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Google Joining Fight Against Drug Cartels
Several readers sent word that Google has announced its intention to start fighting drug cartels and other 'illicit networks.' According to a post on the official blog, the company thinks modern technology plays a key role in helping to 'expose and dismantle global criminal networks, which depend on secrecy and discretion in order to function.' They're holding a summit in Los Angeles this week, which aims to 'bring together a full-range of stakeholders, from survivors of organ trafficking, sex trafficking and forced labor to government officials, dozens of engineers, tech leaders and product managers from Google and beyond. Through the summit, which lasts until Wednesday, we hope to discover ways that technology can be used to expose and disrupt these networks as a whole—and to put some of these ideas into practice.'
War on dissent and alternative information sources.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If we start filtering, we should start with alcohol. The most damaging drug.
One innocent person spied on, arrested or charged with the help of Google to advance this "don't be evil" agenda is one too many.
You can't be evil to fight evil. You're passing ones and zeroes back and forth for crying out loud...
Google execs better change their plans if they were going to vacation in Mexico any time soon.
So now they are siding with the "war on drugs" in order to push their means and methods which are considered by many as questionable of not simply creepy and discomforting? What's next? "Think of the children" and "fighting terror"?
Google. You're a commercial interest whose product lies in the information you collect so you can sell more advertising and marketing services. I will not forget that. You have not forgotten that. Why do you want everyone else to forget that?
... the same technology is aimed not at sex, drug, organ, or baby traffickers, but rather ordinary citizens trying to organize against an oppressive government.
Google supposedly abandoned China over censorship. This is far and away more dangerous than mere filtering of words.
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BMO
Gootcha.
Wall Street doesn't count as a "criminal network", does it?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Google = Carnivore
Let's not lump drug trafficking in with sex and organ trafficking. The latter are heinous atrocities, the former is a contrived product of repressive government policy.
Drug trafficking would never have become a problem if governments hadn't created the giant void in the market that allowed them to exist in the first place. People want to get high, they will do so whether the nanny statists like it or not.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The War on Drugs is actually a war against human nature. It is immoral, expensive, fosters corruption and is doomed to failure.
work in progress
They can start by eliminating all advertising by big banks, arms dealers, genetic engineering companies, and propaganda put out by the major news networks
When people read "drug cartel" they think of "illicit drugs", such as cocaine, meth, ice, and so on
But who _are_ the real drug cartel ?
Ever been to hospital lately ?
Ever wonder why the hell everything there is so expensive ?
Doctors of course wants to get their fair share and over-charge the patients, but, if we dig deep enough, we see a culture of vulture in the medical industry - and the "LEGAL DRUG" industry is a very essential part of the Culture of Vulture
They always paint the picture of "It takes so and so billions to carry out the research" so "we need to charge so much and so much for the drugs to recover our cost"
Really?
The legal drug industry is a MULTI-TRILLION DOLLAR industry, dominated by several oligopolies, and because of it, drugs that would have cost mere cents to produce are being sold for hundreds and hundreds of dollars
No matter how big Google is, Google still can't take on the true "Drug Cartel". They are just too powerful !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is an attempt to legitimize any incursion into privacy they want. No adversary so sophisticated as the drug cartels will engage in illegal activity out in the open, so to speak. It is entirely trivial to deploy tools for securing communications. The only logical conclusions to this initiative are: infringements upon the rights of innocents, and prohibitions on cryptography and anonymity.
End drug cartels by legalizing drugs. When you prohibit something with a large, inelastic demand you create violence. There's a reason why (except in prisons where they are banned) you don't see people stabbing other people for cigarettes because they are available just about anywhere. When alcohol was banned in the US, there was a rise in organized crime selling booze. When prohibition ended, gang violence declined massively. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol and it doesn't work with drugs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hello security theater.
You won't address the "drug problem" until you've addressed the demand... and ultimately, I know this is a leap, but the economic inequities on this planet that push desperate people to traffic drugs, slaves, organs, etc.
This is a PR and marketing strategy. Google relies on selling people to companies however this hegemony is threatened by lawmakers whom may constrain what google collects. By saying that we might be able to win the war of drugs if you let us collect more data on people is a simple strategy and the government is so silly that they'll buy it.
They want people to associate limitations on google's ability to collect data with crime.
This is exactly what I was thinking. These guys don't play and it's all fun and games in the server room until they come for you and your family. Google needs to rethink this in the worst kind of way.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Are you ignorant enough of history to think that Obama entered office in January 2007?
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29google.html?_r=1
The "miserable failure" here is you.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
2. stop indexing stuff related to illegal keywords!
What, exactly, are these?
Explain. Give 5 examples and the law that says they're illegal.
>more farcical stuff I shall not even deign to ask you to back up
>making the searching for certain terms a red flag
You're quite the totalitarian bootlicker.
--
BMO
You've done evil... it's time to die.
The whole thing looks like a bad 90's spam filter.
The internet is great for all businesses, but it better not improve the productivity of :
- drug traffickers,
- child predators
- religious fundamentalist (except Christians of course!)
- unauthorised file sharing
- white power groups (except those in the Southern USA, where it is a tradition).
- anti governmental uprisings (except in Egypt and Syria - those uprisings are OK)
- or scammers and spammers (except those Himalayian Gojo berries and commercial Vitamin pills - those are real businesses)
- those promoting the views on "Global Warming/ Climate change", on either side of the debate
- school kids who "dis" their school
- People who believe that endless economic growth is impossible and ultimately unsustainable - the end is near!
What's the point?
ignore do not follow links
Then that defeats the whole purpose of it in the first place. "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear," though, right?
That'll scare anyone without TOR into not even searching for it in the first place.
No, at most, it'll scare people into using something like TOR or not using Google.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
from survivors of organ trafficking, sex trafficking
Survivors of Organ trafficking? You mean people are really waking up in ice filled bathtubs? Or are the syndicates making the 3 breasted prostitutes from Total Recal?
Federal agencies get funding from illegal narcotics when congress says no to programs, that's why our troops in Afghanistan protect drug lords, fields, shipments. Some federal reserve banks launder money for the cartels, that also big business. The victimless crimes that keep at least a third of the prison population are also fodder for the huge business of the prison systems. Therefore, the price of narcotics must be kept high and so the "war on drugs" escalates. We fight both sides of the "war on drugs", it's big money and agenda driver.
They want their piece of the pie of the big business that is "Law enforcement". It will take millions of dollars to filter out such words as "marijuana" and "bing". Then they will join the police in doing as little as possible for the most amount of money, while calling themselves irreplaceable in the fight on terrorism, drugs, .
The people who do drugs chose to do drugs. It is not like we haven't made damn sure that every person in the United States knows that partaking in drugs is stupid. They are not acting in ignorance. They have been warned. If people want to be stupid, let them be stupid. It is their life. They aren't hurting anyone else. If legal, at least all the violent drug lords will go out of business. Also, we would be saving a crap-ton of tax dollars. Of course, that last bit assumes we don't make the government responsible for our healthcare.
...Just legalize them. ALL of them. Deal with the people who can't deal with drugs as a health care problem, exactly the way alcoholism is addressed.
How big a problem is bootlegging since Prohibition was repealed?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Not so Fast there, Furious.
Since the government can't stop the violence, the Coalition and Alliance were granted police powers by the government.
At some point, they will have no need for the government.
So which cadre is Google? the Coalition, or the Alliance? Does it matter? ;^)
is so damn successful this is just the next logical step.... right?
Perl Programmer for hire
What happens when the Skynet Drones run out of gas? Do they swipe their own credit cards at Chevron? Do they maintain their own engines? No! So that's where we still got the robots by the short ones.
Is Google totally unaware of the fact that drug cartels existed WELL before the internet was ever created? If Google actually is able to shut them off from technology, they will simply go back to their old ways, and will probably be more violent than before. The thing about technology that Google doesnt seem to grasp here is that it doesnt really enable people to do things they couldnt do before, it just makes it a lot easier. With technology buyers and sellers can efficiently contact each other and make deals without having to go to a dangerous area and try to find a deal, which leaves them exposed to theft and especially violence.....
In fact the rise of technology probably is a contributor to the plummeting violent crime rate in the US. Drug dealers no longer have "turf wars" to try to control the places where drugs are sold, clients no longer have to worry about getting killed for a couple of 20s. Everything is arranged online. Google takes that away, and we can go back to what we had during the 80s and 90s....Yup, that sounds wonderful Google....
Monstar L
I prefer a gold mesh to tin foil because it allows my scalp to breathe while still blocking the Google/Trilateral mind control rays with the Faraday Cage effect.
put your money into decriminalising drugs. Take the cartels profits away.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
After a brief but extensive search online, I take back the "multi-trillion dollar industry" remark.
The LEGAL DRUG INDUSTRY just broke the ONE-TRILLION-DOLLAR MARK on 2012
Based on the following report:
http://www.imshealth.com/portal/site/ims/menuitem.d248e29c86589c9c30e81c033208c22a/?vgnextoid=4d47d1822e678310VgnVCM10000076192ca2RCRD&vgnextchannel=437879d7f269e210VgnVCM10000071812ca2RCRD&vgnextfmt=default
In 2011, the global sale of pharmaceuticals totalled 956 billion dollars, and it was predicted (back in 2011) that the figure to hike another 70 billion dollars or so, for 2012
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It sounds courageous but this last step is a doozy. Not well thought out at all. Why on Earth did Google do this so publicly?
Think about it from the perspective of someone who wants to work at Google, "geek heaven".
If they are going to take on big rich gangster cartels like the Zetas who apparently own a whole country and love making examples of ordinary people even reaching into the U.S.A., they become targets too. Big soft squishy targets, very public, scattered in low security offices and conferences all around the world.
The employees of Google did not sign up to become an organized crime and counter-terror military task force. They don't carry guns or wear shields. So let's say Google starts actually making a difference. What happens when the first Google employees get killed?
Likely 90% of the Google employees who know about the program and are happy with it are naive about what it could mean to them personally.
Google at first was a pretty simple nice company.
Then they started tying all their lines together even where the fit was poor, just so they could cross-correlate everything for more advertising dollars. Not that I have anything against making money, that's what businesses are for, but they seemed to lose track of their original purpose.
Now they are entering the holier-than-thou stage. A short while ago they decided to ban all weapon-related items in their shopper. Not the search itself, not yet, just the shopper. I don't mind them having their own personal opinions about weapons, but when you claim you want to be the world's information indexer, yet start making political decisions like that, it makes me wonder, and a little bit sad. What next? Ban sodas over 16 oz from shopper? Ban those from search too? Where do you draw the line? Trans-fats? Sugar itself? Red M&Ms? Low-mileage cars? Once you let your personal political bias into your business decisions, you have taken the wrong fork in the road.
And now they join the War On (Some) Drugs. Their power has gone to their heads. They may still be king of searches, but once people realize they provide incomplete filtered searches, they will be ripe to lose their reputation.
Makes me a little bit sad. Even tho I didn't like their tying all their products together, at least they were still efficient and simple. Now I no longer can trust them to be impartial and complete. They used to stand up to foreign governments who tried to dictate search filters. Now they do it themselves.
Infuriate left and right
not ignorant, dishonest.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I googled 'Joining fight against drug cartels' as Slashdot suggested me to and it just brought me a link to slashdot telling me to google joining fight against drug cartels. I'm stuck.
Have to admire that they are so well off and they are willing to risk very violent deaths at the hands of the cartels.
And it won't have the slightest effect on availability of the drugs.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In Mexico it's mostly fighting between cartels and it is NOT even near a civil war, so that statement is greatly exaggerated. Sure, if you count the killings all these years the numbers seem high (40,000+ dead, lost count already), but this is a country with 90+ million people and the cartels are not killing each other outside the streets of every city, one has to keep in mind that the trouble spots are very localized. As a regular citizen you just do not see that on your everyday life. Still it is indeed a very sad situation with no real ending in sight, even with 6 years well into the fight. Drugs are the most lucrative business in the planet period, as long as there is the demand and the challenge to meet that demand remains of extreme risk and costly (it is an ilegal activity requiring lots of resources to operate and distribute: bribe money for politicians/goverment/police/military , weapons, safe houses, killers, dealers, informants, etc ) there will be unscrupulous individuals that will rise to meet that challenge (and they will just keep getting away with it, the money is too much). The only real solution is dropping the price for end consumers and that means legalizing (or whatever you want to call it), then keep on fighting the cartels til they colapse because of lack of resources, then funnel all that drug war money into youngsters education and rehab programs for the ones already in it. That is really the only way to solve both countries problems.
This would be a good time for anyone driving a Google Streetview car around Mexico or working in a building that says Google on the front to demand duty pay.
How many Google employees have family members in Mexico? Probably not many, but there have to be some. If this anti-cartel initiative actually starts to be successful, how long before Los Zetas go after these family members?
The Mexican cartels don't seem to have much force projection ability into the US (all the killings are on the Mexican side of the border) – maybe this is because they know most US cops wouldn't look the other way like Mexican ones do, or they don't have as many connections and sources in the US as they do back home, or because killing American citizens would get them treated like actual terrorists by the US government, complete with drone attacks and Gitmo. But if they can retaliate against people in Mexico for the actions of US corporations, they will.
Which drug cartels? The ones that make many $billions off their government-enforced monopolies ("patents"), one of the main drivers of bankrupting medical expenses?
A "drug cartel" is like a "religious cult" or a "freedom fighter": the definition depends on which tribe you belong to, pointing at the others.
The way to fight drug cartels, like any cartels, is to stop creating artificial supply/demand shortages with a "Drug War". And treat people who do drugs but can't handle it for their actual medical problems (addiction, underlying psychology seeking abuse, complications of toxicity). And tax the people who can handle it for the privilege of living in a civilization that manages their hobby while protecting them from its actual harm.
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make install -not war
Prohibition fails. Google are just supporting the problem, not the solution. They should be advocating decrimilization and treatment as an illness, not as a crime.
If google declares war to drug cartel and illicit network, it will become the enemy of many political groups and this will not increase the support from other political groups. Google is already a target of many criticism. With this movement, they either commit suicide or change radically the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations
I see nothing there that inspires confidence.
Surely you don't need a tinfoil hat to read plain old Newspeak?
Marketing ploy, otherwise they would eradicate it at the (financial) source and start by asking a hair sample of each Google employee and committee member.
Prohibition never ends; the sweet spots merely change. The government grants black marketeers an oligopoly on many products; if we revoke the charter for one of them (e.g. alcohol) then the oligopoly just moves on to whatever had been the second-most profitable one.
Or they diversify, using all their government-enforced exclusive rights. That way, if the populace decides to revoke other charters, they'll already be configured to adapt to whatever we allow them to keep.
But each market for which we revoke our support for them, does cost black marketeers revenue. (Alcohol in particular, has a very wide customer base; I doubt that marijuana is in the same league.) And drug gangs are impotent incompetent children compared to Wal-Mart.
I'd expect drug cartels to lobby heavily against revoking any more prohibitions, though. And the currently existing policies bear that prediction out; your congressman likely doesn't vote on this issue (or introduce legislation) that is anything close to what the polls say people want.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
How Google sees itself: http://i.imgur.com/cnqsX.jpg. Where do I even start? If governments were relly serious on attacking organized crime they would go against money laundering, all the way up to the top. Instead, we have this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18866018/ And this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs/ So, dream on...
Even many in law enforcement--cops, judges, etc--support ending prohibition on drugs: http://leap.cc