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Increased Power Usage Leads to Mistaken Pot Busts for Bitcoin Miners
c0lo writes "The Canadian town of Mission, BC has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search people's homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day. There have allegedly been reports floating in IRC of two different cases of police showing up at a Bitcoin miner's residence with a search warrant. Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation. DEA Agent Anthony Marotta said high electricity usage does not always mean the residence is an indoor pot farm and has surprised federal agents. 'We thought it was a major grow operation ... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home.'"
Dude's probably buying drugs with his bitcoins.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Better use of the electicity
"I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home. Seizing them has really put our department's IT unit on the fast track though. God Bless lax asset forfeiture laws."
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Seriously, this is getting annoying. Editors, you guys need to knock it off. The bitcoin fanatics are using you as an advertising push. It is getting annoying. Leave off it already.
They spent more on those machines, and on the electricity to run them, than they ever will 'mining' bitcoins.
Didn't even bother to read past the first sentence?
"Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation."
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
So if you want to grow pot mine a bunch of bitcoins and get the police to inspect your house. Once that's done setup your grow operation, because the suspicion has been relieved?
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Second word of the summary is Canadian...
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
If you had read all the way to the third sentence, you would have seen:
Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation.
Ohio is part of the US, and the DEA is a US Federal agency.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In the United States, you just have to say you thought you smelled some dope for cars. Standards are a teensy bit higher for houses due to some quirks of our legal structure, but not that much higher. If you want to go for the extra bonus points, bring a drug dog and surreptitiously order it to bark.
Oops. That was meant for the guy responding to you.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Canada does not have a bill of rights. They have a Queen.
"Rumors floating around IRC" strikes me as somewhere between Fox News and Homeless Guy on Street Corner in terms of credibility. This is exactly the sort of story that someone would make up as a joke, and people would repeat as though it's real.
So I watched the little video in the article but I don't understand why or how anyone would accept bitcoins as currency. Can anyone explain to me how running an application on your computer to 'make' currency produces anything of value?
The average US home uses about 30kWh per day. Checking on people using triple that amount seems reasonable. I wouldn't justify a search warrant, or even a subpoena, but sending an officer to politely ask a few questions would be reasonable.
Canada has a bill of rights too, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, both of which are focused on protecting personal property from unreasonable search and seizure.
But it looks like using "too much" power automatically means somebody is treated like a criminal and subject to being searched to prove otherwise.
Seems to me as these "probable cause based on power usage" continue and more and more intrusions of this nature should lead to law suits against the police and hopefully disallowing power use as a criteria for determining probable cause. That's a bullshit way of doing law enforcement. I run a server at my home. I'll be damned if I am going to sit idle if I were to have a search warrant against me based on stupid crap like that.
Go crawl back under your rock
Great, just great. I can see the calls for banning solar energy technology since it allows drug lords to escape detection via electric meters.
Just imagine the rhetoric: "Only pot-farmers use solar energy." "Support HB123 to place export controls on drug energy technology to Mexico!" "Off grid, on drugs!" "Tell the police if your neighbor has gone wireless!"
Just watch the meter. Now you know not to use more that 92kWh/day you can safely grow pot.
BTW, that's about 250 CFL's (15W), so keep the number down under about 200, you should be OK.
Proletarians of the world, unite! Electric car owners, bitcoin miners - join us in the struggle! Anarchy for the win! Nobody is free until everybody is free!
If Canada doesn't have a charter of rights, then what's this?
Three Bitcoin articles on the front page in as many weeks? Sure, this one is a bit sideways, but seriously, the number of people involved with Bitcoin is insignificantly small and should remain that way. Stop hyping this project which is either an ill-fated experiment or a scam.
The whole article is an Ad. It didn't have to go into detail about Bitcoin and make it sound exciting. Just say lots of computers in home doing stupid stuff raise pot op suspicion
But seriously, this is the kind of thing that has really killed the world. Here we have a weed that is one of the most perfect and useful plants in existence. Because of fundamentalist faith based lawmaking and general greed it is banned for most purposes. Of course some would say that it damages kids, but how about the legal drugs? The Pfizer commercials tells kids they can only be happy with drugs. Someone like Rush Limbaugh can afford to be a prescription drug addict, and maybe old people in the US with medicare part D, but the average person has to go with the unregulated stuff. It would be nice if kids were not told that drug use is good, and I certainly believe that drug use in general is a losing game, but there we have it. Corporate drugs good, plants are bad.
On top of the insanity of jailing people for growing plants or using plants simply because that plant has not been awarded the special corporate status of tabacco, is just the beginning. So we now have these indoor operation using huge amounts of dirty power that contributes god knows how much to global warming, killing the future even for the kids that aren't addicted to Zoloft. All this waste because growers are forced indoors. Of course in canada part of the problem is the short growing season, but really, it is arguable that the time of the police would be better spent arresting doctors for frivolously doping kids so that they don't annoy their parents.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'm going to repeat the comment I made on the Time story covering this 2 hours ago:
I hate to tell you, but it never happened. This is an AMD TV commercial (available on Youtube) saying, basically, run Nvidia and get raided for running a pot growing operation due to excessive power usage.
Oh, and a side note, in the US, the power companies DO regularly report users with sudden spikes of excessive power usage that are indicative of grow ops. This data is volunteered by the power companies, and the police do not need a warrant to collect it.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
I can't remember exactly where, but someone suggested that this might be a possibility on one of the Bitcoin forums. A day later, someone said in an IRC channel that they had been raided. I'm pretty sure they made it up based on the previous day's speculation. And now a website has picked up the IRC claim, and now Slashdot picks up that website's claim. As far as I can tell there's no backing that this supposed drug bust ever happened, but it's pyramiding into bigger and bigger news based on nothing.
Article
It's an attempted end-run around obtaining a search warrant, which would require more than just higher than average power consumption. The way it works is the municipality sends a bylaw inspector to a home for a "safety inspection" after someone notices that the power consumption at the residence is higher than it should be.
The inspector can't force his way in, but a bit of bullying and a stern "What have you got to hide?" or "I'll come back with a warrant and make your week difficult" is often all that's necessary, especially if the homeowner in question isn't actually doing anything wrong, and isn't used to dealing with stuff like this. The inspector brings along a police escort for "safety and security." Convenient.
The inspector looks around, and if he finds a grow op, well, hey, lookee here, the police just happened to be down the hall! Now they don't need a search warrant because it wasn't "a police search."
If the inspector finds nothing illegal, he (often but not always) presents the homeowner in question with a bill for the inspection, which can range from $5k to $10k.
Good news though: A few days ago, the BC Supreme Court has issued a giant "fark you" to the practice:
Article
It's enough in the US to get a subpoena for the records, and that is enough to start an investigation. And, the average bitcoin miner will live a life similar to a grower (lots of usage with no light output) which, added together, is more PC than on most search warrants.
Learn to love Alaska
You should only have enough electricity for your Television to watch IDOL, FOX and CNN and that is all!!
Anything more and you are a terrorist!!!!
We will send the TSA immediately into your home to grab your balls, your breasts or open your kids diapers!!!!
That will show everyone that we just need to keep people safe to stop these terrorists!!!
Mr. Goldstein is _everywhere_ but with your sacrifices we _WILL_ _GET_ _HIM_!!!
Report anything you see to your local threat fusion center immediately!!!
Keep an eye on your neighbors so we can keep you safe!
-DHS
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Now people will be growing pot inside computer cases. lol
Does the return on bitcoin mining equal or better the return on stock in the local utility? In the US, many utility stocks yield 5%. There's always some risk of the stock going down, but computer equipment is guaranteed to depreciate.
As with any money-making scheme, "show me the numbers".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Umm - actually England (which is ruled by the Queen) has a bill of rights too, which was written a full 100 years before the US got it's Bill of Rights.
Are you related?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Read the story, most of it is about Bitcoins and how amazing and dangerous they are and all that shit we've seen so much of lately. To me, it seems like the Bitcoin heads trying to generate more interest/advertising, and evidently succeeding since /. picked it up.
Would not surprise me at all to learn it is 100% bullshit.
I think it's high time we think about extending the 2nd amendment (Right to bear arms), to include technology.
I know they're not busting in to raid a Bitcoin factory, but that doesn't mean they wont in the future.
I'm a coder, and occasionally I write ciphers. Lately I wrote a block cipher system that takes any hash algo, data stream, and a pass-phrase, and produces encrypted output via a type of Cipher Block Chaining on hash-length sized blocks (MD5=160bit, SHA1=256bit, SHA512=512bit encryption, and beyond; Bonus, any new hash comes out, implement it and bingo, stronger encryption).
I came very close to being in violation of federal law when I posted my program on my blog. Fortunately a friend told me that my program was considered extremely dangerous to the government, and that if anyone outside of the US downloaded it, I could be heavily fined and/or jailed. I immediately removed the code, and checked the server logs; Fortunately only my friend had downloaded it.
I didn't know that all strong encryption ciphers have to be registered with the US government (like firearms!? -- Strength at or above 64bit symmetric or 768 asymmetric, or 128 for elliptic curve), and that export of software that can perform encryption must be approved by the government before you put it online, or else it could be considered trafficking illegal controlled software.
I was told by some that if your code was open source, you could just fill out a form, and you were pre-approved, but I don't think that's the case anymore.
I've been tinkering with ciphers since I was 10 -- I don't think anyone outside the US got a hold of my tinker-code, but who knows? We swapped code at HAL-PC SIG's all the time...
With today's government's lack of respect for our freedoms and esp. digital privacy, I think it's time we added the right to bear technology & math, esp. cryptography to the Bill of Rights.
Hey, If I can be prosecuted for distributing my ciphers under the "munitions export restrictions" laws, then does that mean I already can assert my 2nd amendment privileges to USE MY PC TO TWIDDLE BITS? Does freedom of speech (1st amendment) not give me the right to post some byte-code hex to my blog? (Looks like it's illegal to sell your Beowulf Cluster on Ebay too.)
The first four paragraphs are nothing but gushing about bitcoins, no mention of the bust at all. The 5ths finally makes a mention of the power thing and then there's a bit of talk about the alleged bust from the wonderfully reliable source of "IRC". Then more shit about how bitcoin is a cool "P2P" currency then a video about bitcoins.
The fucking thing is a bitcoin promotion and just more of the "Oh look at how awesome and scary it is!" crap. I have serious doubts the event in question ever happened. This is astroturfing.
Any journalist will tell you that you lead with the most important stuff. Each subsequent paragraph is less likely to be read. So if this was about rights and a real event the first paragraph would go more along the lines of:
"What was supposed to be a bust for a pot growing operation went wrong for police when the discovered a house with nothing but a large number of computers working overtime. Police obtained a warrant for the house of $some_guy due to energy company records showing an unusually high amount of usage, often a sign of a marijuana growing location. However no drugs were found, instead just mean computers which were engaged in a process called 'bitcoin mining."
Then maybe a paragraph about bitcoins, then one about drug ops and power usage and so on. That it starts with bitcoins and goes for 5 paragraphs tells you that the article is all about that, not the supposed rights issue.
The average price of electricity in the US for residential customers is 11 cents/kWHr".
So 93 kWHr/day works out to an average electric bill of $312 -- which is likely on the high side for a house in the south using A/C (or perhaps a house in the north with electric heat) but far from excessively high.
I imagine that this bylaw gives them the right to inspect a significant percentage their customer's houses at least once a year ... at least the larger houses, anyways.
Maybe even worse. You think it costs one penny to make a penny? And making one penny costs more than just the material used, there is also the overhead of the labor, equipment, R&D, administration, maintenance. distribution, recovery, etc. Hadn't thought about all that, right? Of course you didn't. The costs involved in making and enforcing the legality and convenience of a U.S. penny make Bitcoin look quite cheap.
Canada has a Queen of Rights?
That's why when you get pulled over by a cop the first thing is not to reach for you license and registration but to shut off your engine, roll up your windows and prepare to get out of your car with your license and registration. once out you lock your car. The police can't break and enter your car but if you have the windows open they are are allowed to make shit up to stick their head in the car or search. leagaly speaking if your stopped by the cops and have your window open you have forfeited your right to demand a search warrant can be more easily seen or searched. same with being asked to open the trunk of your car, you need to ask them if they have a warrant first.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqMjMPlXzdA&feature=related
i think that marijuana should be legal, but if marijuana is interfering with his ability to work, then that's an argument people will make against marijuana legalization. either a drug is harmless, or it isn't. not being able to hold a job while using a drug means its harmful, it means society has to pay for the guy's food and housing. society doesn't want to pay for some asshole to get high all day, why are we underwriting that lifestyle? he needs to get a job. and i'm not saying potheads can't work, you are: " lack of valuable employment."
employed, productive potheads: an argument for legalization. potheads sitting around all day unemployed supported by society: an argument for continued criminalization
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
EconTalk (a great podcast) has an interview by a real economist and a BitCoin founder: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.html. Interesting listen.
If a cop pulls you over and you get out of the car without being asked, prepare for a world of hurt.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
They are growing the pot plants -inside- the tower machines! What, you think all that bling lighting is for show?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Just an FYI: the average house in the US uses about 930 kwh of energy per month. So, 93 kwh works out to about 3x the national average. Energy use in the US is highest in the US' South (because AC uses a lot of electricity), and we're talking about Canada here, so 93 kwh/day is probably more than 3x than average consumption for Canada.
Anyone owed a debt in the US (for instance), must accept US dollars as payment. That's what the notice "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" means on dollars. The same is not true for bitcoins--I can freely refuse payment in bitcoins, and the government can do nothing about it. That's a large component of the reason why people like dollars.
Which can lead to some pretty scary situations for tourists (or immigrants) from countries where you're _expected_ to get out of the car after being pulled over.
Looks like it isnt just the USSA thats becoming a police state, but Canada as well.... With Australia getting the same way, we're gonna run out of places to emigrate to....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I saw some of the comments saying that the article reads like an advertisement for bitcoin, so I took a look. Holy crap! They even embedded a promotional video for bitcoin in the article. The bitcoin guys are really, really trying to make millions off this, and they're obviously pushing these pseudo-news-articles to drum up fame and fortune. And, just to be clear, the claim that the police raided a home was based on a rumor seen on an IRC chat ("Blogger Mike Esspe captured an IRC chat that supports the rumor floating around that at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested."). Uh huh. That's news now. And despite the claim that "at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested", the IRC chat actually says the police showed up, looked around, and left. Apparently, "has been arrested" has a totally new meaning in the pseudo-news-article world of bitcoin.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mod parent FUNNY!
For people using other mod points, you see, plants grow in light. Light comes from the sun and such energy is called. .... SOLAR energy!
If the parent was serious, he would mention any other, cheaper alternative, like wind.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
LED grow lights used much less power
Slashdot, seriously stop it. You just look like tools repeating garbage like this.
Go back to pretending Second Life is popular or something.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Canada has the equivalent of the 4th amendment which, at least in some ways is stronger then the American one or at least in the way our Supreme court has interpreted it is.
In this case they are not showing up with a search warrant. There is a municipal by-law that allows them to do a home inspection if you have high power consumption and if they find anything, like one neighbor who had a loose stair railing, they charge you about $5000 ispection fee. The RCMP do show up as well but stay off the property.
The by-law is currently not being enforced as so much shit has been raised about this and the town is being sued.
And yes, I live in Mission BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Ok, I must be missing something... but is the summary implying that Ohio Police and the DEA are acting on Canadian bylaws?
Not searched, a home inspection for you know, bad wiring, loose banisters (neighbor got caught with that as they used too much power running a heat lamp 24 hrs for their chickens) and signs of a grow op without a license. Just to make it interesting, the federal government does not share with the municipality who can legally grow medical marijuana. .
They do give you notice and if you refuse the inspection then they get the warrant. I live in Mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
please don't post on slashdot while stoned, thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What this tells me is that high electricity usage is no longer probable cause.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If it looks like you are running a business out of your house the police notify the municipal tax collector to make sure you have the proper business permits and paying taxes from the revenue. Even if your legal in all ways, this assault on civil rights needs to be stopped.
Why would an innocent person deny cooperating with the police? Because anything they collect can be used later; even if not covered by the warrant.
Angered Republican
They started caring when every inspection began to net them 5000 dollars. If I could get $5000 for knocking on doors and harrassing people, no one from here to Pacoima would be safe...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
How does the electricity to bitcoin ration pay off? Anyone knows?
Depends. If your mom is paying for the electricity, while you're collecting the bitcoin, then the ratio for you is pretty good. For your mom, it's not so good, but she's presumably inured to suffering with a geek/nerd/dweeb cluttering up the basement.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The recognised unit for time in hours is h. You don't have to make yourself look like an idiot with bullshit like Hr. Idiot.
Homer Simpson: Okay, boy. This is where all the hard work, sacrifice, and painful scaldings pay off.
Employee: Four pounds of grease... that comes to... sixty-three cents.
Homer Simpson: Woo-hoo!
Bart Simpson: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars.
Homer Simpson: Yeah, but your mom paid for that!
Bart Simpson: But doesn't she get her money from you?
Homer Simpson: And I get my money from grease! What's the problem?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Do you realize that the "real" currencies in your pocket and in your bank are all equally a "scam"? They are all abstract fictions that we use as tokens to avoid the unwieldiness of direct barter.
Ostensibly bitcoin is less of a scam than the currency that you seem to think is "real". Bitcoin is tied to a scarce computational resource which prevents its supply being manipulated, unlike the money that governments can print arbitrarily. Ever since "real" currency left the gold standard, its actual value has been evaporating steadily, and Fractional Reserve Banking has turned over 90% of its original value into pure debt. If you're looking for unsound currency practices, look there.
There is nothing "real" about the dollar as a currency except the fact that people are willing to give you goods in exchange for them. And that reality happens to be exactly the same with bitcoin.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The sooner this notion of "using too much power, must be doing something wrong, send in cop thugs" is eradicated, the better.
FC Closer
Thanks Anonymous dad!
Side note: from wikipedia --
If you're going to go out of your way to call somebody an idiot for being wrong, the least you could do is make sure they're actually wrong, and ideally make sure they're wrong about something that actually matters (if your beef is Hr vs hr).
Do you correct people for going "6 sec" rather than "6 s" too? I'll bet you're great fun at parties!
Yes, but if you're singling out the outliers for police involvement, you should probably look for people several standard deviations away from the average. I don't know what the standard deviation would be in this case, but I'll bet a significant percentage of the households in Canada use over 930 kWhr per month. Especially the wealthy with larger houses.
> Fair enough, but what is it backed by?
Mathematics.
Because that's a lot of ongoing expense to get a bunch of bitcoins.
spare some change, anyone?
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