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Keeping DEA In The Loop About Amtrak Travelers
guanxi writes: "The NY Times tells us that Amtrak gives the DEA a 'computer link,' which they use to investigate passengers, leading to arrests. In return, the DEA gives Amtrak a cut of seized assets. I wonder if they have a deal with AOL, MS Hotmail or my ISP? Still considering storing sensitive corporate info at an ASP? An Amtrak spokeswoman tells us, 'We don't believe there is a privacy issue here.' Even if Amtrak is actually that ignorant, can the DEA pretend to be?" Wait 'til you have to provide photo ID to board an Amtrak train, too. (What about Greyhound? Are they in on a similar deal?)
Dear Ask Slashdot,
My cat keeps puking and shitting everywhere. I am sick of stepping in cold puke when I get up in the middle of the night to take a piss.
So my question is: what is your favorite Linux distro?
Thanks.
It's not unconstitutional to do this
Yes, it is. Although the DEA has done end-runs around the 4th Amendment before.
I think the tinfoil wrapped around your head is too tight.
Smokedot ran this article recently:
...the government's behavior as "Neo-Nazi." Anti-drug propoganda is everywhere, and the opinion that a lot of people have is that drug use impinges upon American prosperity, whereas in Nazi Germany the Jews were blamed as the obstacle to German prosperity. We have a tradition of persecuting people for their actions (victimless or not) in this country, just as the Germans had a long history of persecuting Jews. I think we will see where the govt stands on this issue when the Supreme Court rules on the California medical marijuana statute. If the MJ Tax Act gets upheld, I will begin seriously considering moving to Canada or Europe, where people seem to retain some of their rights.
All Amtrak Passengers under DEA Surveillance
People just seem completely unaware of what is going on to their rights behind their backs in the name of a war against drugs (the war against civil rights).
I came across this thread today that captures nicely the seriousness of the present situation.
Although it is an extreme comparison, there is a strong grain of truth.
Stalin wasn't trying to make a drug free state.
The poster you responded to is correct in saying the only drug free state is a police state.
Our brief review of drug war effects on the Fourth Amendment shows that the following acts are considered cause to believe that the citizen is a criminal: attending high school, traveling in a Greyhound bus, being the target of an anonymous accusation. In the name of drugs, many other acts and personal attributes now indicate criminal activity and comprise a "profile" that narcotics police use to pinpoint possible drug offenders who should be detained and searched:
Basically, drug warriors argue that being a citizen is sufficient cause to suspect a person of criminal conduct, thereby constricting civil liberties protections for that person. That situation is hard to distinguish from the legal status of citizens of Nazi Germany.
(Richard L Miller, Drug Warriors and their Prey, 1996, pgs.51-52)
> There aren't other forms of transportation!
> Not even other forms of public transportation.
Um, maybe where you live there are, but just tell me how you plan to get from, say, Baltimore to Philadelphia if you don't own a car. Let's assume you don't happen to have the $150 cash or so that a cab ride would cost.
For now there's the separate bus company "Peter Pan Bus Lines", but they, Greyhound, and Amtrak are it.
Let's also not forget that of these three only Amtrak will get you to Philadelphia in a reasonable amount of time. (Remember to factor in the time spent waiting for a bus going in the right direction - Amtrak has trains through the northeast corridor frequently, but the bus lines know that if you had another choice, you wouldn't be using them, so don't have any incentive to schedule things frequently)
> it's not a huge deal unless you're a criminal.
Most civil liberties issues are like this. And really, if you're walking around with the same name as someone the DEA would like to detain I guess it's your own damn fault.
I'll let someone else flesh this out. This argument can be shredded even without slippery slope, though I don't understand why you feel the need to instantly belittle that approach.
Think of the implications for isp's. What if every isp sent information about your surfing habits to the DEA? Better not visit any site that talks about illegal drugs or you just might have agents knocking down your doors.
Boycotting companies is one solution, but how does one boycott the government.
Actually the DEA gets to take your house and your car and most of your money if they arrest you for drugs. They needn't even convict you. We are essentially living in a modern-day Germany with respect to the abandoment of basic human rights brought on by this agency (and its government-wide supporters). When was the last time you had to sign a loyalty oath saying you don't use drugs? Or provide a urine sample to prove it before there was any evidence against you?
government assest seizure laws
Amtrak also pays $800 million a year in property taxes on the ground their tracks are on. They also have to pay for their own police force. All of these similar items are free to users of highways. They pay for their own "traffic control" personnel, which is provided free by the government to airlines.
Highway patrols, etc. are free? So are those gas taxes and registration fees all just figments of my imagination? The government provides traffic control for free to airlines? I suppose I'm imagining those fees that the airlines pay every time they land/take off from an airport, taxes on jet fuel, etc., too?
I don't understand the rationale for wanting to eliminate Amtrak. Anyone who lives in the Northeast [...]
There's your answer, right there: Amtrak is only really useful in the NE. (Coincidentally, that's also the only place where it's particularly profitable.) Anywhere else, and the two points you're travelling between are either close enough that driving is more convenient (and probably a bit faster), or far enough that a flight is much faster. Mind you, I live in the NE and find trains a far more comfortable way to get around than air travel, but I can't exactly criticize people living elsewhere in the country for not wanting to subsidize it.
Yeah, the invasion of privacy issue is a concern. Just pay cash. You don't have to provide your ID.
I'm guessing that paying cash is just the sort of thing that would get you searched.
If federal funding was removed from air travel, would you spend the $2000 on a ticket from NY to Chicago?
If federal funding was removed from highways, would you mind spending $20 in tolls every time you backed out of your driveway?
IMHO, Amtrak is more relaxing and in a much higher class than any other form of transportation, with the exception of a 2000 mile limo ride, which I can't afford at the moment.
For those who think Amtrak is dangerous, think of how many people are killed in auto accidents. And don't forget, you're more likely to survive a rail crash in the US then a plane crash. (Trains don't fall 10,000 feet when they have engine trouble)
I stopped flying when I realized I was about as important as luggage to the airlines.
One long distance train ride with my walkman, laptop and some books in a sleeper was the best travel experience I ever had.
Now, back to the topic: Ever wonder why the airlines ask you for photo ID? Think that EZ-Pass doesn't record who you are when you drive thru that tollbooth?
This isn't Amtrak at fault, it's the DEA.
The Supreme Court set this precedent in Terry v. Ohio (1968).
In that case, a police officer noticed two people walking past a store a couple dozen times. Suspecting that they were casing the place, the police officer stopped them and asked their names. The suspects "mumbled something," whereup the officer spun one suspect around and patted him down. The Supreme Court ruled that the officer had the right to pat the suspects down for his own protection.
The Supreme Court has since extended the right to conduct a search, so that police can now use criminal profiles based on secret criteria (I don't remember the case name. It involved a man who bought a round-trip airline ticked with cash).
- "Fleet.Ford.com has been designed for viewing with Netscape 4.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x to 5.x. All the features of this site are not viewable with the browser that you are currently using. You may download a supported version from
Netscape or Microsoft."
It seems that Ford doesn't like Mozilla. I suppose that's yet another reason I won't buy from them.Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
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Uhh...
You might want to consult an attorney. Last I checked, it was illegal to do a lot of things that don't harm other people.
Buying alcohol before you're 21 is the first thing that comes to mind. Prostitution is illegal. Buying or selling illegal drugs is illegal. Running a red light when no other cars are on the road is illegal.
There are more. I'm tired. Good night everybody!
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Au contraire. Bad laws are meant to be fixed. Write your congressmen.
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As a semi-frequent Greyhound rider, I can tell you that this would be ineffective on the Dog. On Greyhound, no one is keeping track of you. You buy your ticket with cash, and it won't have a name. With a standard ticket, you can ride any bus you want between those cities within the next year. Moreover, a federal court decided (1999 I think) that Greyhound luggage could not be searched without a specific warrant. They determined that an airline customer may expect their luggage to be examined by x-ray, but that a Greyhound passenger does not have such an expectation.
This "war on drugs" has corrupted all levels of government and business, right down to the core. The essence of the corruption is the financial stake in the forfeiture of property and the business drug investigations, arrests, testing, incarceration, etc. generates. Probably about half of law enforcement budgets and a growing amount of the military budgets are justified by the "war on drugs". Since they stand to profit from investigations, arrests, seizures, etc., it is in their best interest to take steps to ensure that this arrangement continues indefinitely. The "war on drugs" will therefore never end. There are already too many people making too much money. Amtrak is just the latest company to be corrupted.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Other drugs will kill, too, maybe not the first time.
You assume that anyone not 100% in favor of the war on (some) drugs is thus in favor of using those drugs.
I am 100% against the War on Drugs, and I believe that use of most of them is a bad idea (but I'm not giving up my morning caffiene! BTW, do you drink coffee, tea, or sodas that aren't caffiene free? It IS a drug, you know!)
I agree that most of the 'facts' used to support the war on drugs are false, many of them are obviously the results of flawed logic. Many of the problems claimed to stem from drug use actually stem from drug enforcement.
For example, 'drug related' crime and violence. The vast majority of that is actually caused because the high profit margin and high risk nature of the drug trade attracts criminals. Alcohol carried the same sorts of problems until the day prohibition was repealed.
You never know what you're getting: That's true of any contraband/black market. It applied equally to black market meat during WWII in England. It applies to stolen goods of all kinds. This problem, which does contribute heavily to drug related deaths and other less lethal problems would go away if drugs were decriminalized.
Drugs destroy your future: Sure they can. So does incarcerating someone for several years with much more violent offenders, taking away some of their citizen's rights forever (voteing), perminantly limiting their employment options, and attaching additional social stigmas to somebody who probably already suffers from self-esteem problems. <sarcasm>The resulting feelings of hopelessness and isolation will certainly encourage them to give up the drugs that numb those negative feelings and become productive members of society instead. The fact that their felony conviction restricts them from most of the good jobs won't in any way make them feel alienated or cause them to develop the us against them mentality that leads to further brushes with the law.</sarcasm>
The drug laws encourage drug users to get treatment and get off drugs: Yeah, sure. Why would having to admit to a felony in order to get help with an addiction discourage anyone? Simple decision: Keep the drugs under wraps and struggle alone or become a drug free lifelong whopper flopper.
This leads us to a final problem. We don't actually know how many people suffere severe problems as a result of drugs. Those who do manage to use drugs recreationally without serious impact will be able to and must keep it a secret. Given the consequences of letting people know you are a drug user, we (as a society) will only know about the ones who are so adversely impacted that they can't keep it quiet. Those people might be a small percentage, or they might be a silent (under penelty of law) majority. For all we know, illegal drugs might be less likely to have devistating effects than the legal ones. As long as the war on (some) drugs grinds on, we will never know.
Meanwhile, we will all continue to suffer from violations of civil rights and the corruption of law enforcement that the war on (some) drugs has encouraged.
Convictions are not obtained in these cases because the person has agreed to the forfeit of the assets as part of a plea bargain.
Unlikely. In order to make forfeiture work, an obscure fiction from English law was resurrected, the concept of charging an inanimate object with a crime. Since inanimate objects are not citizens, the courts can (and will) do whatever they like, unencumbered by any rights to due process.
This leads to laughable cases like Federal government vs. a 1990 Buik. or Federal gopvernment vs. $5000 in cash. (Look it up!)
Just to make sure that justice doesn't have a snowball's chance, the forfieture is divided amongst all of the agencies involved in the siezure, and the courts that uphold the forfieture. In other words, a bribe in all but name.
'Suspicious activities' that can lead to forfieture include carrying large sums of cash, paying travel expenses in cash, flying to a city that has a heavy drug trade (especially if on short notice). Seeming to dislike having your bags searched. Seeming to have more money than someone of your gender and race is 'expected to have'. Etc. Etc. In other words, anything at all. I wouldn't be surprised if not being at all suspicious was seen as grounds for suspicion.
It is not at all uncommon for someone who has property siezed to never hear from authorities again. There are also cases where a drug conviction does take place and others surrounding the person loose property even though they had no knowledge of the illegal drugs.
In other words, it is a situation that is practically custom designed to generate corruption, and, no surprise, it has.
Despite many posts here to the contrary, Amtrak is a separate private entity. What's confusing folks here is that Amtrak currently receives piles of cash from the federal government, in order to keep it running. Currently, with the competition of planes and automobiles, it isn't easy to have commuter train service here in the USA.
3 .h tm
In fact, the 1997 Amtrak Accountability and Reform Act requires Amtrak to be self sufficient (or out of business) by 2002. DEA 'kickbacks' are almost surely attractive because they replace the lost income from federal grants.
This is a scary prescident. A paranoid person could paint a picture of a large ISP in money woes selling information about browsing patterns, etc. to the DEA or others .
Zipwow
Amtrak profitability link:
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/amtrak2720000227
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Not quite based on an anonymous attack, but in California some seizure-happy drug thugs (both feds and county mounties) executed a no-knock warrant on a reclusive millionaire's house at 2AM.
Said reclusive millionaire was shot when he came out of his bedroom with a gun to protect himself and his wife from the 'criminals' invading his house (who never actually said they were police.)
Basis for the search?
His young, pretty wife had been seen around town with spending freely, using hundred dollar bills.
Don't take much to make 'em think you're prey.
Man, they better not _touch_ my computers! :)
...who ride Amtrak?
I ride the train as much as I can because I can get a lot more done on the train than I can on a plane. There's an electrical outlet for a laptop, a nice little private cubicle, a decent restaurant, and even my personal bathroom. I can stretch out my legs and relax and code to my heart's content.
There's only one thing missing: an Internet connection. If they can provide one for the DEA, why can't I have one?
This is especially problematic when you realize that trains often travel through areas not covered by cell phones here in the West.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Do you have any idea how many people smoke or have smoked marijuana? I do believe, at this point in time, the *majority* of USians have smoked marijuana at one point in time.
Tell me, can you point me to any documented cases of a person having an automobile accident specifically becuase they were under the influence of marijuana? Can you point me to any documented cases of a person having a work-related accident specifically becuase they were under the influence of marijuana? Can you point me to any documented cases of spousal or child abuse specifically due to the perpetrator being under the influence of marijuana? Can you point me to any documented cases of a person becoming violent or belligerant due to his/her being under the influence of marijuana?
You know as well as I that we can easily find many, many cases like those above where alcohol is the drug in question. I think marijuana usage in the US is much more common, and much more benign, than you would like to admit.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I think the guy fourth from the left is a pretty damned ugly, hairy bastard.
And the one second from the right is downright evil-looking. He looks just like the German ones i've seen in those WWII movies.
:)
Come on, dude ... find any picture of any police officer in 1920 and he'll look scary, because that's what uniforms looked like in the 1920s. Some uniforms still looked that way in the 1930s and 1940s too. Get over it.
:: "I am non-refutable." --Enik the Altrusian ::
You are not limited by your birth nationality, you can buy citizenship in several countries at once. Then renounce your high-tax high-intrusion birth citizenship and slip between the cracks in the system.
Also see: How to legally obtain a second citizenship and passport, for example in Grenada, South America, or Africa
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Saw something the other day on TV about how Amtrak can only carry passengers legally, which means that all the real money being made by railroads is being made by the privately owned ones that can carry mail and freight.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...get an educasian!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Does anyone know if Trailways and/or Greyhound carry packages anymore?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Very much the opposite, at least every one I've investigated.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Probably yes, since they're Gummint supported. However, the idea of (1) siezing everything in sight that might be connected with a possible crime; and worse yet (2) rewarding supposed whistle-blowers with a cut of the action is seriously, seriously stupid in the long term.
Consider Amtrak Wars: the radiation was inside the road-trains and facilities which supposedly protected the Federation crews; in this case the ``radiation'' is social poison, and it's inside the system which supposedly protects us.
All police-state approaches like this make several large, stupid assumptions - beginning with the classic pair ``our enforcers are honest and unbiassed'' and ``our methods are effective in bringing about our public aims (we know best).''
But the really big blunder is ``the ends justify the means.'' They don't. The means corrupt the ends.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And does it work?
This is the kind of police state that the USA (and indeed many Western and European states) seem to be aiming for.
Yah, that's what many people are complaining about: no laws or methods to protect you from the DEA.
Now take your rage AND YOUR CAPITALS and turn yourself in.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
They (DEA) are using this information to arrest innocent people and confiscate their assets even if they're never charged. The ratio of asset-seizures to criminals is, I gather, about 4:1.
Yes, we may be protected from the odd drug dealer, but who protects us from the DEA?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think its both frightening and exhiliratiing that you can't hope to get away with anything anymore unless you live in some podunk town at the far end of the road from the rail depot..
Its not even surveillance anymore... The ubiquity of tracking that gives us both security and takes away our freedom to be victims.
Don't do anything you're ashamed of and don't be ashamed of anything you do.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Not really. Amtrak only's got your name if you had a reservation, and commuter trains are *NEVER* reserved (heaven forbid). You either have a ticket (which often you buy from a vending machine) or a monthly pass. In the latter case, the pass will carry your name, but the pass is *NEVER* for a particular time or date, so they'd be hard-pressed to find you out; all they'd know is that you can ride between Southbinghamdeadtown and Boston for a given month...
You can always pay your ticket cash and give a bogus name (unlike with the FAA, there is no FRA requirement that each passenger shall have it's name disclosed), or just board the train without a ticket and pay cash to the conductor.
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Not exactly true.
When the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak's legal name) was founded in 1971, it was to relieve MEMBER RAILROADS of their legal obligations to maintain given passenger services. In exchange for rolling stock, Railroads joining Amtrak would no longer be required to keep those trains operating. Incidentally, not all railroads who had passenger trains did elect to join. For example, the Chicago, Rock-Island & Pacific did not join until 1976, the Southern Railway until about 1979 (the latter kept operating a very highly-rated luxury service between Washington and New-Orleans), the Denver & Rio Grande Western kept operating the famous California Zephyr (oddly, only between Denver and Salt-Lake City) until the mid 1980's. The D&RGW still operates a very famous ski train.
Nowadays, in addition to many commuter authorities, there are a few short lines that operate tourist trains throughout the USA nowadays.
However, no one can start a passenger rail service that competes with Amtrak (however, Amtrak is very open about operating private cars on it's trains, where for an extra-fee, you can have a very luxurious accommodation and food).
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I know a guy with a very expensive and flashy car who likes to teases cops thus: whenever he sees a fuzz cruiser on the prowl, he scrupulously drives 1 or 2 km/h below the limit. Most of the times, he says that he sees the cops meticulously checking the license plate (also kept impeccably clean), and then pull him over to check him...
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boycott may be easy for you to shout, but I have no intention of driving down I95 from Boston to anywhere on the eastern seaboard. Amtrak may suck (they do, from my several dozen experiences) but they're the only game in town as far as I'm concerned. (that is, until I can afford to fly business class.)
While I'm ranting, fuck Amtrak for never running the Acela. I've tried so many times to get tickets. It's like the phantom train. bah!
Of course it's not *surprising*. The debate is over whether it's proper. We get surprised by less and less over the years, but you still need to fight for what you think is right, even if you're weary of it. E.g., the ACLU probably sees the same kinds of cases year in, year out. They still have to fight each battle unless they want adverse case law to be made.
What else can be said?
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But remember, it's officially a private company. I think that means that it's immune to Freedom of Information Requests. I could be wrong. I'd be happy to be wrong. But that's the way I'd expect the laws to flow.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes, but then the problem becomes that many individuals of [visible minority] do not have that type of drug and they are then held up simply for their racial/ethnic/whatever status. Hardly seems like they kind of society I'd like to live in.
// mlc, user 16290
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Amtrak requires that you give them your CC# to make a reservation, but if you make the reservation over the phone and tell them you have a voucher to redeem, they'll just give you the reservation number. When you get to the station, pay cash.
Well said. And they won't run out of criminals for a long time, since they pass more laws every year to turn honest citizens into criminals.
How many laws have been passed latley that were designed to benefit the people of the US, rather than the US government?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Well, since this is the only DEA-approved way that Amtrak can get "illegal" drugs at all, probably not. Anyone know if Amtrak is partial to one drug over another, ie. heroin instead of cocaine?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
As part of their training, DEA agents take courses in Constitutional Law and proper arrest, search, and seizure. They are well-acquainted with what constitutes probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Do you know the difference? Do you know what a "Terry" stop is? They do. If anyone is going to be careful not to run afoul of Supreme Court case precedent, it's the feds
Now I know why this post was moderated as "funny".
I sincerely hope you're kidding. Because this is ridiculous. Sure, the feds probably do receive this training, I wouldn't doubt it. But I'll bet the average DEA agent is certainly no lawyer. I don't doubt that will try not to run afoul of Supreme Court precedent, that's not the issue.
The issue is that there *is* no Supreme Court precedent regarding this. This doesn't at all sound Constitutional on the surface, but then again, privacy is not a guaranteed constitutional right, only protection from unwarranted searches and seizures.
The difference is that, thanks to your favourite buddies that used to be in the White House, what constitutes probable cause is a lot looser, and law enforcement officials don't need a warrant for lots of things anymore, they only need probably cause. This is all part of the attempt to appear "tough on crime." Unfortunately, they are being tough on your constitutional rights.
My journal has hot
I think that it is probably 10% of the property they seize. They will take your house, your cars, and just about anything that you have because it was probable that you bought them with drug money.
Let's not forget that Amtrak is essentially owned and operated by the US government. Would you find this all that suprising if you found out that the post office is coordinating with the DEA to stop suspected drug shipments?
Although this does bring up a good point... they're a government entitity, they're subject to Freedom of Information requests. If you really want to know the full scoop on what's happening, just ask.
The detainee is not under arrest. But he is being detained.. Hmm....
I recall a story from years ago (early 90's?) where a black lawyer from LA was 'detained' at LAX. He was on his way for a month's vacation in Hawaii (or some such place). He had a few thousand dollars cash on him. They searched him, found the cash, and detained him on suspicion of drug trafficking, because he fit their 'profile'. Black, mid-30's, lots of cash on his person.
Hmm...
Jeez, there's no other train!? Somebody should tell that to New Jersey Transit and SEPTA, which I ride at least once a month. They're about a fifth the cost of Amtrak for comparable distances, too.
Whether or not they should be legalized is irrelevant; they are illegal, it is legal for them to be illegal (in that the courts have not overturned those statutes as unconstitutional), and that means if you break those laws without damn good cause, you're committing a crime
Whether the morality of these laws is irrelevant greatly depends on the context in which they are being discussed. Technically you are quite correct, by e.g. buying an ounce of pot I am committing a crime. That may not mean much, though. In some cases committing a crime is the right thing to do. To give a very simple example, consider the Soviet dissidents. They were, most certainly, committing crimes -- they were breaking Russian laws, which were quite legally adopted. Yet, for some strange reason, most of the Western world admired the dissidents and extended to them whatever help it could.
So I don't see much point in your "technically" argument.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
So for dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (whose name I'm grossly misspelling), according to American legal thought, he didn't commit a crime because the law he was accused of breaking was enacted in violation of his human rights, and thus, null and void.
Why should American legal thought have any influence on what is and what is not a crime in the Soviet Union? What's so special about the US?
The Soviet dissidents broke legally adopted laws of their country, usually with premeditation. They certainly had mens rea. The fact that certain people in the US and other places consider these laws unjust is neither here nor there. It certainly doesn't make breaking these laws not a crime.
To get back to the original topic, there are a lot of people who consider the drug laws unjust. So?
Unless, of course, you are prepared to argue that the current set of US laws is the absolute truth and thus should govern the conduct of everybody on Earth forever...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The US airlines certainly make their passenger lists available to the IRS... I flew from California to Germany once, during a period of time where I owed the IRS about $4k (the whole thing, amount and payment terms was being disputed and discussed, but the IRS hadn't taken a turn for a number of months).
There was a Treasury agent waiting on the jetway for me. She asked how much cash I had, and wanted to see it! She didn't talk to anyone else, since she spent the whole time trying to get me to say I was carrying a big pile of cash. I wasn't, but I was afraid she was going to pull my backpack out of the luggage bay and search it!
I'll take the $20. Because it is a slippery slope. Have a look at the article earlier today about .uk.
To be honest you are a fool, you are willing to give up some security and privacy for "safety" you deserve no security and no privacy at all. You are part of the problem, In fact i'd go so far as to label you a sheep or a mark.
Ah. So the DEA and FBI are different from every law enforcement entity in HISTORY, and they're only going to go after the "bad guys". They're not going to harass any innocent people. They're not going to hound anybody until that person is caught doing something inappropriate. They're not going to take every scrap of power they can lay their hands on in order to extend their authority. Of course not...that'd be wrong.
I sure wish I lived on your planet.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
They know which nationalities courier what drugs.
The color of someone's skin or sound of their accent must never constitute probable cause.
-- Adam
The War on Drugs in nonsense. In my opinion, it's causing more problems in this country than anything else right now - and it's causing a whole hell of a lot of problems. From corruption in government to the losses of individual Constitutional rights, everybody is getting screwed except for those making money from it (Government and large corporations).
:P
And come on, Timothy, you need to read Smokedot more - we ran this story on Wednesday
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The color of someone's skin or sound of their accent must never constitute probable cause.
:) sources.
But they do. A few links to reduce your faith in our government:
New Jersey: "Yes, we racially profile"
USA: Race, Rights, and Police Brutality
These are both articles from Smokedot, but they link to external (i.e. reliable
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Would you find this all that suprising if you found out that the post office is coordinating with the DEA to stop suspected drug shipments?
The post office has very stringent rules and regulations regarding packages it may inspect. Amtrak is not subject to these types of rules.
--
You are innocent, unless you're convicted after being railroaded by the DEA...
I'm not innocent, I've been convicted by the Pun Patrol.
Right now, all it takes to get on Amtrak is cash, a "name", and absolutely no ID. If a drug runner is stupid enough to use the same name and commute too often to actually stay in a city long enough to work or live there, than I'd say we have a drug runner with insufficient brain cells.
This discussion should probably ignore Amtrak, and focus instead on the hypothetical notion of an Amtrak who knows their own passengers
Here is a login free link
In fact, this form of profiling has the potential to be less racially biased than face-to-face observation. When you get over the knee-jerk reaction and think about it, it really is preferable to the current system. The current system being basically "stop people with brown skin".
So technology is improving our lives, just not always in the ways we expect.
I think you mean "So technology is improving the lives of those people who would be stopped under the non-computer profiling but won't be under the computer profiling". Without seeing the rules they apply I've no idea whether that includes me.
There could be more people under the new system, and I don't see that being stopped on the basis of nationality, having paid in cash, and having once said your favorite color was red (made up statistical correlation to terrorist, the rules could be anything, that's half the problem) instead of race doesn't seem like an improvement to me, it's just harder to build up opposition because there is no defined group of people who know they're going to be picked on and who have a definite interest in protesting. In fact, anyone who visibly complains may be added to the list of troublemakers to be spied upon, keeping your head down is much more incentivised under this scheme.
Let's boycott a tax-subsidized train sytem.
The fewer people who ride, the less far that free money will have to spread. If you really want to hurt Amtrak, lobby Congress to cut off federal funding.
And then what will happen? More people will use our subsidized road system.
The most recent information a quick google search turned up was that Amtrak got $555 million in 1999.
My *state* (Maryland), got more money than that to subsidize its roads. Less train users means more car drivers. This means the more traffic and road repairs/building. Why do you favor giving money to GM and Ford?
Drugs may not be made out of metal, but they still have detectors for them! These are the same systems used for detection of explosives. The detector you walk through uses backscatter from X-rays to fingerprint chemicals. These detectors are already installed at a number of major airports, although their current cost precludes them from being used everywhere.
a ug.html
http://www.us.net/signal/Archive/Aug97/detection-
Whilst they both have effects on the brain and body, those of ethenol are based on the physiological depression of the body. MJ mostly latches onto the cannaboid receptors in the brain. (Good thing they're there!). If you're used to the effect, driving shouldn't be a hassle....
But, hey, it all boils down to this: you signed the drivers license application, you agreed to go by all of their rules. And this is a case of it's not wrong because it's *wrong*, it's wrong because they're against the rules.
we get the government we deserve. Ugh!
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Or else they sieze the basic assets of whomever they suspect of being a big player to put pressure on them; or, to punish the suspect for not rewarding the cops with a bigger bust. "Hey, we didn't get a big fish, so we'll just make this bastard pay. If he knows what's good for him, he'll give up the big fish." What do you think happens when the guy is innocent or has no such information? Bye, bye house, damn the law, screw the constitution. Now, with no house on which to get a second mortgage for a defense attorney, how is he going to prove his innocence and get his house back?
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
> It, too, will cause cancer given enough time, just like cigarettes.
Note that most pot users will smoke far, far less than even a light smoker. Pot has certain self-limiting characteristics that cigarettes lack.
I'm not sure if you are suggesting that people OD on pot. I have never heard of such a case, it appears to be very unlikely. I imagine it would be very hard if not impossible to OD by smoking pot. Perhaps it is easier to OD by ingestion due to the slower absorption.
> You mention alcohol, which is as bad as the worst illegal drugs.
Now you're just being silly. Alcohol isn't as bad as many other drugs because it's rather non-addictive, by and large. Yes, there exists a subset of the population that gets addicted, but it is small relative to the number of casual users. I imagine this is also true of pot. Not so with cigarettes, crack, heroin, etc. Of course cigarette addiction isn't nearly as harmful as the other drugs I mentioned because (1) the health effects are less bad, and (2) cigarette addiction doesn't impact the user's life very much.
> Drugs are stupid. Cigarettes are stupid. Alcohol is stupid.
Hearsay, by your own admission.
Fuck, IHBT. Anyone as smug and self-righteous as yourself would've signed their name.
-Ryan
If that's your moral definition of a criminal, great--I'm sure Charlie Manson doesn't consider himself to be a criminal, because according to him he didn't cause anyone any harm at all.
From a legal perspective, you're quite wrong. All that is required to be convicted in criminal court is for, (a), a law be broken, (b) it be established beyond a reasonable doubt that you were the one who broke this law, and (c) that you possessed mens rea ("criminal intent") in your action.
For instance, if I go barrelling down the highway at thirty miles an hour over the limit and run a few red lights, I've committed a criminal offense of, at the very least, reckless driving, endangerment of others, and so on. But if I'm barrelling down the highway at thirty miles an hour over the limit and run a few red lights in order to get to the hospital before my wife bleeds to death in the passenger seat, I haven't committed any crime at all--because I possessed no criminal intent, only the reasonable intent of a concerned husband.
You've made my case.
No, he's shown your case to have more holes than a North Korean submarine. Whether or not they should be legalized is irrelevant; they are illegal, it is legal for them to be illegal (in that the courts have not overturned those statutes as unconstitutional), and that means if you break those laws without damn good cause, you're committing a crime.
You can talk about "should" all you like, but brother, if you think that selling crack isn't a crime, I know a few district attorneys who'd just love to have a word with you. Exceptionally strong words, backed up with force of law, if you've happened to have ever sold crack to someone.
Get the picture?
To give a very simple example, consider the Soviet dissidents. They were, most certainly, committing crimes -- they were breaking Russian laws, which were quite legally adopted
To the American judicial mind, the Soviet dissidents lacked mens rea, or the specific criminal intent. Also remember that the United States considers the Bill of Rights to be politically absolutist: what the Bill of Rights recognizes, no legitimate government (in the eyes of classical US legal thought) can deny its citizens.
For instance, to the US legal mind, freedom of speech and religion are inherent human rights, and any government which seeks to deny this right is violating human rights and, thus, those laws are invalid.
So for dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (whose name I'm grossly misspelling), according to American legal thought, he didn't commit a crime because the law he was accused of breaking was enacted in violation of his human rights, and thus, null and void.
After World War Two, the biggest threat to the United States (as perceived by the government) was found in the Soviet Bloc. The National Security Agency was born in large part to eavesdrop on Soviet traffic, in order that the US could enjoy a strategic advantage. If we knew what they were doing, we were in a better position to prevail against them.
The NSA pursued this mandate with zeal that bordered on the unholy. They conspired with long-distance carriers, with manufacturers of cryptographic equipment, with anyone who had a line of communication that a shred of Soviet traffic could likely be found on. They applied pressure, they bribed, they twisted the knife, they cut all kinds of sweetheart deals.
But today, the number one threat (in the eyes of the government) is no longer the Soviet Union. I don't know what Public Enemy Number One is nowadays, but you can be pretty sure the War on Drugs is getting close to top billing.
Why is it so surprising that the agency tasked with combatting the "nation's greatest menace" is acting exactly the same as every other government agency which, in the past, has been tasked with combatting "great menaces"?
If this took you by surprise, you need to wake up and smell the coffee. I don't find it at all surprising this is happening. I think it's probably likely that the DEA has sweetheart deals with airlines that do a lot of travel to South America, so the DEA can keep track of frequent travelers and try and use that information for better interception and seizure of contraband.
The only thing that would surprise me at this point is if they weren't.
In return, the DEA gives Amtrak a cut of seized assets.
Hmmm...it's a good thing that Amtrak and the DEA are so interested in protecting the rights of citizens. I mean, it sure would be terrible if a government agency as important as the DEA was acting just like a private corporation, making lucrative deals. I'm just glad that they're out there to watch out for us, completely disinterestedly.
Big Macs are bad for your health too + they cost money = you are a masochist
REBOOT
Oxygen oxidates you + cost money to keep it pure = you are a masochist
OH NO WE ARE ALL MASOCHISTS
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Hold still while I swat that fly on your face with this hatchet.
;P
Elephant: a mouse built to government specs
Funny thing about life is NO ONE GETS OUT OF IT ALIVE!
No one expects the Spanish Inquistion!
Elephant: a mouse built to government specs
I would have told the agent "one moment" - went to the front of the car, asked for everyone's attention, and then given a speech, something along the lines of:
"Attention, everyone - I have just been informed that I fit the profile of a drug smuggler - I paid for my ticket with cash and got on at the last minute. Is it now illegal in this country to use cash? When did you last use cash? Can I not choose to do something in this country on impulse? By purchasing my ticket and boarding, I harm no one! But the DEA agent sitting in seat XX says that I am a threat. You are my witnesses, ladies and gentlemen - my witnesses to this event. Remember it! This is just one more step down the road to tyranny!"
(ok, I know, I know - I probably wouldn't even get to the front of the car, let alone give a speech - but wouldn't those things be within my rights, as well?)...
Then I would go back to my seat, told Mr. Agent that I would NOT let him check my bags or person without my lawyer present, and also throw some warrant shit in his face as well (though I full well know it wouldn't matter, since a warrant only is needed for a residence, from what I understand) - but maybe it would stall him a bit. The agent would likely be beligerant (I would definitely remain absolutely calm during all of this - remain an upright citizen - so that my witnesses could see I was the one being badgered). He would likely handcuff me (I would ask why for - I pose not threat - and where are my Miranda rights - I want them read, damnit!), and take me "downtown" at the next stop. I would not say one more thing after my Miranda rights are read, no matter what they ask, other than I want to see my lawyer, and to ask for water, or to go to the bathroom, or what not. I would not give up any other information, until I saw my lawyer. I know I would end up being detained, and I would also not get to where I was going.
I would make this agent work - I would gladly pay for a lawyer - then, when at last no drugs are found, and all of that time is wasted, I would push to file a lawsuit against these people for some civil rights violations. Fitting a profile does not equal to committing a crime! They want to charge me with a crime, they have to prove it, not just "think" I look like someone who could commit a crime. But that is where we are at now in this country - and none of us stands up against this bullshit because it might "inconvience us", or make it look like we are for the "bad guys". These are people we should protect also - even the bad guys have rights.
We are all - every...single...one...of...us - capable of committing a crime.
But these actions and abilities (our rights that have been lost - "unreasonable search and seizure" - to the "War on (some) Drugs") are sanctioned by most people. But you what horrifies me the most?
The fact that if I could make that speech, that every one of the individuals on that car (hell, probably the DEA agent himself, as well!), would tune me out, or look at me with hate, tell me to sit down, or be fearful of me... Why would that be?
Because I would be the one truely free...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I like to hope I will be if the time comes. To do anything less is to declare you are less than human, and do not deserve the fundamental rights to privacy of which that entails. To bow down is to be in bondage - an animal.
That's an awful lot of punishment to endure to make a point. Does anyone make moral stands like this anymore, in the face of handcuffs, jailtime, etc?
Hardly anyone does - I would do it to prove a point, if not to the few around me - at least to myself, to know I won't bow down to a faceless, corrupt system, no matter the consequences.
In the face of a prejudiced media and society? You're just going to be branded as an unruly wacko.
Like I noted in my post, I relise that - and that alone frightens me...
It occurs to me we have the oppression we do because nothing like this ever happens.
It so rarely happens - when it does, it can sometimes be powerful - witness what happened in the wake of Rosa Parks. We just need more people to stand up for their beliefs.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Libertarianism - as the term is used today to mean "libertarian capitalist" - is rightist. Left/right is labor (socialist) vs. capital (capitalist), and these guys are definitely capitalist; ask them if they think the government should get out of creating and defining proprty rights to land, natural resources, and information.
However, it should be noted that they've essentially hijacked the term from the left.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Flying, beside being more expensive, would take me longer since the airport is not in the heart of Manhattan. Intercity bus is cheaper but less reliable, less comfortable, and the bus terminals on both ends of the trip are less conveniently located. I couldn't sleep on the way up (or read on the way back) if I drove up, and parking in Manhattan is an expensive adventure.
But from now on, I'll be buying tickets with cash. Perhaps under the name Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst.
From
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"I was only following orders" didn't cut it at Nuremburg, and it doesn't cut it today.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Amtrak also pays $800 million a year in property taxes on the ground their tracks are on. They also have to pay for their own police force. All of these similar items are free to users of highways. They pay for their own "traffic control" personnel, which is provided free by the government to airlines.
I don't understand the rationale for wanting to eliminate Amtrak. Anyone who lives in the Northeast, Amtrak goes away, then all of those people going between major cities would either clog up I-95 or the airports, which are themselves are already over capacity. Just in the Philadelphia area alone, the feds are going to pour in 2 billion dollars (reference www.dvrpc.org) into minor airports in the area trying to move some smaller regional air traffic out of Philadelphia.
Yeah, the invasion of privacy issue is a concern. Just pay cash. You don't have to provide your ID.
They are "free" to the users of the road system. Police are usually paid for out of local taxes, not fuel taxes. As for the fees on take offs and landings and the jet fuel taxes, they hardly pay for all the costs involved in running airports and keeping the skies managed. The funding and revenue sources don't all go into and out of the same pot so accurate accounting is just about impossible, but often localities throw in money to help their airports with the excuse that the indirect income received through increase tourism, sales taxes, and employment will offset the expense. Some smaller communities pay subsidies (tax benefits or whatever) to encourage airlines to continue to provide service to them.
The long distance Amtrak trains exist only to pacify members of Congress who scream each time Amtrak wants to pull out of their state. Look at am Amtrak map sometime. It touches every state except South Dakota. Think that is a coincidence? So Amtrak is screwed in having to provide service to 47 states yet get threatened to be cut off because they can't make that profitable. They should be allowed to concentrate on providing service in dense corridors like BOS-WAS, SF-LA, etc... They pay property taxes on tracks they own, and have to rent time on tracks they don't own.
About 50 years ago, the ambitious Interstate highway project was kicked off. It's almost done. There are no big huge highway expansion plans on the books now. Nothing is planned but tweaking existing corridors. Most corridors have no room to expand so we're faced with huge condemnations of expensive property or double-decking many highways. The only way we can grow is to encourage a smart multi-modal transportation system where users have choices. Not everyone can take a bus to work, for example, but those that can keep cars off the road so those who can't or don't want to, can enjoy less congestion going to work.
boycotting won't change the policy of handing customer data over to the DEA. on amtrak (or your city bus, or whatever) there is always a law/rule/regulation that applies, that says that carrying illegal drugs (and lots of other things) is not allowed; you generally are giving implied consent to search by getting on the train. personally, I don't think it's anybody's business if I take amtrak to get somewhere, including the DEA's. but such a situation isn't at all new, unfortunate as it is.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
I am so sick of everyone who bitches about the lack of privacy whenever law enforcement agents do something to try to even the odds when they are asked to enforce a law that is practically unenforceable. Whether the cops like it or not, this is their job - They have to do what they are told. When you are told to do something at your job that you don't feel is fair, do you just not do it, or do you try to find a tool that will tip the scales in your favor?
/*_NOT_*/ BLAME THE LAW ENFORCERS. THEY ARE JUST DOING THEIR JOB.
Rather than bitch about how the police are the bad guys, the police shouldn't get to use technology to help them enforce the laws, the police shouldn't arrest people for laws I don't like -- WRITE YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS TO CHANGE THE LAWS. DONATE YOUR MONEY AND TIME TO THE CAUSES YOU WISH TO SUPPORT. RUN FOR OFFICE YOURSELF!
DO
Not at all. You can be stopped for speeding because it's illegal, but because everyone speeds you can also be stopped for not speeding because that's clearly suspicious behavior. It's almost as if they planned it that way...
i wonder how history will judge a government that let it's nation be reduced to ash because they refused to say 'sorry.'
You realize that only makes sense if you're talking about China, right? Bush expressed regret for the (self-inflicted) death of the Chinese pilot, but correctly did not accept responsibility for the crash, because it was not the fault of the US. In addition to causing the accident, China illegally held the Americans for nearly two weeks in an attempt to extort a confession from the US. China is the country that should be apologizing, but somehow I don't see that happening.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Again, that is a paraphrase, but think about the implications there; at most hotels of some decent stature, you provide at LEAST the following:
Full name
drivers license number
home address
credit card information
drivers license of other guests in your party
car registration info
sometimes a Social Security number
posibly (probably) phone records in and out...
Now, THAT'S alot of info floating around, and presumably stored in a database somewhere, all in the name of catching a bad guy or two.
Not exactly on topic, but vaguely pertinent and definetly disturbing.
I agree completely, although for a different reason, perhaps. If you ever watch a like America's Most Wanted, you'll realize that there are criminals all over the place who've evaded capture for years, simply because no one they came in contact with had any idea who they were. By doing "background checks" on Amtrak passengers in this way, there is a much better chance of catching criminals, or at least making it harder for them to get from place to place.
I admit that it's disturbing that a company is giving away my personal information like this, essentially providing the means for the government to track my movements. But I don't personally see it as a huge problem. I've done nothing illegal. The government has no reason to be paying any attention to me. If it helps get criminals off the streets, I'm okay with it, and I suspect most people will be.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
Yes, I do understand what you're saying. (This goes for the other two replies as well.)
If I could stop this from happening, I would. Make no mistake, I think that it's a bad idea. My point was that most people either won't care because it doesn't affect them directly, or just won't do anything about it because they don't feel they can make a difference anyway (which would be the category I fall into).
So I'm not saying I agree with this. Just that it seems unavoidable, because most people are willing to give up privacy for security.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
It's now gone, in fact, (incorporated in to two other rail lines), although you'll still see 'conrail' engines for a long time before they're painted.
It was an amalgamation (sp?) of a good number of other freight carriers (CONsolidated RAIL), but not all of them ...
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
As for participating in the drug war in America, I am totally willing to live in a "police state" if it keeps even one child from "getting high" or using heroin.
Sadly, the "police state" you welcome is far more destructive than the drugs themselves. Is it really better for people to die or spend their lives in prison, than for them to touch drugs? Should we really be fighting a war against our own families?
No matter - the drug war is rapidly losing public support anyway. Its days are numbered.
--
http://www10.nytimes.com/2001/04/15/weekinreview/1 5BOXA.html
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
Forms of nationwide public transportation:
Every time I start thinking the Tinfoil-hat-black-helicopter crowd is wrong, something like this happens.
You found him.
Look to your left, you just found her.
Innocent until proven guilty? Innocent until you step out of line is far closer to the truth.
We hate those evil drug-pushing criminals, but we love how well our wartime economy works. The answer? Declare war on our drug-pushing criminals. It's quite perfect, really. Why look overseas for criminals when our nation's already infested with 'em? It's ever so perfect.
And regarding South America? They don't bother dealing with the airlines: they unleash pesticides and fungicides down there that kill not only drug plants, but food and cash crops as well. Also, their children. It's no wonder Americans get shot at down there: how much would you like Belgians if they were poisoning _your_ food in the name of one of their more inane policies?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Here in Boston (and a bunch of other cities), AMTRAK runs the commuter-rail service. When you ride the commuter rail, you ride AMTRAK.
That adds up to 25,000 suicidal criminals per day in Boston alone.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
I ride AMTRAK on long trips because I hate flying. Three years ago, I rode AMTRAK from Boston to New Orleans (36 hours each way). AMTRAK is much more comfortable than the bus, and you get to meet some very interesting people.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
Here in Boston (and many other cities), the commuter rail is run by AMTRAK. So not riding AMTRAK means not going to work for a lot of people.
I'd like to see what happens when black folks are harrassed as frequently on trains as they are on the highway. My sister lives in New Jersey, and racial profiling by the state police is the main reason why she refuses to get a drivers license.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
They're the ones consistently doing the speed limit and driving safely.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Cash definatly is a barrier to this and they already try to discurage its use. Go to the bank and try to get $10,000 in cash. They will make you fill out special federal forms becuase you must be doing something illegal with it.
They want to track money. So they make it hard to get cash without filling out paperwork. This is also a byproduct of the "War on Drugs".
Another article about the incident where it mentions that the passenger paid cash.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
For an example of this presumptive monitoring and action taking, check out this article from ABCnews
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
It's http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/04/15/weekinreview /15BOXA.html
Edith Keeler Must Die
The idea that one must lose privacy when one steps outside one's home is absurd. (Or even in one's home if one is renting, or even in the case of owning the home, there is still infrared sensing).
Okay, I ride Amtrak pretty often. I buy my tickets online about half the time with my ever-so-handy-Mister Visa.
My boyfriend does the same. (Rides, buys online, yadda, yadda).
I'm working for a company that sends people to New York on a DAMNED regular basis. And up until a week ago, none of those folks even tried to buy the tickets online, and it only took a mandate fron on high by the Human Relations people to make them start doing it.
When you buy a ticket online, they get your name, address, phone number, all that great info.
But they don't know when you'll be on the train, unless you buy a reserved ticket.
And unless you go to the counter with your photo ID to pick it up, they have no idea of knowing where you might be to pick up yout ticket.
Union Station, in Washington DC has about 10 of those little ATM-type machines where you stick in the credit card, and *poof* out pops your ticket.
And I suppose they could watch them easily. Very easily.
I also suppose it would be extremly easy for a suspected drug dealer to have his cronie or 'bitch' go get the ticket FOR him. All you need is that little plastic card and the pin number, and if your drug dealer is smart enough to know how to get tickets online, he's most likely smart enough to send a cronie (or "bitch") to go get his ticket FOR him.
--
Which brings me to my second conclusion.
How many drug dealers do you know who have computers, internet accounts, and credit cards in their name -- and who are STUPID enough to think they can't be traced?
How many drug dealers realistically buy things WITH A credit card? Cash, baby. And if its cash, they can't trace you.
All this will do -- is weed out the STUPID drug dealers, and leave the smart ones still around to sell more drugs and make a larger amount of money off the morons who get hooked on crack.
--
Poor little no puppy toe!
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
Okay, point well and truly made.
... for some bizarre reason, always got the attention of my teachers and other adults figures. We heard about the Evils of Pot, and the Evils of Acid -- but never "Look, if you take crack, you'll end up a jobless prostitite ho inside a year.") -- anyawy, I digress... less addictive drugs that the dealers may very well have other reasons for selling.
Pot, LSD, some of the less harmful, less addictive drugs (which
And because I generally consider them harmless but not to my taste (done pot, didn't really like it. Not doin' acid, I'v got lack of sleep if I want to see weird stuff), I didn't lump them in with the folks selling crack cocaine and heroin
Poor little no puppy toe!
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
As noted in this story. Seems like invasions of privacy are becoming more and more common as the laws designed to protect individuals become outdated.
I know its a fine line between protecting privacy and letting criminals go unhindered, but especially with the developments in the U.K. it's a bit scary.
Well, of course they are. Existing packages are searched when deemed suspicious, and may be forwarded to customs or the DEA as appropriate.
In fact, postal inspectors can open any package they feel like...no probable cause is necessary, you've given up that right by entrusting your parcel to them.
They are arresting innocent people. That's why they use the method of payment for the train to determine what degree of suspicion to place on people. 'Real' criminals arn't usually kind enough to sign their own names, so they simply suspect anyone who is old-fasioned enough to use cash. Therefore, they must be harassing people innocent of any crime or rational suspicion of crime in order to find out who, on their lists of 'suspects', deserves that suspicion.
Since prejudices are so common, it is sometimes useful to ask - when dealing with privacy issues - what you would think of this happening - in secret, until the parties were asked - in the former USSR. If your perception of the severity of the act changes, ask yourself why.
Would you work if you weren't getting paid?= \=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\
I do. Its pretty nice for short journeys under twelve hours. I think you're mistaking it for the AA-Meeting-On-Wheels known as Greyhound.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Timothy what have you done with the other Slashdot editors! It was nice to unhandcuff Taco for a few minutes on Easter, but please let them go! Proper grammar on Slashdot makes me edgy!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Okay, if the "government" is completely evil, everyone has infinite rights (even though living in a society with laws means that you lose some of your so called God given freedoms by choosing to live there for the betterment of the whole, regardless of what you think, simple, look it up), and everything else Slashdot seems to be so kill, kill, kill The Man about...then what in the hell does Slashdot suggest, we as a nation, do to protect ourselves against people who break the laws that we, as a people, have made? If there is no way for Law Enforcement officials to protect and enforce the laws because no matter what the laws say, everyone on Slashdot appears to not care, how do you expect laws to be enforced at all? I had an argument with a friend the other day about high speed police chases. He sounds exactly like all of the backhills, my life sucks because of the government, conspiracy about everything other people make them believe types, like on Slashdot, who actually argued that it should be illegal to engage in high speed chases. What?!? I should be able to go down to the local gas station, shoot some innocent person, steal a ton of cash, and then if I drive fast enough the laws no longer apply to me? Yup, makes ALL kinds of sense. Damn Government, he says. Makes me want to puke. Criminals have no rights, and never should have. You break a crime, you pay the price. Oh, so according the Slashdot, if I hop on a trane or take a plane I should just be "let off of the hook???" If you want anarchy without laws and without the ability for law enforcement to do their jobs, then why do you stop whining, pick up your family and lives, and move to the jungle in South America and start your own country where Utopia awaits? YOU make the laws, YOU break the laws, YOU pay the price. Just because Marijuana is harmless does not make it legal. It is ILLEGAL and when you break the laws you should recieve the punishment that the people of the United States believe you should have. If Law Enforcement, be it the DEA or FBI, has no way of tracking criminals, then why have laws at all? They are not "invading my precious life" by being able to see who is on a train in order to stop a criminal from breaking a crime. The people of the United States, as far as I am concerned, care about stopping criminals from selling herion, crank, crack, methanphetimines, LCD, PCP, and every other drug to children and other people who are either too young or stupid to know any better than to not do drugs. We would need the DEA if this country had better parents and deeper morals and values. Those are the facts, plain and simple.
So, exactly when was the last time you saw police officers knock on your door to ask some questions and you decided "Gee, Bob, I should answer the door with a loaded firearm...?" What would happen if you got pulled over for speeding or OMVI and had a loaded handgun sitting on your lap or in your passenger seat. Then, when the police officer asked you for your license you simply reach over and grab your loaded weapon, you for some reason think you are not going to get shot? Are you serious? I really hope not. But, for some reason everyone thinks that they are on Slashdot.
Amtrak gets 10% of anything the DEA seizes off the trains.
anything? isn't this grossly illegal? are they taking applications?
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Holy shit, is that what you call it?
I agree with the previous poster, I do not smoke, drink, or use any illegal drug. I think Alcohol is the worst drug because it destroys more lives than just that of the person who is abusing it.
Now, I'm not going to judge your drug use. I don't care what you do to yourself. Just remember that if you do ingest anything that impairs your senses, keep your ass out of the drivers seat lest you hurt someone about whom I care.
Also, don't try to say that I, or the original poster are not "living" because we are makeing a choice not to live your type of lifestyle. I can "lighten up" and enjoy life without using mind-altering substances.
By the way, I said that I will not judge your drug use, and I am not, but if I were to put on my Freud cap, I might theorize that you are mocking someone for deciding to be clean and sober because your are ashamed about your own habits.
Just a thought.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Not all drugs have proven to be bad for your health. To lump up all drugs into one category and say that they are bad for your health is like lumping all people of a certain race together and calling them dangerous killers because one or two of them have killed before.
Marijuana and cocaine have about as much in common as apples and buffalo. Sure, there are a few similarities, but more differences.
No one, ever, has died from a direct result of marijuana use.
And if taken responsibly with sufficient knowledge and precautions, nearly all the dangers associated with drug use can be minimized. Unfortunately, many people are stupid and don't take the proper precautions.
I like what the other poster said. Have you ever read the ingredients in a Big Mac? How about a McChicken, which is ten times worse? People have been smoking marijuana for thousands of years and we know the risks involved. We don't know the long term risks of consuming huge quantities of monosodium glutamate, mono and di-glycerides, sulfates, sulfites, and a whole slew of other chemicals. And these chemicals are becoming more and more commonplace in the food industry. Go to your grocery store; it is almost impossible to find products that do not contain preservatives and flavour enhancers.
For instance, glutamic acid, which is, by every definition of the word, a drug, is present in about 98% of food items you'll find at the grocery store, just because companies are too cheap to use quality ingredients.
It never seems to occur to people like you that drug users use drugs for specific reasons, and have determined that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Huh? Where is your logic that follows to the equation:
drugs users == stupid people
???
Some of the most intelligent people that I know are drug users.
Sure, you could break the law, and stay illegally, but exchanging a low risk of being wrongfully chaged with drug violations for a high risk of being imprisoned or exiled to Africa hardly seems like a good exchange. Besides, as a non-citizen living in the US, you give up almost all of the rights you would otherwise have, giving you even less privacy than you started with.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
What you actually see going on is libertarians giving money, who generally vote conservative and support the Republican party as a "lesser of two evils."
Little l libertarians actually make up about a third of the Republican party (I read an exit poll article an election or two ago about various groups that compose political parties), and those are the sorts of people you often see funding groups like the Cato Institute. They certainly aren't conservative in any mainstream sense of the word, as they are anti-military and pro drug legalization.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The fewer people who ride, the less far that free money will have to spread. If you really want to hurt Amtrak, lobby Congress to cut off federal funding.
The most recent information a quick google search turned up was that Amtrak got $555 million in 1999.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
It is libertarian. So wow, big surprise they are for drug legalization. I happen to agree with you, but that's pretty poor support for your point.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Interstate highways were built into areas that had almost no one living there - Utah, the Dakotas, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, on and on. There was no economic justification for it. There were damned few people there. The creation of the IHS by federal tax dollars gave those underpopulated states the capability to add citizen/voters - not to mention all those water projects, at the Fed taxpayers' expense.
Trains were very efficient people movers. But the railroads made a lot of enemies over time, and the nationwide consensus was to spend them out of existence.
I'd love to ride Amtrak -- it would be fun. But because they must support themselves, they are always more expensive than driving the IHS, or even sometimes, flying!
The IHS did not pay for itself -- it was created by Federal welfare. The train system had its nuts cut off by fiat. They must raise the money to support themselves by passenger fees, while trucking companies and airlines are taxpayer supported entities, far, far, more than the trains are.
The other point I'd like to make is -- less affluent people use Amtrak. Amtrak is being given special scrutiny by law enforcement. Do the mental math; they're after the poorer people.
It's the first time I've seen a non-www.nytimes.com link here, and it was refreshing not to have to change the URL for once!
Uhh... wait a minute..... *grumble*
You listening, Rob? Slashcode needs an automatic link rewriter...
--
It is interesting that this follows the Fifth Utility closed circuit cameras article. But, like the British were posting, if you aren't guilty why worry about being watched all the time? :(
:( Maybe just hang onto that dna and see who is a poor risk for insurance... It turns out the dna wasn't what resulted in the arrest in the first place. Isn't there a way to see who is going to do criminal activity in the future by looking at their dna?
This is why... The expansion of cameras goes to following individual people and seeing who their friends are and what they have been up to as well.
Recently a French criminal case was solved using detective work. They got dna from thousands of people who were in the area of the crime. If they weren't guilty, why should they worry?
- James - [IMAGE]
> Let's assume you don't happen to have the
:)
> $150 cash or so that a cab ride would cost.
Here they will track the cab with gps - for the safety of the driver.
- James - [IMAGE]
What she should have pointed out was that other people would also pick 1,2,3,4,5,6, so even if she did win, she would have to split the jackpot with (probably many) other people. :)
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I don't believe in taking societal regulation out of the picture. I merely favor allowing rational adults to make adult decisions. One of these decisions involves consuming drugs which may cause long-term detrimental side effects. The other involves giving away personal information which may likewise cause long-term detrimental side effects.
Every transaction I make is not being monitored. In fact, even before this article came out I avoided disclosing this information where possible. Last time I used Amtrak, which admittedly was over a year ago, cash was still accepted, and I used it.
Of course, I don't have any illusions of privacy. Back a couple years ago I ran a free web hosting service which was at one point used by people sending harrassing mail through the USPS. The FBI got involved and contacted me to ask for information about this person. They told me I was particularly difficult to locate, but the fact of the matter is they found me. I didn't have any information to give them, since I didn't collect any information, for this precise reason. Since then I've pretty much given up on my privacy, at least as far as the federal government is concerned. What do I care if they know where I've gone on Amtrak, anyway?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Even if planes, trains, and buses all required you to identify yourself (of these only planes do), you still could drive. For the few times a year you take a plane, the government knows about it. Big fucking deal. I don't see the harm that is done. I really don't. Maybe you could enlighten me on it.
One time credit cards will be around by the time everyone refuses to accept cash. They already are, to some extent. You pay cash, and you get a credit card number, to spend that cash. They could easily be put in vending machines, and now you're going to have to be a pretty damn important person for the government to bother.
I've heard of cases of identity theft, but in all cases the only bad thing which happened was it appeared on the person's credit report. Maybe that matters to some, but I don't give a shit. Even if I can't get credit, I tend not to anyway, and my friends will be happy to loan me money, since I have loaned them money many times in the past. For any credit card company or other credit agency who refuses to loan me money, it's their loss.
I don't have very much "stuff" to steal, so I'd be a pretty bad target for burglary. In fact, my biggest assets are my knowledge and my friends, both of which are impossible to steal from me (in the sense that I lose something and the other person gains it). Short of being killed or locked up, I don't have all that much to worry about.
Technology can't be uninvented. We're going to have to live with it. The most important thing to do, in my opinion, is get rid of the selectively enforced laws, such as drug laws, many intellectual property laws, many traffic laws, and most of the tax laws (simplify it). These laws are nothing more than a way for the government to selectively prosecute those which it disagrees with. Once we've decriminalized and legalized the things which 99+% of the country does, the only people who have to fear the government will be those committing real crime.
Privacy *is* important. All other things being equal, I'll choose the more private alternative. But the government already knows where I live. They know where I work. And anyone who wants to burglarize my house need only check to see if my car is in the driveway, they don't need to steal records from Amtrak. Any company who relies merely on easily stolen information such as Social Security numbers to lend out money will quickly go out of business. I sure won't have to pay for it.
For anyone who values their privacy more, take a car, take a different train, pay cash, don't make that trip, get a fake ID, the possibilities are endless. When these possibilities go away, then you can complain. But don't whine about your information being given away when you made no effort whatsoever to not give it away, or to at least have the reciever promise to keep it private. That's stupid.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
First of all stopping crime is not the only factor to be considered. Criminal enforcement must be balanced against personal liberties, total cost and welfare of the nation as a whole.
True personal liberty would allow a corporation to sell any information to any entity at any price. You gave Amtrak the information, you didn't make Amtrak agree not to sell it, the information is now Amtrak's to do as they please with it. You should assume any information you provide a company is publicly available, unless that company signs an agreement otherwise. Even then you probably should consider the possibility that they might break that agreement.
The problem is that drugs are illegal. Racial profiling would approach becoming a non-issue if we stuck to fighting real crime. It's never going to go away completely, our predjudices are what allow us to make rational decisions. Personally I'd recommend that the police be sued for harrassment for falsely detaining an innocent person. That would quickly limit their harrassment to cases where they actually believe there is a crime being committed. Of course, it might also increase the amount of planting of evidence and framing that is done. Immediate suspension with pay until a trial then discharge and jail time if convicted of planting evidence is the only thing you can do about that problem.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
If they say they cannot enforce all the laws of this country without taking "pro-active" measures, then you may know by that sign that THERE ARE TOO MANY LAWS.
The Roman historian Tacitus probably said it best in Annales - "Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges"
In English, "The more corrupt the state, the more numrous its laws"
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
Bullshit. Of those 100,000 deaths you speak of, I assume you are referring to driving related deaths, since health problems cause only a fraction of alcohol related deaths. What makes you think that people would be any more responsible with pot? If it were as accessable as alcohol, you would be citing twice as many deaths, unless you really believe that someone under the influence of marijuana is any better a driver than someone who had been drinking.
Everyone keeps saying pot is safer than alcohol. Well, no shit. That isn't the point. Smoking pot is not safer than nothing at all. Can any of you say that you would be comfortable with your children's bus driver smoking pot before he picked them up for school?
You mean like facts found here http://www.google.com/search?q=marijuana+driving. Where even the most generous studies could only say that it isn't as bad as other drugs, but still dangerous? If you are relying on facts to assure you that marijuana consumption is harmless, then you are relying on the wrong facts.
You are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty of a crime. Whatever else that may mean, it doesn't mean that law enforcement has a blank check to gather and sift for information on people before they know a crime is committed in anticipation of that event. It should preclude that. Presumption of innocence means that your rights are to be held intact and without modification until you are indicted or convicted. If you are under no indictment, your right to privacy may not be infringed upon.( Police and prosecutors should have that rule tattooed on their foreheads instead of getting shiny badges to identify themselves as law enforcement). But we see that the police do invade the privacy of individuals routinely while investigating no specific reported crime. This is the presumption of guilt and they apply it indiscriminately to batches of people at a time so they may claim they violated no one person's rights. In fact they just violated the rights of all.
This is not a relationship of a free people to their own law enforcement, and I think it's something that should be fought, even though it must be admitted that only favored classes of citizens really enjoyed protection from invasive hostile law enforcement in the past. The point is we should all expect that protection as our right as citizens, and expand it to cover all, rather than accept the erosion of privacy for all to better enable enforcing laws, which is what is happening now.
If they are not investigating A SPECIFIC CRIME, then I want the cops back in the precinct house watching TV and eating donuts. If they say they cannot enforce all the laws of this country without taking "pro-active" measures, then you may know by that sign that THERE ARE TOO MANY LAWS. The laws exist to sustain and improve the lives of the citizens, not the other way around.
An ancient assumption of our legal system was that "better 99 guilty men go free than one innocent man lose his life or freedom", which I think was a quotation from Blackstone. Another assumption I'll add to that which I think was so implicit it never got said was that the laws existed to protect average people from extraordinary bad actors. Well, with the changing of times and the multiplication of laws, it seems to me that an average person is probably guilty of something nowadays. A misdemeanor offense, for most of us, but still a threat of prosecution for misdemeanor offences can easily be used by police to extort information on 3rd parties' criminal acts (real or made up). Police may gripe about how hard it is for them to enforce all the laws, but they can hardly deny that they love the leverage they get from being able to nick almost anybody for something. Through that mechanism we are becoming a nation of informants, a good deal of that information is fiction concocted between Inquisitors and the informants they put on the rack, and we are crazy if we think this can continue long without bad effects on our national character and political life.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
I think you got (t)rolled.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Then please, by all means, move to Saudia Arabia or China where they have REALLY tough drug laws and no-nonsense "law enforcement" so you and your kids will be safe from those evil drugs. I'll even help you pack.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Depending on how they do this, Amtrak could be in trouble in Canada.
This would suggest that for tests outside of this area, Amtrak continues to be a private corporation, as the United States Congress stated it's intent to be.
Now - there are Amtrak trains that run in Canada. They pick up passengers, and (presumably) gather some personal information on them. The difference would be that federal Canadian legislation covers train transportation, and thus any personal information gathered will be protected by Canadian privacy legislation.
There is a nice article on this at http://law.miningco.com/newsissues/law/library/bri efs/ucanadaprivacy.htm, which quite correctly raises more questions than it answers. However - it seems possible that Amtrak is opening itself to legal liability by disclosing this information without a specific request from a law enforcement official (which should include a warrant).
And just to cover one item quickly - the Canadian legislation covers Canadians even outside of Canada. They don't lose the protection when they leave the country.
Commment to other readers...
Then, out of nowhere last week came news that the plan had resurfaced at the Richmond Federal Re serve, where one Marvin Goodfriend, a senior vice president, proposed placing a tracking code on every dollar bill. "The magnetic strip could visibly record when a bill was last withdrawn from the banking system. A carry tax could be deducted from each bill upon deposit according to how long the bill was in circulation,"
This may sound like just so much paranoid rantings, but this quote is pretty accurate. I recall seeing information about this on the Richmond FR site at the time. It was a trial ballon surfaced to guage reaction by people of the idea of automatically deflating currency. The idea was, they want you to keep as much of your money in the banking system as possible, and not have too much cash on hand, as cash in the hand makes their calculations messy. The proposal was to have currency to automatically start deflating once you withdrew it from a bank. Obviously, there are a =lot= of issues that would have to be dealt with if they were to enact such a system (the technical ones are as intense as the social ones).
This proposal was part of a war against cash, which, to the government is untracable by them and therefore evil. Luckily, it was quickly shot down by many as loony. The bad thing is, that this loony proposal was actually put forth by a governor of a federal reserve bank.
This is an ex-parrot!
Sir, you are a fool. If you think that the FBI and the DEA only go after the "criminals" (You are assuming that your definition of criminal and their definition is the same) and leave the innocent alone then you are extremely naive. Look up the word "COINTELPRO" in any search engine and then tell us you have nothing to fear from this goverment.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
The DEA seizes more than drugs. Your cash, car, house, boat, computer, whatever, is all fair game if it's suspected of being connected with drugs.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I hate slashdot
Aside from the technology, this is is no different from the standard profiling they do in airports. We all believe technology will make our lives easier. Well, it makes the DEA's lives easier too.
Let me explain:
As part of their training, DEA agents take courses in Constitutional Law and proper arrest, search, and seizure. They are well-acquainted with what constitutes probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Do you know the difference? Do you know what a "Terry" stop is? They do. If anyone is going to be careful not to run afoul of Supreme Court case precedent, it's the feds.
An agent from the DEA standing around in the airport knows what constitutes suspicious activity and/or a suspicious appearance. They know which nationalities courier what drugs. They know what kind of "cargo" to look for. They know nervousness and evasiveness when they see it.
The exact same thing applies with cyber activity. The profile they get of an Amtrak passenger is not fundamentally different from what they could get standing around the station observing people. The only difference is they are looking at data on a screen rather than faces and clothes.
In fact, this form of profiling has the potential to be less racially biased than face-to-face observation. When you get over the knee-jerk reaction and think about it, it really is preferable to the current system. The current system being basically "stop people with brown skin".
So technology is improving our lives, just not always in the ways we expect.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
Care about freedom?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
In return, the DEA gives Amtrak a cut of seized assets.
So would Amtrak be doing this if they weren't receiving said cut?
---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Instead of "partners", use "channel" in the URL
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
I can't recall seeing a "no drugs allowed" sign on our local CitiBus. Even so, there is also a law against unlawful search and seizure and our right to privacy. IMO, the practice of drug searches on airlines are tolerated for two reasons:
1) They are most likely looking for weapons, explosives, pressurized canisters and anything else that could create havoc in the air. In other words: public safety.
2) This is a weaker point. Some travellers, even on domestic flights either originated their journey or will end their journey in another country. You pretty much give up all your rights in exchange for the priveledge of crossing an international border.
Neither of these points apply on a train/bus/taxi etc.. So what next? How about NYPD or Boston PD installing cameras in the back of cabs? Hey, let's even have the cabbies or the busses drive the bad guys right to jail after we spot 'em. Who really thinks that the government sets up monitoring systems like this "to combat drugs"? I think not.
I bet Amtrak resells the information to advertisers too. Anyone ridden it long distance and ended up with a mailbox full of flyers when they got home?
Maybe alot of drugs are shipped by rail. Airports have alot of security so maybe people avoid them.
Why they don't just drive I dunno...maybe the police have gotten good at picking out drug couriers?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Good argument but it has some problems.
First of all stopping crime is not the only factor to be considered. Criminal enforcement must be balanced against personal liberties, total cost and welfare of the nation as a whole.
Where police targeting people based on some less psychologically important characteristic than race it would probably be a good idea...but the mere fact that race is so close to many peoples identity and has so frequently been inappropriately used before the mere knowledge that race is being used to profile is quite damaging.
Race is also an inherint non-changable property. As such anyone of a "profiled" race is likely to run into a great deal of law enforcement harrasment. An individual (in fact an entire cultural group) routinely harrased (or at least suspected of crimes) by law enforcement is probably going to develop a poor attitude towards law and authority in general and possibly increase their rate of criminal activity.
Secondly, it is an unfortunate fact that people (and I have no doubt police officers are included in this) are extremely poor at manipulating probabilities. People tend to form sterotypes (as in a vision of how things usually are) and rate liklihoods by how reasonable they are instead of how probable they are. For instance most people would (at least until they thought carefully about it) rate the sequence of coin flips HHTHTTH more likely than HHHHHHH because it somehow seems more "reasonable."
This leads one to suspect that racially profiling is not done in a statistically usefull manner. In fact police may be acting inefficently by their racial profiling.
Consider as a police officer your primary contact is with criminals. Suppose for the purpose of argument that black people make up a significantly greater percent of criminals than whites (or at least the criminals these police come into contact with). These police officers then develop an image of a criminal as a young black male. This would lead them to falsely assume that young black males are almost certainly criminals when in fact most of them are innocent.
Finally racial profilling seems to be used primarily in respect to the war on drugs. While this entire war is a gross violation of civil liberties it points out the further inappropriatness of racial profiling. As a matter of fact the difference between white and black drug use in young men is actually not very large but the difference in arrests and prison sentences is huge. In short these drug laws are being used to remove "undesierables" which should be read as minorities.
BTW I really like how you criticize us for being too hung up on individual rights to implement this but yet your "enlightened" european nations are the ones who haven't implemented such a policy.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The only drug free state is a police state.
Bullshit. Drugs will always be around - even soviet russia under Stalin had a drug problem in its heartland - whether it was some kid boiling poppies and shooting up or doing an actual "street sold" narcotic.
The only reason we fight this is because the government doesn't have control over it, and as such, can't tax it. Alcohol has destroyed many more relationships than drugs, poisioned more livers and fucked up more babies than any street drug.
Smoking has kill millions - we know its bad, but do fuckal to stop it. Why? because the govt gets $$ from it and it keeps the rabble from rising up.
Blah, sounds like propaganda, so I'm going to stop. That shit is true though - quite a number of american spend their weekends hung over, and even more gladly give the govt money that the govt didn't even really ask for..
Last thing. Stalin made "Adolf the angry Jew from Austria" seem like a little boy, estimated 45-50 million dead - perhaps more... Only difference was that he didn't count the people he killed.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I'm sick of all this shit. I'm going home.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
This is true but it is not a knee-jerk reaction, it is human nature. Human beings always divide themselves into "us" and "them". Us being good and Them being the repository of all the projected evils we don't want to recognize within ourselves.
Human nature is not kept in check by technology. If anything, technology makes human nature more pervasive because it is not the blatant hoods and burning crosses variety. It is the subtle denial of rights to a segment of the population through the "impartial" application of technology. To the Germans the Jews were Them and whatever the Nazis did to Them wasn't of any concern. This was the understanding between the Nazis and the ordinary German citizens that allowed unprecedented mass murder. A similar understanding exists that allows racial profiling to continue.
"Us and Them.
Us and Them.
We are Good.
They are Bad."
Applicable to any side of any ethnic conflict anywhere in the world at any time in history.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
This makes sense now:
I was taking the Amtrak train home to Raleigh from New York, and some plain-clothes policemen boarded when we stopped at Washington. They flashed their badges, and proceeded to search the guy sitting next to me, who happened to be young, black, and travelling alone... then they apologized, since he was innocent, and left without telling anyone why.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
....drugs won't do you any good anyway. Seems scientists have found a way to keep you from getting high on marijauna. Similiar methods already exist to take all the fun out of other chemical substances. Now all they need to do is legislate it into the water supply (think of it as a DMCA for your brain :-).
Lack of curiosity is also stupid. Smoking pot is not like pouring draino down your throat. Lighten up and live a little.
--
Yep, Amtrak gives them free rides and the DEA gives Amtrak corporate officers uncut, pure Columbian Coacaine. Sounds like a good deal to me!
--
Bull. Drink everyday for a month or two, and you will probably be an alchoholic. I know. :)
--
No I am just being smug. I simply see no reason to be sober all the time. Everything in moderation. I don't see any intrinsic value or virtue in abstinence.
--
THE WAR ON DRUGS AS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE
by Bob Black
No one ever made a more important observation in seven words than Randolph Bourne once did: "War is the health of the state". War has been the main motor for the extension of state power in Europe for a thousand years, and not only in Europe. War enlarges the state and increases its wealth and its powers. It promotes obedience and justifies the repression of dissent, redefined as disloyalty. It relieves social tensions by redirecting them outwards at an enemy state which is, of course, doing exactly the same thing with all the same consequences. From the state's perspective, there is only one thing wrong with wars: they end.
That wars end is ultimately more important than whether they end in victory or defeat. Occasionally defeat spells destruction for states, as for the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires after World War I, but not usually, and even if it does, they give way to other states. The state-system not only endures, it prevails. Usually war is well worth the risk -- not to the combatants or the suffering civilians, of course: but well worth the risk to the state.
Peace is something else again. The immediate consequence may be a recession or a depression, as after the American Revolution and World War I, whose hardships are all the more galling when they fall upon the population which "won" the war and naively supposes it will share in the fruits of a victory which belongs to its state, not to the people. The regime may artificially prolong the wartime climate of repression and sacrifice, as did the United States by working up the Red Scare after World War I, but soon the people crave what Warren Harding promised them, a return to normalcy. The vanquished, of course, rarely fare as well as occupied Japan and Germany did after World War II, but even then the Germans initially experienced famine.
There have been epochs in which certain states were almost always at war, such as Republican Rome, whose oligarchs, as Livy repeatedly demonstrates, were well aware of the way war was a safety-valve for dissipating class conflict. Colonial wars well serve the purpose since they are fought far from the home country and usually waged against antagonists who are, however gallant, greatly inferior militarily.
The British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a good example. Engorged with the wealth of commercial capitalism (soon to be unimaginably enlarged by the Industrial Revolution), secure in its insularity, shielded by the world's greatest navy, with a robust and ruthless ruling class wise to the ways of statecraft, the British State could afford a war anytime it needed one. The cannon fodder was easy to come by. There were outright mercenaries such as Hessions on the market. And yesterday's enemies were today's troops. The Irish, repeatedly crushed in the seventeenth century, were one source. Starting in 1746 the British annihilated the society and culture of the Scottish Highlanders, then recruited regiments from the survivors. They would repeat these cost-effective methods in India, in Africa, everywhere. And then there were the English sources of expendibles: the peasants forced off the land by enclosure of the commons, and the urban poor. They would not be missed, and there were always more where they came from.
But times have changed. Some states can possibly carry on in the old way for a while -- maybe Serbia, North Korea, Iraq -- but the United States cannot, for at least two reasons: We are too squeamish, and we are too poor.
Too squeamish in the sense that, as Saddam Hussein crowed before the second Gulf War, America is a society which cannot tolerate 10,000 dead. He was right, although that did him no good, since he was unable to inflict 10,000 or even 1,000 deaths. Grenada and Panama were larks, but even such two-bit gang wars as Lebanon and Somalia were not, and nobody has any stomach for war in Haiti or Bosnia. Americans are fast losing their taste for media wars, to say nothing of real wars.
And too poor for any war long enough to put a lasting blip in any President's ratings. The attack on Iraq was the turning point. As adroitly handled as the manipulation of the mass mind was, Americans only went along with the war on the condition that the "Allies" pay for it. Even the most dim-witted are dimly aware that the lion's share of their Federal taxes goes to pay for war debts and military spending they never reaped any benefits from. The trade-off for lives in a high-tech, media-savvy, photogenic war is money. It costs more, immensely more, than war ever has. But America does not have more, immensely more wealth than it ever has. It has less, and less and less all the time.
Even with the massed forces of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and all the rest of the mainstream media behind him, and despite an overwhelming victory which owed as much to luck as skill, George Bush became the first President to win a war and then lose an election -- to a pot-smoking, womanizing draft-dodger.
Thus the regime is caught in what the Marxists used to call a "contradiction." It needs war, for war is the health of the state, but (with occasional ephemeral exceptions) it cannot afford either to win wars or lose them. But what kind of a war is it possible to wage, at not too intolerable a cost, which avoids these twin pitfalls -- a war which cannot be won or lost?
The "War on Drugs." Which is not a real war, of course, but what the Germans call a Sitzkrieg, a phony war. Formerly they sold us the war to end all wars. Now they sell us an endless war. The March of Dimes is an instructive precedent. The March of Dimes raised lots of money which (what was left of it after most of it went for advertising and administration)financed research on a polio vaccine. Then came catastrophe: Jonas Salk found a polio vaccine. So, its purpose accomplished, the March of Dimes went out of business, right? (Just kidding.) No, the organization moved on to an amorphous quest, to conquer "birth defects," of which there are so many varieties that the March of Dimes can count on doing business for many years to come. Some people say "the ends justify the means," others say they don't. The March of Dimes has transcended the contradiction: The means justify the end.
Such is the utility, to the state, of the War on Drugs. It cannot be lost, for there is no enemy to lose it to. And for countless reasons it cannot be won. The government cannot inderdict more than a fraction of the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other drugs which, by illegalizing them, the government has raised the price on to the point that they are well worth smuggling in. And some of the dope, such as marijuana and opium, is easily produced domestically. Many tens of millions of Americans have indulged in illegal drugs, including the President. Their kids see no reason not to try what their parents did, regardless what the parents are preaching now. Children tend not to heed their parents when they know they are lying. Besides, there is always alcohol.
And in the suburbs as in the ghetto, legalizing drugs has jacked up their prices so far that busting drug dealers has no "supply-side" effect. Taking a drug dealer off the street just opens up a vacancy for another entrepreneur. Indeed, it is standard practice for dealers to get their competitors busted to take that competitive edge. But it makes no more difference who is dealing the drugs than it makes who is running the state. Indeed, they may be the same people! The Drug War is the health of the state.
Because it is only a phony war, the War on Drugs is fiscally manageable. The government can spend as much or as little as it likes, since the result is always the same. Even the out-of-pocket costs are disguised, divided as they are among Federal, state and local governments and confused with funding for law enforcement. The single greatest expense, prisons, is one which most people mistake for just about the best thing the government does for them. Underpinning this error is a misconception about what the product of the criminal justice system is. It is not crime control, for even if that could be measured with any accuracy, there is no evidence that law enforcement in general reduces crime. The product is crime rates, which are a function, not of the amount of crime, but of the amount of law enforcement. Thus the authorities can manufacture a "crime wave" if they want more money, or ease up on enforcement if they want to take credit for doing exactly the opposite -- a reverse Catch-22, a no-lose situation. Aside from themselves and their higher-ups, the only beneficiaries of those 100,000 more police that President Clinton will put on the streets will be Dunkin' Donut franchisees.
What's more, to some extent the War on Drugs pays for itself. Just as armies used to subsist largely by "living off the land," pillaging the districts they passed through, so the drug warriors cram their coffers with booty from forfeitures. And that's just on the formal, legal level. Off the books, of course, the police have always seized a lot more drugs than ever found their way to the evidence room. The dealers and junkies are unlikely to complain. (The classic scenario: a cop makes an illegal search on the street. He finds something. He asks, courteously, "Is this yours?" The answer is always no.) Some dope the police sell on their own account. Some they use themselves. And some they use for "flaking" (planting drugs on suspected drug dealers) and "padding" (adding more dope to what was found to turn a misdemeanor into a felony).
In still another way the War on Drugs offers one of the benefits of a real war without its costs and risks. Every real war is a civil liberties holocaust. Even on the formal, legal level, national security -- a so-called compelling state interest -- tends to trump fundamental rights, at least until the shooting stops. Meanwhile patriotic vigilantes carry out the castrations, the lynchings, the arsons -- the dirty work too dirty for the state to do, even in a supposed wartime emergency, but not too dirty for the state to wink at afterwards. The United States during World War I and the Red Scare is one example; the Italy which the liberals let the Fascists take over, after letting them extralegally smash the socialists, communists and anarchists, is another.
But peace returns and the legal ground lost is mostly recovered, or even more ground is taken. Once the state has demolished the radical opposition irreparably, it may well restore constitutional rights to the impotent remnants and bask in its own announced glory, parading its tolerance once it doesn't matter any more.
The phony war is much more effective. It cannot be conducted without massive invasions of liberty and property. The single most important right implicated, and endangered, by the War on Drugs is the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. This body of law effectively began during Prohibition, and today it is, as Professor Fred Cohen says, "driven by drugs." The rights of everyone are defined by the rights the judiciary grudgingly grants to drug offenders.
Other rights are reduced too. Under the forfeiture laws, private property is taken without due process or just compensation. Applied to Native Americans and others, drug laws interfere with freedom of religion; so does the common practice of forcing drunk drivers into "rehabs" for indoctrination in the religious tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous. Even the campaign against gun ownership is an indirect consequence of the War on Drugs. Participants in the drug trade have to enforce their own contracts, since the state will not. And prohibition has made drugs very valuable commodities: in the inner cities, by far the most valuable commodities. Meanwhile, drug addicts rob and steal to support their habits. The result is an arms race and the clamor for gun control. One prohibition leads to another.
For the criminal, the ultimate challenge is the perfect crime. For the state, it is the perfect law. Is it prohibition?
Maybe not. Drug prohibition is today much more popular than alcohol prohibition ever was, but within living memory, decriminalization was a serious possibility. It might become so again if the anti-drug hysteria continues to rise till it reaches a level impossible to sustain. And it probably will rise, because the drug war has been institutionalized. Various agencies and organizations have a vested interest in its unlimited extension, although its unlimited extension is not only impossible, it would deprive the state of the great advantage of drug war over real war: its predictability and manageability. As some organs of government grow and grow, there is less for others. Since victory, like defeat, is impossible, there will never be a "peace dividend" to divvy up. The state is probably already draining more wealth out of civil society than is consistent with the state's own long-term interests. If it takes more and more, the parasite will kill the host -- or the host will kill the parasite.
Eventually the state may succumb to its own success. The state is huge. And it is bureaucratic. That means that it is intricately subdivided by function (or by what was initially considered a division of labor by function: in fact, overlapping or competing jurisdiction is common and tends to increase over time). Even if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, it may not be able to do anything about it. (Or else, in the words of the German proverb, "one hand washes the other.") Inter-agency cooperation becomes more difficult as it becomes more frequent and more necessary. "The complexity of joint action" thwarts action, or its purpose.
It is very hard, administratively, to reduce a bureau's budget, but easy to increase it. Bureaus fiercely resist zero-based budgeting -- that is, starting from scratch, the annual rejustification of every line of the budget request -- as reinventing the wheel. And it is difficult for higher-level authority to identify areas for cost reduction, if it even wants to, since the very raison d'etre of bureaucratic organization is deference to institutionalized expertise. The easy way is to take the previous budget as presumptively the next one; it is only departures from the status quo, not the status quo itself, which require justification. The bureau, staffed with supposed experts, is itself the usual source of justifications for departures, and the departures are always in the direction of more money and more power for the bureau. What goes for each bureau goes for all of them. Thus government grows.
Referring to the way competition between workers lowers wages for all of them, Fredy Perlman observed: "The daily practice of all annuls the goals of each." Inter-agency interactions tend to have the same effect. So does inter-agency competition for tax money.
The long-term implications for the War on Drugs are, for the state, ominous. The more the state extends its control over society, the less control it has over itself. The more the state absorbs society, the weaker the state as an entity responsive to a common will becomes. It disintegrates into an authoritarian pluralism reminiscent of feudalism, but lacking its romantic charm. Some agencies fatten off the War on Drugs, most do not. The ones that do are the first to go their own way. Attorney General Janet Reno had no control over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms when it exterminated the Branch Davidians to win what amounted to nothing more than a gang war: but she took responsibility. The Drug Enforcement Administration is likewise as independent as Hoover's FBI or anybody's CIA.
For the state, another inevitable adverse consequence of the Drug War is corruption. Not that corruption is necessarily a bad thing for the state. Up to a point, police shakedowns of drug dealers, bookies, pimps and other extralegal entrepreneurs benefit the state in more than one way. The more the cops collect in payoffs and confiscations, the less they have to be paid in salaries. Cops whose supervisors know they are on the take (as they do, since they are on the take too) look the other way unless and until for some reason they need to get rid of a particular cop. Corruption is thus a management tool.
But some cops get too greedy and go too far. Most are "grass-eaters" (bribe-takers) who take what comes their way, but some are "meat-eaters" (extortionists) -- proactively corrupt -- who actively seek out or set up corruption opportunities, like the Special Investigative Unit detectives depicted in the movie Serpico. The grass-eaters cover for the meat-eaters (the "blue code of silence") since they all have something to hide. Until recently, police administrators and their academic allies thought that they could keep corruption under control through various institutional reforms most of which were initially proposed by the Knapp Commission. Maybe the reforms would have worked, except for one thing: the War on Drugs. Corruption is making a comeback, even in the Knapp-reformed NYPD. Because penalties are much harsher and the profits of drug trafficking much higher, the protection the police sell commands a much higher price. Drug-driven corruption is the growth sector of police misconduct.
For the state, the problem with runaway corruption is that it cannot be confined to where its benefits exceed its costs. The state needs the police for a modicum of selective law enforcement and, much more important, for social control -- as the occasion calls for, to break strikes, evict squatters, suppress riots, repress dissidents and keep traffic moving. Even in our sophisticated times, when manipulation is the hippest of control strategies, there is often no substitute for the gun and the billy-club.
But a pervasively corrupt police force cannot be counted on when push comes to shove. Meat-eaters cannot spare the time to enforce the law. Officers on the nod are ineffective knights of the club. Police who are enforcing drug laws are unavailable to enforce others. There's been a tremendous expansion in undercover police work in recent years, inevitably accompanied by more corruption. Police, as workers, are notoriously difficult to manage because they are usually out by themselves, unsupervised. Detectives especially are in a position to be secretive about their activities, and more drug enforcement means more detective/undercover work. These cops are pursuing their own agendas. Why do dogs lick their balls? Because they can.
Corruption scandals demoralise the police and delegitimize the state. Most people obey the law most of the time, not because they fear punishment if they don't, but because they believe in the system. As they cease to believe, they will cease to obey -- not only the laws that don't matter (like "don't use drugs") but also the ones that do (like "pay your taxes"). And, ironically, crackdowns on corruption impair police effectiveness for other purposes.
The state has overbuilt itself so heavily that the weight begins to crack the foundations. It is not the sort of elephantiasis that can be eased by privatization. It doesn't matter who collects the garbage. What matters is who has the guns. Not "social pork" but the essence of sovereignty -- the means to enforce order -- is tumorous. Thus the cancer is inoperable. The state may die, fittingly, of an overdose.
--
No no no no. When he/she says "boycott" he/she means the FBI, not Amtrak! I mean, how many police forces does one nation need, anyway?
I do not have a signature
Amtrak is most often competitive with driving. In some markets it's distinctly faster (notably the Northeast Corridor, where it competes with air travel). But for the same customer experience you really don't have an alternative.
Note that there's almost nowhere in the world where there is competition for intercity rail service. Japan is probably the notable exception, with national and private railways competing on many major routes.
So, back on topic: gubmint is gubmint, as you said. If you want to transport drugs, you'd do better to stay in your car. I guess.
sulli
RTFJ.
The experience of Amtrak, which uses other companies' tracks except on the Northeast Corridor and is therefore subject to delays from late freight trains, should have informed the UK that this wouldn't work very well. Oh well!
sulli
RTFJ.
They bust boatloads of stupid kids bringing back small amounts of KB for personal use. They kids are dumb for pulling the move, but are neither hurting themselves or anyone else, and thus not criminals or offenders.
Yes they are.
To be a criminal you must cause another person harm, against their will.
Hmmm... If our jails were not full of non-violent drug offenders, sexual predators might not be released so quickly.
I think you need to read Brave New World, 1984, and We.
It doesn't stop there, I am sure people will uncover multiple intrusions, and every day the DEA looks to invade our lives even more. In the future, they will certainly be checking your mail if the war on our children...err...drugs is to continue.
The only drug free state is a police state.
I'd love to boycott them, however their prices suck so bad that I never even bothered using them before. :) Its generally cheaper to fly than use Amtrak.
Tim
The only people that should be afraid.. and your not a criminal are you ;). I mean if your using cash then you surely MUST be smugglin somthing around the country.. is there something wrong with MY logic?
Jon Bardin
It's interesting to note that most legitimate casinos do the same thing, and do it "worse," in a more invasive sense. You're on camera from the moment you step into a casino until the moment you leave, and at all the big-name casinos, those cameras feed straight into photo recognition applications. Originally this software was installed and intended to monitor the casinos for people who had been identified (even by other casinos) as cheaters.
The kicker? Now, the technology is also used to identify known criminals. I don't remember whether the casinos check their video feeds against databases of criminals on-site, or whether the video feeds are sent out to LEA who do it on their end. It's one or the other though.
There was an episode of "MSNBC Investigates" recently which contained some interesting footage of the photo recognition in real time. It documented how a wanted felon was busted after he was spotted (and ID'd) by a camera monitoring the entrance to a casino. The photo recognition software ID'd him and police showed up to bust him within a few minutes.
Suffice it to say, if you're a known criminal (and the cops have a picture of you), stay the hell away from Vegas or Atlantic City.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
i hear a lot of jokes about this (gallows humor, admittedly) but i have never known anyone to be searched/arrested on the basis of an anonymous tip, much less an unfounded one for the purpose of harassment.
Anyone else heard of a case like this?
Could you provide links to those cases you mentioned? a cursory search revealed nothing, but i'd love to know about this.
Is catch the people not wise about what they do. People who use or carry drugs in public while matching probable cause profiles - people who don't know how to stand up for their rights with the cops. People who have chronic habits and establish unwise comfort zones (smoking in the car, etc.)
Think about it. The reason the War on Drugs must violate our rights to persist: discrete folk may easily maintain usage habits and businesses without arousing official attention or suspicion under normal levels of scrutiny.
But tell me this: if there are such smarter drug dealers, don't you think they may have picked their line of work, not to "addict morons to crack" (which can't be a very fulfilling role) but instead for some other cause? Civil disobedience? Contributing to a community of healthy drug users? Carrying a sacrament to the faithful?
Just a thought.
Take this sugar cube, this sugarcube broken for you...
That's an awful lot of punishment to endure to make a point. Does anyone make moral stands like this anymore, in the face of handcuffs, jailtime, etc? In the face of a prejudiced media and society? You're just going to be branded as an unruly wacko.
It occurs to me we have the oppression we do because nothing like this ever happens.
pardon my cynicism.
yes, absolute and unquestioning compliance is definitely the way to go.
for instance, if you live in a state that hasn't repealed or at least set precedents against "sodomy statutes," you'd better make sure you don't have sex that isn't legal. you can check for your state here also, many states have laws against premarital sex, so wait 'til you're married, folks!
my point is that not all laws are just (for a better parallel, read about america's prohibition of alcohol). there are some things that the government just has no business enforcing upon me. i'm not necessarily saying that the answer is simply to disobey the laws, just that if everyone accepted unjust laws, as you're suggesting, unjust laws would never be changed.
to email, take off every 'zig'
they catch you in your DeCSS shirt? Does Amtrack get to keep the sleeve?
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
so that you can't scan in a $20 and then print it out.
Scanners and printers copies have gotten so good that you can easily make passable counterfeits with them, hence the little plastic strip that's in all the new bills.
You almost need a paper mill and those strips to make better counterfeits.
They weren't needed with color copiers, as almost all of them are smart enough to recognize currency and fsck up your copy.
Dude!! That is REALLY funny!! I haven't laughed this hard in ages. Thanks for the chuckle. You've got a great, if slightly adolecent, imagination!
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A person of moderate zeal
Miranda prevents what you say to the police from being used against you in court? I thought it only gave you the right to "remain silent".
Of course, like most Americans, most of what I know about our justice systems comes from TV; so I could be wrong.
where there's fish, there's cats
There is very little money to be made in long-distance passenger rail service in the U.S., and this has been the case since at least the 60s.
The US railroads would have liked to eliminate passenger service entirely, but there were laws that said that they had to carry passengers.
(This situation came about because the U.S. government had given so much land to the railroads back in the 19th century. In return for this favor, the railroads would have to carry passenger traffic whether it was profitable or not).
Amtrak was created to take some of the burden of passenger service off of the frieght railroads. Railroads were given a choice: either continue to run passenger trains, or allow Amtrak to do so on their tracks. Some of the jumped at this opportinity right away, others waited a few years.
They (the US railroad companies) still have to support passenger service, by letting Amtrak trains use their tracks and other facilities. It ties up their systems and slows down the money-making freight trains.
The situation is slightly different in the Northeast, where Amtrak actually owns the electrified corridor. I believe that this was split off from Conrail and given (or sold) to Amtrak when Conrail ceased to be part of the government.
Amtrak has traditionally been banned from carrying freight, because doing so would be seen as competition against the freight railroads that support it. In the last few years there have been some exceptions made, and these have been somewhat controversial.
where there's fish, there's cats
Of course, the same can be said of the USPS.
where there's fish, there's cats
The first time I rode the train, I was on the very early morning Eugene-Portland that leaves at 6am, not many people there. Several people got on the train, payed cash to the conductor, and rode the train. In fact, last time I read the little thing they give you, they still say that you can buy on-train for something like 10% more. What drug dealer wouldn't find little-used routes and do this?
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
Although the conviction does help a lot. Here's roughly how it works.
The DEA catches "Joe" at an Amtrak station with 50 kilos of cocaine. Joe doesn't seem to hold any kind of job anywhere, but he still manages to have a $500,000 house, a Corvette, and various expensive toys. The DEA will have no problem convincing a federal judge that the house, car, and toys are the result of profiting from illegal drug trade, and will seize it all. Later on, the DEA will sell all of this at a drug auction, and give 10% of the proceeds of Joe's ex-stuff to Amtrak.
Now, later on, the DEA busts "Marc" at another Amtrak station. He has a small bag of uppers. He also has a halfway decent job paying $25K a year, a small apartment, and a used car. While Marc, just like Joe, can probably expect to do some time in a federal facility, the DEA will probably not even try to seize the apartment and car because they can't reasonably prove that Marc acquired these from profiting on illegal drugs.
Most times, in fact, the DEA will not seize assets that are not "worth their time". They, like every other federal agency, loves showing off, and usually reserves full seizure of assets for the "big boys" with multiple new cars and mansions.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
. . . the Soviets for requiring an internal passport to travel. Tried to board a plane without ID lately? And now this? Your papers!
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts. That line of thought is completely invalid when discussing the War on (Some) Drugs. The DEA and other police agencies typically sieze the cash upon any suspicion of drug activity. If the person is arrested and acquitted, or not arrested at all, the DEA/pigs get to keep the cash. There are many documented instances available online (no link--I'm lazy), even through the rightist Cato Institute.
While I agree with you, it shouldn't surprise you that an organization like Cato should be against the drug war. It's not a left/right issue anymore; the Democrats have embraced the drug war just as heartily as the Republicans have. When was the last time you heard Gore or Gephardt or Daschle calling for legalization?
There are quite a number of Republican or conservative figures calling for an end to the drug war -- William F. Buckley, Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, Rep. Tom Cambell of California (who ran against Diane Feinstein last fall), Walter Williams (who subs on Rush Limbaugh's show fairly frequently), former Sec of State George Schultz, Milton Friedman, and others. Any conservative who claims to be in favor of capitalism -- the unrestricted exchange of goods and services between consenting persons -- but is in favor of the drug war, is a hypocrite. Many are, but a sizeable number are not.
Actually, I think that the politicians to end the drug war may be more likely to be Republicans, strictly on Nixon-to-China grounds. A liberal wanting to end the drug war, risks being tarred as a "pot-smoking sixties hippie"; a conservative runs no such risk.
And as far as asset forfeiture goes, that's another case where there are Republicans on the right side of things. Asset forfeiture is, after all, a gross violation of property rights, and for that reason you do see those Republicans who have and stand by principles acting against the forfeiture laws -- such as Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary committee (not exactly small fry) pushing through the 1999 forfeiture reform bill.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the Republicans are angels on this matter. They're not. But this is not a left/right issue anymore, although this article in the New Republic makes a good case that it's becoming an east/west issue.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
>The DEA, can, as far as I know, use
> informants if they so choose. Corporations
> make wonderfull informants as they rarely
> have a sence of morality attached to them.
> Were the DEA forcing Amtrack to give these
> passanger lists over, that would be a
> Constitutional question (unreasonable
> search etc) but paying them is something
> else entirely.
Amtrak is another Government agency so there may be a constitutional issue there. I don't know if the DEA can use all government records to locate suspects, if they can then this is fine. Otherwise, I would guess the courts may have a problem with using billing information that would not seem incriminating to search a bag. Who would think that paying cash would make you subject to a government search?
Nick
Amtrak are a government agency. They were created in the '60s (or so - somewhereback there) when passenger service ceased to be profitable, unfortuneately it was needed in many areas (particularly New England) so Uncle Sam stepped in and operates Amtrak with the help of local railroads. I dubt that companies would do this - if it came out that Greyhound was spying on it's customers most of them would use cars. Amtrak has a relatively captive audience, and are ussually able to get whatever they need to make up a budget shortfall because at budget-time Congress has so many other issues that a bankrupt rail service is priority #876. The fact that the GOP controls Congress makes cooperation with the Feds a great budget move. The GOP, for all it's claims of being more "pro-freedom" then the Democrats, has traditionally been more in favor of privacy violationsas long as they nail a few criminals.
Even if we all stopped riding Amtrak today, nothing short of massive protests will make them stop. Taking a revenue hit will actually help them:
"Well Congressmen, revenue is down because we started turning all passengers with outstanding warrents over to the cops and the ACLU is raising hell..."
Nick
I'll join you in conjecture. I think the driving-related deaths are around 20,000 annually. You forgot to consider cancer of the stomach/esophagus/liver, other liver disease, brain degeneration, and of course lethal overdoses, which are impossible with pot. The only physical malady linked to pot is lung cancer, which can be avoided by eating it. By the way, there is no high finer nor safer than eating food made with God's Beautiful Flower.
On a side note, have you heard of the DSM? It stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's used by shrinks to diagnose mental disorders. I perused it once and remember about ten disorders primarily due to alcohol. There was only one primarily due to other drugs.
Yet another side note. I really wish I had a link for this one: Recently a government-funded study was performed to assess factors which impair the ability to drive. Fatigue (not a substance) was highest, then alcohol. Pot was next, but it only caused a marginal impairment, even at high doses. That is because marijuana, unlike alcohol, is not a CNS depressant. Anecdotally, pot smokers are much more cautious while driving. They are much less likely to speed, change lanes frequently, or run red lights--actions that cause a majority of accidents.
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Oops, forgot a few. Alcohol causes agression, even in small doses. When considering the social cost of alcohol, you should count all the fights (two people were beaten to death in the same weekend by drunks at UF last fall...), property damage, rapes, etc... perpetrated by people on alcohol.
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Are you kidding me? Drugs aren't made out of metal.
Besides, if they really wanted to "stop drugs", they would close down every liquor store, tobacco shop, and pharmacy. They have instead made arbitrary decisions based on junk science--this drug will be legal, and therefore "good" and "this drug will be illegal, and therefore "bad"
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts. That line of thought is completely invalid when discussing the War on (Some) Drugs. The DEA and other police agencies typically sieze the cash upon any suspicion of drug activity. If the person is arrested and acquitted, or not arrested at all, the DEA/pigs get to keep the cash. There are many documented instances available online (no link--I'm lazy), even through the rightist Cato Institute.
It is estimated that a conviction is not obtained in 80% of cases where cash/assets are siezed due to suspicion of drugs. That means that money is stolen by the government in 80% of seizure cases. I have read testimony given before our Congress by experts on the law; they don't seem to care. Since the speed-freak president Nancy Reagan declared a War on (Some) Drugs nearly twenty years ago, billions of dollars have been stolen from innocent people. This money has been used to arm every police department with machine guns, riot shotguns, body armor, armored carriers, etc...
Meanwhile, most of the "facts" used by the anti-drug people have been debunked. However, bullshit is often more persistent than reality, so the general public is still convinced that (some) drugs are totally evil.
The DEA sucks, too. One of their agents shot and killed an unarmed guy while making a buy in Jacksonville, Florida last year. The agent said it was an accident--he will never be prosecuted. It is 100% legal, if you wear a badge, to murder someone selling a plant that has been used safely by millions of people. Meanwhile, alcohol is blamed for over 100,000 deaths annually.
We now have the police state we asked for.
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
I don't see anything happening with trains to be particularly different, especially if they cross a border. Certainly, public transport has never had problems with watch-lists in the past, this is just an upgrade to use electronic technology.
Not nice, but not particularly surprising.
See my journal, I write things there
Wrong. They're stubborn people who bitch and whine until someone else gets things done for them.
"The good thing about Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs."
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
Ah. But what if you have done something wrong?
I, for one, would *instantly* be sent to jail for the crimes I committed this weekend, if the cost of enforcing the law on me were low enough. Luckily, the cost of enforcing the law to such a degree that I could be caught smokin some weed is high enough that I was able to commit my criminal offense, and get away with it.
The cheaper and easier it gets to enforce the law, the more likely it is that I'll get arrested - and that sucks!
Shit. My illegal encryption software could bite me a year or two. Hell - I've even sent it to friends! And let me tell you... my mp3 collection... that's worth a beheading.
Maybe I should be concerned about the 18km/h over I was doing on the freeway today. Good thing there's no chip in my car!
Oh.. and then there's that girl.. she must have been 16 or 17.. that I was grindin up on in that club on Friday. I'm sure there's some religious fuckwit loser conservative mid-40's type that would like to see me electrocuted for that.
I hope you get my point.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The Post Office may have such limitations, but I'll bet the DEA doesn't. See This AIR article (look for "wrapped brick").
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
...that I'm caucation!
Maskirovka
Because hospitals have regulations called Patient Confidentiality. These are enforced BY the hospitals to protect their clients. Amtrack does not have such agreements. Furthermore, if the hospital is subpeonaed (sp?) by the court for the information it can be forced to provide it, just a shrink can be forced to provide data on a subject in a court of law.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
I always thought agencies like the ATF (known for "draconian" tactics), the FBI (known as THEM), the NSA (always a sketchy group, see Enemy of the State etc), and (of course) the IRS were the ones that people disliked.
Perhaps I'm drawing the trend to far, but I'm assuming that Joe and Jane Sixpack of Nowheresville USA want little Joey and Suzie protected from all the evil Drug Dealers out there and that they therefor support the DEA who, unlike the afforementioned agencies, generaly dosn't get much media coverage. Since the DEA at least tells everyone they are out there keeping the streets free of drugs and thus safe for America's Young People I figgured they had a pretty good wrap. Am I wrong on this? I've never really seen any high level media damnation of the DEA [e.g. Waco].
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
If Amtrak is basically a government agency, as many of the posts here seem to indicate, then this behaviour seems unconstitutional to me.
It's only unconstitutional if Amtrack forces you to give them that data with the understanding that if you attempt to resist they will take it anyway. That's what a search is.
No one makes you buy an Amtrack ticket, and if you don't buy a ticket you don't have to deal with Amtrack selling your data to the DEA. Since that data was given willingly it's use by the DEA does not constitute aquisition through an illegal search, it was given freely.
Since Amtrack is not a law enforcement agency (even though it may or may not be an arm of the federal government) what you tell it is not protected by Miranda. Consequently, what you say can be used against you in a court of law.
It's always been this way. Computers just make it faster and it now involves lots less paper to keep track of.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
I don't want to be repetitive, but the other reply is a bit vauge.
The Miranda decision forbids the prosecution from using anything you say prior to being informed of your Miranda rights (i.e. Keep silent, have a laywer etc) against you. In short, untill you've been told you don't HAVE to say anything, you can be considered to be confessing under duress, and thus whatever you say is null and void.
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Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Even the hard core right wingers I so often disagree with will espouse the law (note that word, law) of supply and demand.
If people are willing to watch it, it may not reflect the truth, but it does reflect what they want. They wouldn't watch it otherwise would they? So dosn't it follow logicly that the media does give us a pretty good idea of what the people as a whole want to see?
I'm not saying one particular station/paper/mag. I'm talking about the media as a collective entity.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Warning: IANAL, all thoughts, opinions, and ideas expressed in this post are those of the poster alone. Don't argue this in front of the Supreme Court, or indeed even your mother.
The DEA, can, as far as I know, use informants if they so choose. Corporations make wonderfull informants as they rarely have a sence of morality attached to them. Were the DEA forcing Amtrack to give these passanger lists over, that would be a Constitutional question (unreasonable search etc) but paying them is something else entirely.
I'm not debating the moral question, I think it sucks. But there's not diddly squat that I can think of that prevents Amtrack from selling that data to anyone else, be they a marketing agency or the US Governemnt.
More to the point, who's really going to come down on the DEA for buying passenger lists from Amtrack? It's hard to find a Fed Law Enforcement group more well received by the American People then the DEA.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
It should go without saying, but it is wise to be polite and cooperative (to an extent) with police. There is no benefit in being disrespectful or profane, and certainly physical evasion or resistance is asking for trouble. But people going about their legal business in particular have an obligation to politely but firmly refuse police searches, even though it may mean a little more time and hassle. MOre than anything else our rights have been eroded by the fact that too few LAW-ABIDING citizens have any real respect for them. Our pioneer ancestors, as the late William S. Burroughs Sr. put it, would be "pissing in their graves" if they could see us now.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Do you honestly believe you could determine "passengers' names and itineraries and... see whether they paid in cash or credit" merely by standing around watching people check in? There's no probable cause or reasonable suspicion here - this is just one agency giving another agency private information on the movements of private citizens, for pay. By virtue of riding the train you get your personal information shaken down. (Here's a concept, people - read the article then post your "opinions" on it). The DEA is using this illegally obtained information to create probable cause - not the other way around.
I agree that there is a lot of illegal racial profiling in current law enforcement practices. That doesn't mean that something which violates everyone's rights is an improvement. Our rights have been steadily eroded by the war on drugs - a war, I might point out, that has only made the drug situation worse (there is a higher per-capita incidence of drug addiction now than when cocaine, marijuana extracts and opium were commonly available as legal patent medicines). Stop making excuses for the government. If you don't like racial profiling then you don't like the war on drugs, which is America's single most concentrated assault on African Americans since slavery. Figure out what you're fighting and get on the right side.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
so what kinds of drugs do the metal detectors find? multi vitamins with iron?
A lot of people are hung up on the idea that getting rid of all regulation ensures true personal liberty. That's just not true. When there's only one person in the whole world, that person has true personal liberty. As soon as you introduce another, that person's liberty is curtailed. The nature of society is such that we must give up certain liberties in order to survive together. Radical ideas like Anarco-Syndicalism attempt to push the limits as far as they will go, but they don't abolish the restrictions on your person, they just exchange them for new ones.
When I hear someone tell me that taking gov't out of the picture is going to increase personal liberty, I get worried for that person's sanity. Individuals, corporations and juntas are as capable of limiting others' personal liberty as is any state or federal government. If there are three airlines and one train company, can you really say that you have the freedom to travel anywhere you want without being monitored? Or to make things even more extreme, if every transaction you make is monitored or limited by some entities, do you really have personal freedom? What, you're not going to travel? Not going to eat?
The reason we live with governments is that they seem to be the only way to fairly balance the impositions we put on each other. That they fail much of the time seems to be a given. That they often become corrupt is another problem we just have to cope with. But don't fool yourself into thinking that taking societal regulation out of the picture is going to create any sort of personal freedom; it'll just create new oppressors.
I like decisions too. Unfortunately, we don't always get the opportunity to make them. Every time you get on a plane, the airline company gains personal information about you. Even if they don't sell this, it's not impossible for somebody to get hold of it. You can pay cash, but by law you cannot hide your identity. If your privacy is important, the only adult choice is not to fly. Ok, well that really sucks and it's not the way I'd choose to have things in our country, but hey, there are alternatives like Amtrak. At present, Amtrak allows you to pay cash and travel semi-anonymously (although the fact that you paid cash raises a big red flag, which can result in your being searched and having your property confiscated, according to the articles posted in this thread.) However, there's no reason Amtrak, Greyhound and the other half-dozen national transportation agencies couldn't begin requiring ID just like the airlines. Even toll booths are becoming automated.
So you value your privacy and you don't fly. You don't take the train, or the bus. This is your adult "decision", to stay home. Now this really sucks, as we live in a big country and there are lots of reasons we need to travel. But you have a place to live and food to eat, so really all you're suffering is a decreased quality of life. Eventually it's possible that other important services could refuse to accept cash (mail order and e-commerce sites are a glimpse of this.) Want your privacy, but you also want to buy groceries? Do you really have a decision here? Of course not, your privacy eventually has to slip away; most people will give up long before this point, of course.
If you're wondering why privacy is so important, wait a decade or two. Even today there's always the devastating possibility of identity theft-- it's relatively easy for people to get hold of enough personal information to get you in a lot of trouble. If somebody could gain access to your up-to-date travel movements, burglary could become a science. And all that aside, I believe our government simply shouldn't be watching our every movement.
Boycott assumes that passenger lists from the alternatives (air travel, really) are not accessable to the DEA. Why would you assume this? Did you check?
Sure, but please reference this site for general guidelines and posting etiquette. We want to keep it on topic you know. Thanks.
It would be better if you didn't use profanity. Check here if you need some help on how to refrain from using it, or just if you want to be a more sophisticated contributor to Slashdot.
A lot of people's rants so far have hinged on the fact that Amtrak is a federally funded operation.
In fact, after decades of reliance, a fed up Congress mandated a few years ago that Amtrak become completely self-reliant by 2003. There's no need to write your congressperson to cut Amtrak funding; it's about to happen anyway.
Acela, and possibly this DEA arrangement, are ways in which they are striving to meet that deadline with some success.
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At first they came for... doesn't ring a bell?
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
In Georgia about 10 ago, police boarded the Greyhound I was riding and asked everyone if they could search their bags. I was the only one who said no. They brought a dog on to sniff my bag.I don't know if they're still doing random searches because that's the last greyhound I'll ever ride.
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be plausible.
Who would even ride an Amtrack except for suicidal criminals....*CRASH* :p
It's not unconstitutional to do this, but it is a violation of the spirit of the constitution. What's going to happen of course is that some criminal will sue Amtrak for violating his privacy.
That'll happen before anybody actually protests. Why are people so complacent?
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
Exactly. You're innocent until proven guilty. The constitution made it so that search and seizure required a very good reason. These days they just need any reason.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by the Federalist's. Hamilton and others supported the kind of strong government that Franklin feared. Luckily, Franklin managed to stop Jackson from establishing an American aristocracy. Unfortunately, after the Civil War, the government started a campaign of continuously increasing it's powers and ignoring Constitutional rights in favor of public safety. BTW, I seem to remember that the A&S Acts were recalled very quickly. It's doubtful that they would have stood up to the Supreme Court since they went directly against the 1st amendment.
Yes, I know you can cut history a thousand different ways. This is just my slant. It may be different tomorrow. I learn every day.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
Yeah, but what are you doing about it? If you love this country, you and other geeks like you have to start speaking up about things that our government does that decrease our liberty. If you don't, it will only get worse.
Big deal. Amtrak *IS* the government. It's a government run monopoly of passenger train service after the federal government destroyed private passenger trains. So they are in a deal with the DEA? It's the same as if the DEA was in a deal with the CIA. Gubment is gubment is gubment. Oh, and that boycott idea: as I said, Amtrack is a M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y. There is no other train option. Your next option is to drive. That some think the solution to this problem is to put more cars on the road...well, that's comedy, folks!
According to the article, the DEA gives Amtrack a 10% cut of it's seizures...
What?
How does this work again? Does the DEA estimate the 'street value', and give 10% of that to Amtrak? Do they give them 10% of the drugs and join the amtrak employees in the back room for a party after work? (Wasn't there a train wreck outside Baltimore a few years ago because of a train conductor on drugs?)
This is bizarre to me... it creates an economic interest within Amtrak to lure people carrying large amounts of illegal substances onto the train. If I were a passenger, I think the economic interest should go the other way.
Actually, both the Steam Locomotive and the railroad track were developed in Great Britain.
TODO: Something witty here...
At least I have the courage and integrity not to hide behind a shield of anonimity.
TODO: Something witty here...
Just go fuck a goat
TODO: Something witty here...
This brings up some very intresting issues. The soulution is obious: BOYCOTT!
TODO: Something witty here...
If Amtrak is basically a government agency, as many of the posts here seem to indicate, then this behaviour seems unconstitutional to me.
Now just because the Feds thought it up does not mean it is constitutional. Even if it is unconstitutional, they can go years milking this set-up before it gets overturned.
It seems to me that it is reasonable for someone to be informed by a government agency what information they provide will be used for purposes other than those obviously involved with the activity involved. There is a federal rule requiring the reasoning for all paperwork to be disclosed. Amtrak doesn't seem to be following this rule.
I say that every Amtrak passenger should be read their Miranda rights before they attempt to buy a ticket.
Then watch the fun happen!
Excelsior,
ME
evanchik.net
I got hit by this one on my way from Texas to Chicago on Amtrak.
I was hanging out in the smoking lounge, when the train came to a stop near Longview (which, incidentally, is where they brew Lone Star). When I went back to my seat, I found a DEA agent waiting for me.
He asked to check my baggage, and explained that I fit their profile of a drug dealer, since I had paid cash for my ticket, and boarded at the very last minute.
I didn't have any drugs, and he didn't seem to care about the case of Shiner Bock I was taking to my ex-patriot friends in Chicago, so the friendly narc thanked me and went about his business.
I was a little annoyed, but at least they waited for me to get back before they rifled through my belongings.
I guess the moral of this story is: if you're going to move drugs on the Amtrak line, pay with a card, and buy your ticket in advance.
Let's compare the average train wreck to the average plane crash, shall we?
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts.
About 10 years ago there were many stories in the news about government agencies, from the county level on up, who were trying to emulate the DEA's property seizure powers. In one such case a paramilitary group from the Department of the Interior, in conjunction with the DEA, raided a Southern California ranch and killed the ranch owner when he appeared on the porch with a gun.
It turned out that the rationale for the raid was that the rancher's wife had a "history of drug problems" and there were likely to be illegal drugs on the property. A judge leading the ensuing investigation of this incident concluded that the raid was instigated to a great degree by a desire to confiscate the ranch and add it to the Department of Interior's holdings. This is not the only example of a lame government operation, it is simply a particularly egregious one.
No matter how someone feels about the "war on drugs," and no matter how beneficent our officials, we all have to be concerned about dove-tailing the agendas of various government agencies and where this may lead.
I have always been a big fan of public transportation to begin with. Amtrak serves a great purpose and is, for the most part, a safe way to travel quickly to almost any place you might have to go (often within walking distance to the nearest station!).
As for participating in the drug war in America, I am totally willing to live in a "police state" if it keeps even one child from "getting high" or using heroin.
"If the Lord had meant for us to fly, He'd have given us wings with which to soar...." William, 14:35
Karma?
Unmuzzled power corrupts, unmuzzledly.
When the US Government kidnapped and imprisoned Japanese immigrants they had a very good purpose. They were protecting National Security.
Nonetheless, the outcome was outrageous injustice.
Everyone Japanese was assumed to be an agent of the Enemy and they paid with their freedom and property.
The war on drugs is, IMHO, also a cery good purpose.
And now every person paying for train tickets with cash is assumed to be a drug smuggler.
And they too will pay with a loss of freedom and privacy.
Check out http://www.loc.gov/global/executive/fed.html for a list of executive branch agencies and their web sites. You'll see Amtrak (National Railroad Passenger Corporation) nestled in between the National Mediation Board and the National Science Foundation. Basically, as prez, I own Amtrak and I can do whatever I want with it. If I want to give the DEA information about passengers, I can, 'cause it's all mine. If you don't want your information being shared with the DEA, then you shouldn't be so po' that you need to ride the train.
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
It's because we don't put up with this kind of shit.
You seem to think it's ok to put up with this kind of invasion to keep a harmless weed in check just because it's better than what they do in singapore. That's baloney.
If you want to be a US citizen, then you must stand up for your freedom.
18 USC section 2702(a)(1) states that "a person or entity providing an electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity the contents of a communication while in electronic storage by that service." The practical effect of this is that you have a private right to sue should your ISP decide to refer everyone using suspicious language in internet communication to the DEA. Additionally, you have protection from unreasonable search and seizure in cyberspace via 18 USC section 2703, which spells out the requirements for governmental access via warrants, etc.
This fact appears to be new to the discussion of this story: you DO NOT have to show ID for travel within the United States. The airlines started this practice, so that you couldn't use others' frequent flyer miles. NO LAW EXISTS to require that you show identification. Ask the next ticketing agent to show you the statutory authority. The trade off? Your bags will be hand searched and tagged with an orange label. You will be listed in the airlines computer as a "designee" on the particular flight. I assume practices are much the same for Amtrak or the bus lines.