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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?)
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Lord knows that I take my life into my own hands whenever I travel. Lets go down the list: Long hair: I've had it since grade 10. I don't like the way my face looks without it; I think the hair frames it nicely. Nervous: I get travel sick. I don't like being places that I'm not familiar with. I have gastro-esophagal reflux disease, and I'm always worried I'm going to yurl in public. Airplanes are actually nice for that bit; they expect it. Luggage: Unless I'm going for two weeks or more, I only use carry-on luggage. A backpack and laptop bag will take you further than you think. Attire: Again, travel sickness and a desire to be comfortable means I usually wear trackpants, a loose t-shirt, loose front-buttoner, and a big black leather 'biker' style jacket. Lots of pockets, and decent protection against those damn terrorists. Once, I got accused of smoking when I was in the plane's bathroom hurling. That amused me, because I'm so dreadfully allergic to cigarette smoke.... "Sir, we can't prove anything, but we know."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
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. --
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:
Boycotting companies is one solution, but how does one boycott the government.
MOVE
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.
--
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.
they catch you in your DeCSS shirt? Does Amtrack get to keep the sleeve?
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
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."
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!
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.
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 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.