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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?)
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.
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:
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.
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."
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!
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.