this blast of signal and it reflects everywhere, the guy would get through or not randomly.

I think the most damning thing here is that no one who participated in the research would ever testify in a court that the method in question definitely places the phone in question at 123 Cherry Lane, or on the same block as Cherry Lane, or in Cherry Village, or if there was a car involved even in Cherry County. On the other hand, when your shiny new LTE phone is reporting back its gps on a millisecond basis with every call and tons of http headers, things will get a lot easier. For them. I won't be doing that kind of work again.