DEA Lack of Data Storage Results In Dismissed Drug Case

Nerval's Lobster writes "Dr. Armando Angulo was indicted in 2007 on charges of illegally selling prescription drugs. He fled the country in 2004, with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. Marshals Service eventually finding him in Panama. As the case developed (and Panama resisted calls to extradite Angulo back to the United States), the DEA apparently amassed so much electronic data that maintaining it is now a hardship; consequently, the government wants to drop the whole case. 'These materials include two terabytes of electronic data (which consume approximately 5 percent of DEA's world-wide electronic storage capacity),' Stephanie M. Rose, the U.S. attorney for northern Iowa, wrote in the government's July motion to dismiss the indictment. 'Continued storage of these materials is difficult and expensive.' In addition, information associated with the case had managed to fill 'several hundred boxes' of paper documents, along with dozens of computers and servers. As pointed out by Ars Technica, if two terabytes of data storage represents 5 percent of the DEA's global capacity, then the agency has only 40 terabytes worth of storage overall. That seems quite small for a law enforcement agency tasked with coordinating and pursuing any number of drug investigations at any given time."

Comments

Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

The war on drugs is a disaster. Decriminalize all drugs, since that is the only thing that leads to a decrease in drug use and an increase in treatment.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[i kan reed]

Yes, but what's your opinion of UNEVENLY dismissing cases? Is that better or worse than dismissing none?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Jeng]

The fewer people sent to prison for drug crimes the better.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

My Kingdom, for a Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB USB 3.0 drive!

Man. These guys are SO 2007!

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[DoofusOfDeath]

The war on drugs is a disaster. Decriminalize all drugs, since that is the only thing that leads to a decrease in drug use and an increase in treatment.

Some drugs are more problematic than others. I really don't want someone who's been doing steroids for 3 years to stand in front of my house and ingest PCP.

Not unless he's surrounded by several policemen with pre-drawn tasers.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[jbeaupre]

Did you even read the summary? It has nothing to do with illegal drugs. It's about illegally selling prescription (legal) drugs.

They guy was selling to people that didn't have a prescription.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[cpu6502]

The drugs would be decriminalized, but they'd still be restricted like other prescription drugs.

Oh and if dude did attack you, why do you need police? You should have your own taser for self-defense.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like alcohol, or anything really, I go under the opinion of 'If whatever you want to do with your body doesn't interfere with other people's shit, go nuts'.

If said 'roid freak wants to injest a pound of PCP, I couldn't care less so long as he does it somewhere where he won't fuck up other people's anything. He wants to trash his house or run around in an open, unused field or something, I don't see a problem with this.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Mr.CRC]

The problem is that "decriminalization" just means that users don't get punished, or just get a fine for possessing less than some threshold of substance. But the manufacturing and distribution are still illegal. Therefore the criminal black market is still incentivized to exist, along with its violence and the leech government entities that try to stop it and who's jobs depend on retaining this disgusting destructive relationship of illegality ensuring the profitability of illegal trafficking for drug dealers, and which ensures billions in government spending on the "War on Drugs" and employs hundreds of thousands of government employees.

I am simply fed up with the whole thing. Let people do what they want. I have never, ever run into a "meth freak" or any other drug crazed person that threatened me. The really scary people are drunks.

If just one stupid kid gets wasted on some drug like "bath salts" and gets killed (by accident, not directly from the drugs) then there are immediate calls to ban it. Well why the heck do we have "bath salts?" Because methamphetamine, MDMA, and cocaine are illegal! Yet they are much safer drugs with a long history of safety data and medical use! We know they are only harmful if you have a heart condition or if heavily abused. Well of course people are going to abuse them, but that's not my problem. At least if they are legal and you can buy them from a dispensary in pharmaceutical grade then we could benefit from:

1. People can be educated out in the open what is a safe dose, how to keep up your nutrition and minimize harm to your health, and where to get help if you loose control of your use and need help to stop.

2. Much of the damage to users that is actually caused by the IMPURITY of the drugs, the dirty needles, and the unhealthy lifestyles etc., will be eliminated or reduced. Perhaps we can even develop more quick acting oral drugs so that people will be less inclined to inject to get the same effects.

3. We can supply people with opiate antidote drugs to protect themselves in case of accidental overdose.

4. The risk of overdose will be much much lower since the purity will not vary.

5. The cost of treatment programs could be miniscule compared to criminalization and interdiction.

6. The black market and all it's innocent bystanders caught in the cross fire will be eliminated.

7. The price of the drugs will be 5-10x lower, making the theft crime needed for unemployed addicts to support their habits will be proportionally lower.

8. Many more addicts who were unemployable due to prohibition might be able to manage a "functional addict" lifestyle--remaining employed and productive members of society.

9. Medical research into safer and more effective anti-depressants, sleep aids, stimulants, and other psychoactive drugs could be dramatically accelerated.

The criminal black market and all its violence is what scares me. Not dope fiends. I'm personally morally committed to a drug abuse free lifestyle. My family and I don't even drink alcohol. But I'm just so sick of this prohibition crap.

The economy might even benefit from people using stimulants carefully and in non-abusive quantities. The classic drugs such as amphetamine really aren't all that bad, despite all the propaganda and the fact that on the street they are filled with potentially toxic contaminants!.

For those of you with an environmental inclination, look at some videos of how cocaine is extracted in the Amazon jungles, and what is done with the chemical waste. This is real tear-jerking stuff. It's just so disgusting and sad. Yet, if it were legal, then all of this could be done in the open by modern companies following international environmental standards, employing people in 9-5 jobs, who could pay taxes and live normal happy lives.

Now for the bad news: Prohibition is never, ever going to end. It's just too much of a wonderful bonanza for the state.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Jeng]

There should be doctors who specialize in non-medical drugs. In order to purchase drugs you will need to go to a doctor and get ok'd for specific drugs, you then get a card allowing you to purchase said drugs. If you do not go back for quarterly check-ups your card will be revoked.

If a significant portion of people who use currently illegal drugs go this route then there will not be enough of a market for illegal suppliers.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Shikaku]

Concealed guns work just fine in Texas. And Connecticut has no drug problems due to legalized marijuana.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Jeng]

As long as you have the proper licenses and accept quarterly evaluations I don't see a problem.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[EdIII]

To be fair this guy is selling prescription drugs illegally.

That's like protected by copyrights and patents and shit. If he was selling coke or heroin to kids that might be one thing, but now he is messing the very fabric of our economy!

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[DoofusOfDeath]

Because if the police were to stop him with deadly or non-deadly force, the risk of me getting sued or going to jail is close to nil.

If I were to do it, the risk is considerably higher.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Jeng]

As long as he was monitoring the health and mental well being of those he was prescribing drugs to then that is pretty much the model of legalizing drugs that I support.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Forty Two Tenfold]

The problem is that "decriminalization" just means that users don't get punished, or just get a fine for possessing less than some threshold of substance. But the manufacturing and distribution are still illegal.

Grow. Netherlands, Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, ehh... Heroin clinics in Switzerland, uh... And this whole headline? I think real life stack overflow, not ENOSPC or EFBIG.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[mcgrew]

Decriminalization is NOT the answer. If we'd simply decriminalized alcohol in 1933 rather than outright legalizing it, we'd still have the bar bombings etc we had when it was completely illegal.

Legalize it and the gangs and gang violence goes away, the prices drop drastically so maybe that crackhead doesn't have to burglarize your house for his crack, etc.

If someone wants to shoot heroin, let him shoot heroin. Your drug use is not my business. If you have to steal to support your habit, it's your theivery that's my business when you rob me, not your drug habit.

However, there is one class of drugs I would keep illegal -- antibiotics. Your illicit use of heroin doesn't affect me, but your use of antibiotics breeds supergerms which DO affect me.

Don't decriminalize it -- legalize it, regulate it, and tax it. I have a acquaintence who is a crack addict, she was surprised to find when she checked into rehab that there was not only cocaine in her system, but meth as well. Back in the '70s they used to dust pot with PCP. Regulation will keep adulterants out of dope, the dope they're doing is bad enough.

Lagalizing alcohol worked well. Yes, we still have alcoholics, but a lot lower percentage of teenagers are drinking now than in 1925.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Jeng]

You can be sued for any reason by anybody at any time.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[geekanarchy]

Four U.S. states do not require a permit to carry a concealed pistol, and the overwhelming majority of remaining states are "shall-issue" with regard to permits, which means you default to being allowed a permit unless the state can dig up some legal reason why you should be disqualified. Much like drug laws, people opposed to simple freedoms are usually fearful and misinformed, if not completely ignorant.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[RajivSLK]

7. The price of the drugs will be 5-10x lower, making the theft crime needed for unemployed addicts to support their habits will be proportionally lower.

I agree with everything except point 7. Introduce it at a low enough cost to put all of the illegal avenues out of business. Then slowly increase the price and make it more expensive that it used to be. Just like alcohol and tobacco. Overall usage will decrease dramatically and the government will make money in the form of taxes that can be used to fund rehab, abstinence campaigns and hospitals.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

Making drugs in your basement with poor safety standards, and selling them on the street, should still be illegal. If it is a drug for human consumption there need to be strict rules. There's a reason why real pharmaceutical companies have strict regulation, because impurities from a sloppy process during drug production can cause serious health problems or death. Hell, even if the product is carefully made, you should still have a doctor and/or pharmacist overseeing the dispensing and monitoring of someone's health, because side effects can be nasty from properly-made drugs. Dose, effects in combination with other drugs, and the duration taking a drug can also be an issue. Every person will not respond the same to a given drug. Maybe people should be able to ingest whatever they want in their own bodies, but the people *selling* the stuff for that purpose should be held to a very strict standard and be accountable legally and financially if they !#%!% it up. They shouldn't be able to make their money off maiming and killing people with bad product and get away with it. And people have to be accountable individually as users if they take drugs and then do dangerous things such as driving or even walking down a public street in traffic while in a drug-induced haze. People have to know what they are buying, they have to know what the effects are, and while it's easy to say "this is an individual choice", the rest of society still has to learn how to deal with it when it goes terribly wrong, as it demonstrably can. That's why we have strict rules for use and sale of legal drugs.

You're right about need to make treatment the proper focus of attention, but the bottom line is: you need to be specific by what you mean by "decriminalize". Some types of production, distribution, and use of drugs should still be illegal with very stiff penalties if those rules are broken.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[CanHasDIY]

Because if the police were to stop him with deadly or non-deadly force,

Point #1: The police will arrive too late to save you. Also, as the SCOTUS decided, protecting you is not their job, anyway.

the risk of me getting sued or going to jail is close to nil.

If I were to do it, the risk is considerably higher.

Point #2: Dead men tell no tales; get a gun (and, of course, learn how to use it).

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's just it. They don't confine it to their own lives. They force the rest of society to deal with their self inflicted problems. They won't trash their own house, they'll come over and trash yours.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[MightyYar]

Decriminalization is NOT the answer.

I agree. All the billions we spend on trying to eradicate drugs, and all we accomplish is pushing the street price up. At some point you have to ask if what you are trying to do is even possible... are our goals even realistic? I have come to realize that no matter what the arguments are for or against, a reasonable person has to conclude that we are not going to eradicate drugs - the best we can hope for is reducing the problem.

At that point, you might as well make "reducing the problem" the goal instead of "stopping the problem". We can keep the street price high with taxes and keep use lower with education and rehab programs financed with the tax.

If someone wants to shoot heroin, let him shoot heroin. Your drug use is not my business.

I agree with you as an ideal, but realistically we do need to worry about drug users. Yes, you can throw them in jail when they steal, but then you have a large portion of society in jail - which does affect me, both in taxes to keep people in jail and in lost productivity dragging down society as a whole (this is the situation now, BTW). But also there is the issue of disease, which tends to thrive in drug communities. Tuberculosis would be all but eradicated by now if not for drug use.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[h5inz]

Meth (speed) is a prescription drug for example: Methamphetamine is FDA approved for the treatment of ADHD and exogenous obesity. It is dispensed in the USA under the trademark name Desoxyn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, you better stay in the basement, would hate for you to experience the outside world.

You might find it frightening.

Also, not to scare you, but when you go outside and look up, you will see a giant ball of gas on fire!

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[dkleinsc]

It could be worse: He could have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[mr_bigmouth_502]

I wish I had mod points right now, because I definitely agree with you. The world's drug problem isn't going to improve if they just keep going after people for the shit.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[mcgrew]

Some drugs are more problematic than others. I really don't want someone who's been doing steroids for 3 years to stand in front of my house and ingest PCP.

The law's not stopping him from doing steroids and PCP now, plus the dealer told him that "PCP" was cocaine. That wouldn't happen if those deugs were lagal and regulated. If someone is outside your house in a threatening manner? Call 911 and a cop will be there in five minutes tops (here at least, I've had to call them a few times).

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[interkin3tic]

Now for the bad news: Prohibition is never, ever going to end. It's just too much of a wonderful bonanza for the state.

I see no reason to be so cynical about it. Decriminalization suggests that things can and do change despite what law enforcement wants.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Lonewolf666]

You mean, tax it to the point where there is not too much illegal production.

In Germany (where I live), cigarettes cost around 25 (Euro)cents apiece. That is enough to motivate some people to smuggle them. But not enough to make the black market as big and dangerous as in illegal drugs.
So you get some tax evasion through smuggling of cigarettes from Eastern Europe, but cutting with dangerous stuff and gang wars are rare. Low-key drug crime like that is inevitable if you have serious taxes on the stuff, but it is at a tolerable level.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Chirs]

I agree with you as an ideal, but realistically we do need to worry about drug users. Yes, you can throw them in jail when they steal, but then you have a large portion of society in jail - which does affect me, both in taxes to keep people in jail and in lost productivity dragging down society as a whole (this is the situation now, BTW). But also there is the issue of disease, which tends to thrive in drug communities. Tuberculosis would be all but eradicated by now if not for drug use.

If the drugs were legal they would be far cheaper and people wouldn't need to steal to support their habit.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[mcgrew]

Prescription drugs are illegal if you have no presecription, and they actually have cocaine in spray cans for topical use, morphine for hospitals, amphetamines... even Ectasy is produced by legit drug companies. Oh, and since you're trying in vain to be pedantic, there are no "illegal drugs", the terminology used is "controlled substances" which includes everything from Quaaludes (AFAIC only made by a legit company but still illegal) to LSD.

If you sell oxycontin to Rush Limbaugh, it's still an illegal drug, even though it came from a legit pharma company. If you get caught selling your oxycontin that was legally prescribed to you to that old fat bastard, you're still going to jail for "delivery of a controlled substance"; e.g., selling illegal drugs.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

When seconds count the police are but minutes away.

http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kasler-protection.html

"Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers."

The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen." [4] There are many similar cases with results to the same effect. [5] "

You are responsible for protecting yourself and your family. Any questions?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

Five minutes or less huh?

http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kasler-protection.html

"Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers."

The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen." [4] There are many similar cases with results to the same effect. [5] "

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[jeffmeden]

There should be doctors who specialize in non-medical drugs. In order to purchase drugs you will need to go to a doctor and get ok'd for specific drugs, you then get a card allowing you to purchase said drugs. If you do not go back for quarterly check-ups your card will be revoked.

If a significant portion of people who use currently illegal drugs go this route then there will not be enough of a market for illegal suppliers.

Sure there is. When this un-doctor (prescribing you drugs to make you less healthy) is required to report the use to the insurance companies, after they realize there is a pretty solid correlation with legal blow and heart attacks (or whatever) and want to jack rates for any confirmed users. Black markets will always be around since there are many undeniably negative trade-offs to recreational drug use, and therefore benefits to concealing their use will always be present.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

"the government will make money in the form of taxes"

I know you won't even understand this, but taxes are theft of money, no money is produced by the government whatsoever. Never has been, never will be.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[jeffmeden]

Decriminalization is NOT the answer. If we'd simply decriminalized alcohol in 1933 rather than outright legalizing it, we'd still have the bar bombings etc we had when it was completely illegal.

Legalize it and the gangs and gang violence goes away, the prices drop drastically so maybe that crackhead doesn't have to burglarize your house for his crack, etc.

If someone wants to shoot heroin, let him shoot heroin. Your drug use is not my business. If you have to steal to support your habit, it's your theivery that's my business when you rob me, not your drug habit.

However, there is one class of drugs I would keep illegal -- antibiotics. Your illicit use of heroin doesn't affect me, but your use of antibiotics breeds supergerms which DO affect me.

Don't decriminalize it -- legalize it, regulate it, and tax it. I have a acquaintence who is a crack addict, she was surprised to find when she checked into rehab that there was not only cocaine in her system, but meth as well. Back in the '70s they used to dust pot with PCP. Regulation will keep adulterants out of dope, the dope they're doing is bad enough.

Lagalizing alcohol worked well. Yes, we still have alcoholics, but a lot lower percentage of teenagers are drinking now than in 1925.

It's been beaten to death (working on a pun here) but those with a drug habit ended up there in a lot of cases because they were already destitute and making crack $1 a hit instead of $10 a hit isn't going to make them less likely to want to steal to get it... they don't have a job and legalizing it won't change that. Drug use, joblessness, homelessness, mental illness, burglary, violence, and emergency health care are all tightly intertwined. The first 3 might be easy to ignore but the last 4 are *your* problem as a member of a first world country. The solution is not to simply take away the criminal atmosphere surrounding issue #1...

As a student of Economics, I admit that this is appealing and possibly beneficial if part of a larger solution, but only if.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[RajivSLK]

Exactly. But your problem is largely due to inconsistent tax regimes in neighbouring states. Nobody is manufacturing cigarettes - that would be much more difficult. In Canada we have much higher taxes on alcohol and cigarettes than the US does, however, smuggling for resale is almost nonexistent.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Mr.CRC]

It should be legal. And you should be liable if something happens. Unless you entered into a contract to waive it. But lawyers are expensive. And small scale production isn't likely to be the primary production paradigm. It may also not be legal according to zoning laws. And if it can be bought legally, people won't flaunt even little laws to make it since there will be no profit in it! But fundamentally, it is not necessary to criminalize small scale production in order to ensure that most of the drugs used will be pharmaceutical grade.

By the very nature of abused drugs, there will be a need for users to sign a waiver of rights to sue if they have an adverse medical reaction to taking whatever when they buy it from the drug store. Also, just like a good bartender will cut someone off if they get too smashed, it is possible that in the internet era pharmacies will simply cut off users who look like they are over-doing it. Sure some other unscrupulous sellers will enable such addicts (it could be a bonanza for the elderly), but the point is that social pressure to not be a junkie can be developed through means other than criminalization. But perfection is not attainable, so the rights of the rest of us don't deserve to be trampled to try to achieve an unobtainable goal of no drug abuse.

What is good enough are laws against fraud, if only someone would enforce them. If a pharma. co. commits fraud and someone gets hurt because of a contaminant, then they may be sued for fraud, and perhaps criminal fraud or negligence charges as well.

But the regulation that you are promoting only leads to monopoly and corruption, ultimately leading to the sort of situation where the companies can PROTECT themselves from fraud and other liabilities, because the regulators will just "settle" with them--like the way the crook bankers can rip us off these days, then "settle" later for pennies on the dollar of profit.

Micro-breweries are personal-scale drug manufacturing labs. Do you really want to put them out of business?

Are people dropping like flies from tainted nutritional supplements that fall under (justifiably so) a much less strict regulatory regime than pharmaceuticals? No.

Good grief, people presently abusing street drugs prepared from gasoline, in rusty cans, with no lab tests or controls, and you are worried that if legalized and sold by legitimate companies all of the sudden the drugs will become of questionable safety?

What's the difference from food preparation? What you are proposing should apply to anything prepared for human consumption--if you want to be logically consistent about it. Do you propose that every restaurant needs to get FDA approval to operate after spending millions of $$$ on years of studies? Ever been to Thailand? Barely any regulation, and I've never gotten sick. Millions of people eat street vendor food for their entire lives. They are nearly as heathy as here in the "1st world."

There is an interesting YouTube video documentary on herion addiction. In it a large scale distributor says that he prefers people get their dope from him because he knows it's quality is good and they will be safe. You see, most business people just don't want to hurt their customers. Even criminal ones. Don't believe Marxist propaganda. It's just as wrong as anti-drug propaganda.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[blackest_k]

Why would you want a drug without a prescription? Ok some people want to get high but others maybe it is just the cost.

I have to take around 9 drugs everyday for the rest of my life currently the cost is subsidised but if it wasn't I might well find this Doctor saving me a fortune, To be frank I go to my GP for a signature for a prescription decided by specialists at the Hospital 6 of these are unlikely to change as I don't see the cardiac specialist any more.

I can only sympathise with American's without Health Insurance who are being held captive by a system which exists first and foremost to make a profit from illness. Admittedly the drugs supplied could be fake as in not containing what they are supposed to contain but if you can't afford the drugs you need to keep you alive by the "Legal" route, it is a risk that you could be forced to take.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[jd2112]

Think EMC not Seagate. While the 4gb Seagate drive could probably be bought out of petty cash that much EMC storage would have blown their IT budget for the year.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Jeng]

Black markets will always be around since there are many undeniably negative trade-offs to recreational drug use, and therefore benefits to concealing their use will always be present.

If you can remove 90% of the volume of what goes though the black markets then you will severely cripple the black markets reducing their prevalence to the point that it will be very hard to even find people who know where to get what.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

I like that page too, especially the part where they talk about the racemic qualities of the product produced by reductive amination of phenyl-2-propanone. Maybe that's why it was always better than the glass shards of the 90's. Good ol' fashioned biker crank. Big yellow rocks > clear glass.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[KhabaLox]

no money is produced by the government whatsoever. Never has been, never will be.

What are you talking about? Haven't you heard of quantitative easing or monetizing the debt?

Maybe what you meant that no value is produced by the government.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

Taser? I want the cops having Rifles/Shotguns pointed at the guy. For all I know the PCP could make his neurological response all out of whack and the tasers won't do jack other than make him angrier. Shoot the PCP ingesting bum, in fact shoot him A LOT.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[schlachter]

FYI...heroin, coke, and weed are all prescribed drugs in parts of the US/Europe. The line is blurred.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Grishnakh]

I seriously doubt this. It doesn't matter what laws any state passes with regard to marijuana, because it's still highly illegal according to Federal law, so while some states may have legalized medical marijuana and allow clinics to sell it, Obama is constantly sending his DEA stormtroopers to bust these dispensaries. We have this problem constantly in Arizona, where we too have legalized medical marijuana.

As for concealed guns, they do have a problem with them in TX: people are getting shot and killed for situations where no one's life is in dangers, such as petty thieves running away and getting shot in the back by gun owners. We don't have this problem in AZ (where there's now no permits required for concealed carry), because our law actually require you to be in real bodily danger in order to shoot someone. They don't have that requirement in TX.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Electricity Likes Me]

You're conflating the consequences of many of the things surrounding drugs (illegality, expense) with the actual consequences of taking drugs. People who drink alcohol have done far more damage to my property then drug users ever have.

If we're so concerned about the effects of drugs on society (we're evidently not but whatever) then we could just subsidize them into being free, and let people go and do them in supervised zones. Sydney has one of Australia's only Heroin injecting rooms - for example. Now, they don't supply the heroin, but they do supply safe, clean needles and syringes, disposal facilities for them, access to medical help and access to counselling for those who want to quit the habit. The result? A massive decrease in used needles in the streets, which are what present the actual public health hazard.

People on heroin are pretty docile. Most of their damage is robberies committed to try and get more heroin. But heroin isn't expensive to produce, whereas enforcing it is. If we also just gave them heroin, then that's about the cheapest possible way to solve the problem.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[jamstar7]

Think EMC not Seagate. While the 4gb Seagate drive could probably be bought out of petty cash that much EMC storage would have blown their IT budget for the year.

Whaddaya expect when the DEA's IT budget is less than donut money at your local police station?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Electricity Likes Me]

There should be doctors who specialize in non-medical drugs. In order to purchase drugs you will need to go to a doctor and get ok'd for specific drugs, you then get a card allowing you to purchase said drugs. If you do not go back for quarterly check-ups your card will be revoked.

If a significant portion of people who use currently illegal drugs go this route then there will not be enough of a market for illegal suppliers.

Sure there is. When this un-doctor (prescribing you drugs to make you less healthy) is required to report the use to the insurance companies, after they realize there is a pretty solid correlation with legal blow and heart attacks (or whatever) and want to jack rates for any confirmed users. Black markets will always be around since there are many undeniably negative trade-offs to recreational drug use, and therefore benefits to concealing their use will always be present.

Concealing their use is one thing, dealing with the massive negative consequences of allowing large criminal empires to flourish across borders is quite another. I'd much rather that people buy them in bulk (cheaply) and distribute them illegally, then large cartels operate across multiple countries borders and build armies which are serious threats to government and citizens.

Let's see people try and fund a mercenary army when $10 buys a few kilos of marijuana.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[HornWumpus]

Pot is more or less legal in CA. My last three years crops have been visible on Google earth. It's a safe bet that illegal traffic has been reduced 90% by volume.

Tweak/Tweakers are still everywhere. Rich ones are the worst.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[jamstar7]

Because if the police were to stop him with deadly or non-deadly force, the risk of me getting sued or going to jail is close to nil.

If I were to do it, the risk is considerably higher.

You kidding me? YOU'D get sued right along with them, as you 'facilitated' the 'police brutality' by daring to own property that the victim stood on while the police tazed him.

Welcome to the legal 'system' of the United States, where nobody goes unpunished unless they can buy their way out before it comes to trial.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[jamstar7]

Granted. But that still won't get you off of a murder rap when you shoot an intruder in some states. Good old Catch-22. Yer fucked if ya do, and fucked if ya don't.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Electricity Likes Me]

7. The price of the drugs will be 5-10x lower, making the theft crime needed for unemployed addicts to support their habits will be proportionally lower.

I agree with everything except point 7. Introduce it at a low enough cost to put all of the illegal avenues out of business. Then slowly increase the price and make it more expensive that it used to be. Just like alcohol and tobacco. Overall usage will decrease dramatically and the government will make money in the form of taxes that can be used to fund rehab, abstinence campaigns and hospitals.

Eh. Why bother?

When you have a few million dollars a year of taxpayer money being spent on a police helicopter, who's sole job is to fly over a national part in Victoria (Austraila's southern state) to try and spot marijuana plantations, I can't help but think that any effort to try and turn them into a revenue stream is just ignoring how much money we currently spend on enforcement. And this is just enforcement.

It's false economy - even if we spent money subsidizing drugs and treating addicts, we do all those things now and the lessons from countries with legalized drugs is that usage falls off pretty dramatically, especially for harder drugs (hard to make heroin seem appealing when the only public perception of it is a line of sickly looking folks at the hospital waiting for it).

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[DoofusOfDeath]

Do you have any examples of this happening?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

Better idea.... if you don't like them, don't take them.

Who are you to decide what other people should or shouldn't do? Why do you get to decide what should be raised in price and what shouldn't? Maybe we start pumping up the price of coffee next?

And don't go hiding behind society like "Oh we vote on it, its not me", you are advocating it, why do you think you are so much better than so many people you don't even know? Who are you to decide that your path is better for them?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Electricity Likes Me]

It's been beaten to death (working on a pun here) but those with a drug habit ended up there in a lot of cases because they were already destitute and making crack $1 a hit instead of $10 a hit isn't going to make them less likely to want to steal to get it... they don't have a job and legalizing it won't change that. Drug use, joblessness, homelessness, mental illness, burglary, violence, and emergency health care are all tightly intertwined. The first 3 might be easy to ignore but the last 4 are *your* problem as a member of a first world country. The solution is not to simply take away the criminal atmosphere surrounding issue #1...

As a student of Economics, I admit that this is appealing and possibly beneficial if part of a larger solution, but only if.

Then make them free?

Drugs are staggeringly cheap to produce. That's why criminals can do it in the first place. Given the current cost of the "war on drugs", I suspect that if we redirected the enforcement cost to government manufacture, it would cost us a tiny fraction that we spend now, and we'd still see overall usage decline.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[khallow]

Are you trying to say that thieves have never made money?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

The drugs the doctor was involved with were decriminalized. They were "regulated". Just like alcohol, tobacco, beef jerky, soda, and potato chips are regulated.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[rahvin112]

In my state if they broke into my home I'm legally allowed to kill them. Their intent is irrelevant as the law allows me to assume they are there to kill me and to act accordingly.

In particular I remember the story of an older gentleman. A 19 year old man broke into the house through the sliding glass door in the middle of the night. The older gentleman in question was woken by the break-in and armed himself with a firearm. He heard the intruder approaching on the stairs and shot a single shot through the wall (without any warning) and the 19 year old fled. After the police arrived and searched they found the 19 year olds body about 50' from the house dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. The older gentleman was never charged or even threatened with indictment.

In fact just last year the legislature made it impossible for intruders to sue (although they likely couldn't win they could have still sued previously) homeowners due to injury they sustain in the act of a crime, including being shot.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[BlearyTruth]

"American's without Health Insurance who are being held captive by a system"

How is this being 'held captive', actually this sounds like 'has the opportunity to purchase healthcare services'.

"which exists first and foremost to make a profit from illness"

Wow that's a jump. What motivates any man to labor to produce a product or service for people who want to pay for those services? This is not a trick question, it's called a profit.

Do you actually think the state will be motivated by some other factor? You seem to trust the state more to watch out for your interests - and spend your money, than yourself. I for one do not. The evidence shows the state has a pretty poor record when it comes to making prudent decisions with our money. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise?

It appears that you have some relationship with a business (blarneygardencentre.com), do you provide your product or service for some other reason than profit? Is this business motivated by something other than profit? We all understand that it is not. Why is healthcare different?

Do you expect doctors and other health care professionals to do their job for any reason other than profit? Are they not allowed to make a living (what you call a "profit") from their product or service? This is a real question.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[mirix]

Something like a third to half of the cigarettes in Ontario and Quebec are smuggled in.

Smuggling is a fair bit lower in western provinces, afaik, under 10%, IIRC. Probably partially due to less close-border large population centres out there. Seem to recall that a lot of the smokes in the east are smuggled through some cross/near border indian reservation(s), although certainly not all of them.

Ontario, or Quebec, I forget... maybe both, had to actually cut their provincial cig taxes because smuggling was getting so high. I presume this is the same reason that cigs are 5 euros in germany and not 10 - because in eastern europe and balkans they are 2 euros or less... if they were much more expensive it would make smuggling very profitable, and probably actually reduce tax income for the government.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[rahvin112]

Homeless addicts are the exception not the rule and it's foolish to even suggest they are the stadnard (though it's a fun talking point the DEA uses).

There are estimates ranging from 8% to 10% of the population uses illicit drugs regularly. An even larger percentage in excess of 50% has tried an illicit drug in their lifetime. The vast majority of those people are perfectly stable users with employment and families.

Alcohol is a far worse drug than nearly every other illicit drug. Cigarettes are far more addictive than nearly every other illicit drug. Yet both are legal, the first because a ban was tried and it caused consumption to sky rocket and violence to explode, the second is legal due to economic dependence on not only the production but the sale.

Just like Alcohol prohibition legalization will remove the blackmarket, improve safety, reduce violence/crime and provide tax revenue to the government to support the negative side effects.

The war on drugs has created a police and prison apparatus that costs the tax payers close to 12 billion a year. What has the war on drugs done to personal liberty? Well for one the government now has incentive to go after individual users because they can then seize their assets. In fact, the system incentives going after users and leaving the dealers alone. We have more than a million people in jail that never committed a violent act and are in jail simply for possession of drugs. What the war on drugs has cost this country is simply not worth what it protects (virtually nothing, except for all the people making money off the police state it's created).

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[BlearyTruth]

A fair correction, yes words do mean things, don't they? :-)

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

i've met meth freaks. they're scary.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[bbelt16ag]

i prefer my spear and sword thank you.. they took that perticular right away along time ago with my right to vote. not sure why i havent left for mexico and join the cartel down there yet. I would make more money..

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

"American's without Health Insurance who are being held captive by a system"

How is this being 'held captive', actually this sounds like 'has the opportunity to purchase healthcare services'.

"which exists first and foremost to make a profit from illness"

Wow that's a jump. What motivates any man to labor to produce a product or service for people who want to pay for those services? This is not a trick question, it's called a profit.

Do you actually think the state will be motivated by some other factor? You seem to trust the state more to watch out for your interests - and spend your money, than yourself. I for one do not. The evidence shows the state has a pretty poor record when it comes to making prudent decisions with our money. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise?

It appears that you have some relationship with a business (blarneygardencentre.com), do you provide your product or service for some other reason than profit? Is this business motivated by something other than profit? We all understand that it is not. Why is healthcare different?

Do you expect doctors and other health care professionals to do their job for any reason other than profit? Are they not allowed to make a living (what you call a "profit") from their product or service? This is a real question.

Where's that '-1 brainwashed' mod when you need it?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[BlearyTruth]

Yea, clever. Answer the question Mr. "brainwashed".

Or does coward fit?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[ColdWetDog]

No, he was a doctor - he wrote prescriptions, just not for valid medical reasons.

So the 'patients' could likely not be prosecuted. But when you get a DEA license (and a state medical license) you agree to prescribe drugs for valid medical issues. That's why we have 'medical' marijuana. The bar is pretty low, but the bar is there.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[ColdWetDog]

The terminology the DEA uses is Classes 1 through 5 drugs

Class I's are the big no-no's

Substances in this schedule have a high potential for abuse, have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and there is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.

        Some examples of substances listed in schedule I are: heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), peyote, methaqualone, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (“ecstasy”).

Most of the stronger opiates (morphine, demerol, oxycodone) are Class II drugs. Weaker opiates and some benzo's are Class III. Weaker benzos and a whole raft of other oddities are in IV and V.

The higher the classification, the more stringent the reporting / prescribing rules. Most physicians / Nurse Practitioners / PA's in the US have Class 2-5 licenses. Trying to get a Class I ticket is likely to get you a nice, personal meeting with somebody with a gun, a tie and a DEA ID card.

Note that marijuana is listed right along with heroin (which is just substituted morphine). USA! USA! USA!

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[ColdWetDog]

Oops. Slashcode's lack of editing strikes again!

"The higher the classification" is actually wrong. The lower numbers are the more restricted drugs.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[MightyYar]

If the drugs were legal they would be far cheaper and people wouldn't need to steal to support their habit.

Let's say we let the drug price fall to the natural price, effects be damned. I'm not certain that you are correct that people would not need to steal. How is a junkie making a living? Certainly a long-time heroin user is not holding down a job? Wouldn't the junkie just need to steal less?

But even if I accept your reasoning, it wouldn't help the public health problems created by drug use.

And of course there is the social burden of millions of additional drug addicts.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

The higher the classification, the more stringent the reporting / prescribing rules.

There's also sub-categorization of some kind within the classifications, I assume based on the potency. A person can get a prescription for hydrocodone with little fuss -- but drugs like fentanyl (80-100x morphine) require a few in-person visits with the doctor, weight monitoring, drug testing, and a contract that dictates things unrelated to the drug. (Not that there's much point beyond making drug-testing companies richer; the people getting the drugs illegally are the ones abusing them, while the real patients like me aren't about to sell medication that protects us from near-unbearable pain levels.)

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Genda]

Forget the regular gun. A dart gun loaded we Succinylcholine. A powerful paralytic. Roid ranger goes down hard, no dead bodies, no fighting, no risk to bystanders or neighbors. Just bag and tag. You want to keep him breathing (he can't breath without help) and keep him alive until the welcome wagon arrives. Nonlethal, completely effective, and after a few hours, leaves no trace in the blood stream. The perfect asshole management technology. Everyone should have one.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Why would you want a drug without a prescription?

Two different reasons... Young adults take them recreationally a few times to experiment and enjoy the sensory experience, like feeling they're part of the universe or hallucinating ponies dancing across the ceiling. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe depicts their reasons really well.

Beyond that, people take illicit drugs in order to control unpleasant or intolerable symptoms from physical or mental disorders. In some cases the legal drugs are really inadequate or have nasty side-effects, in others it's because the person has a mental illness and doesn't trust psychiatrists to not lock them away, or because the person has given up on finding a doctor that can/will actually help with their condition.

...if you can't afford the drugs you need to keep you alive by the "Legal" route, it is a risk that you could be forced to take.

Very true... Out of fairness, I have to note that we do have coverage called Medicaid for people that are disabled by serious health problems -- it's just a deeply fucked-up system. It's available only to the disabled citizens that are living in serious poverty, so if a disabled person that's not in poverty can't pay for their medical needs, they can only get Medicaid if they give up almost everything they have and divorce their spouse if he/she works. Also, the system is trying to essentially find loopholes to throw as many of us under the bus as possible, because it's being overwhelmed with the much higher cost of covering the incredibly high number of pregnant & underage immigrants (or 1st/2nd generation) in need.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you won't even understand this, but taxes are theft of money, no money is produced by the government whatsoever. Never has been, never will be.

So you are saying if I came over to your home, took a bat to your face, and loaded up all your possessions in my truck... You wouldn't call the police to do anything about it? As long as I can disable you enough to prevent you to stop me, you're fine with that and won't press the issue further? No government assistance by utilizing law enforcement?

First, thank you!

Second, what kind of weak pussy bitch are you? Allowing anyone and everyone to so thoroughly walk all over you. Don't you have ANY self respect for yourself and for the things you spend time and money on obtaining? Doesn't sound like you do at all, just another coward who won't even report criminal abuses against you to the cops.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

This. We could also finally use the maintenance-dose treatment that has an extremely high success rate in other countries as addicts wishing to get clean could then focus on getting their life straightened out instead of obtaining the next hit to avoid withdrawal. It'd be a hell of a lot better than the cycle of homelessness, hospital, and jail that our current religion/AA-based approach delivers all but a sliver of the time...

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[adolf]

I am but one data point, but:

All of the people I've personally known to have made regular use of heroin or cocaine have also had regular jobs, and lived an honest (though often intoxicated) life. The thieves that I've personally known didn't tend to use these drugs, if they used any.

Your mileage may vary.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[MightyYar]

I know some people who went to jail, and they also used drugs - but most people use drugs. I can't say whether there is any correlation.

I will say that some people just don't function very well when addicted. I've seen alcohol completely destroy lives. I've seen a person destroyed by, and then remarkably recover from, a heroin addiction. I've seen some people use drugs recreationally forever and not seem to suffer for it (other than looking 50 when they are 35). I think it is very personality-dependent. I think I'd have to defer to statistics, of which I have none :)

In any case, crime is only a small portion of my argument. My wife works in health care and sees what drugs do to health on a regular basis. The counter-argument is that these people will die earlier and not use as many healthcare dollars overall - but of course if they were drug-free and productive the whole time they might not be using charity care in the first place.

You also have intoxicated people on the roads, operating machinery, building and designing infrastructure, etc. There are ways to deal with these areas of concern (drug tests, etc), but there is no denying that it costs society. We would be much better off without drug addiction, but then we would also be better off without murder and that isn't going anywhere either.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[ultranova]

Some drugs are more problematic than others. I really don't want someone who's been doing steroids for 3 years to stand in front of my house and ingest PCP.

Well, one side effect of decriminalizing drugs would be that we could require that the more dangerous ones could only be administered by licensed drug dens on-site, and that said dens would then be responsible for the user until the effect wears off. So the steroid-user wouldn't be taking PCP in front of your or anyone else's house; he would be enjoying (?) the effects in a padded cell under the monitoring of medical and security staff.

Sturdy padded walls beat tasers anytime :).

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

making crack $1 a hit instead of $10 a hit isn't going to make them less likely to want to steal to get it... they don't have a job and legalizing it won't change that.

So you're saying we might only reduce drug-related crime by 90%? Unless you expect 10x as many users, all likewise destitute, addicted, and thus driven to theft, it seems like a win.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[CanHasDIY]

Forget the regular gun. A dart gun loaded we Succinylcholine. A powerful paralytic. Roid ranger goes down hard, no dead bodies, no fighting, no risk to bystanders or neighbors. Just bag and tag. You want to keep him breathing (he can't breath without help) and keep him alive until the welcome wagon arrives. Nonlethal, completely effective, and after a few hours, leaves no trace in the blood stream. The perfect asshole management technology. Everyone should have one.

Yea, until the doped out assbag sues you for intentional infliction of emotional distress, or some such bullshit.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[tibman]

But you probably wouldn't want to be fucked like those in the parent post. Take the murder charge over 14 hours of violent rape.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[mcgrew]

It's been beaten to death (working on a pun here) but those with a drug habit ended up there in a lot of cases because they were already destitute and making crack $1 a hit instead of $10 a hit isn't going to make them less likely to want to steal to get it

Many, perhaps most, of them are mentally ill to begin with.

I think the best approach to the drug problem is twofold -- available treatment for those who want it (forced treatment doesn't work, an addict has to really want badly to quit or they won't) and perhaps more importantly, availability of mental health care. Many if not most addicts are subconsciencely self-medicating pre-existing mental illnesses, yet the drug establishment treats all of them as if the mental illness is the result of the drug use rather than the cause. In some cases this is correct, others not.

We should get politics and law enforcement out of the problem. It belongs in the hands of health professionals.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

Happens all the time. Did you know if you trip over a cracked sidewalk, owned and maintained by the city, in front of a house, you can sue the homeowner?

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

If you increase the price like that, then the black market will have an incentive to return.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[blackest_k]

There are at least a couple of ways of providing health care essentially public and private health care.
Public health care is usually funded by tax in one way or another and the money raised is spent to provide the health care.

In a private healthcare system the money is raised via premiums with a percentage going into providing health care and the rest as returns for the share holders. With no shareholders to reward public healthcare should be cheaper,

in actual fact since everyone pays into the public health care system in proportion to their means the end result is that everyone is covered and able to access health care.

Compared to a private system where Health Care is determined mostly by your income which results in a situation where many people have no access to health care.

Sadly a consequence of illness is usually a lowering of income which means you will likely reach a point where you can no longer afford to pay for private healthcare. So you have a strange situation where only healthy people can afford to pay for health care they do not need being as they are healthy, but when they become ill they then lose access to the health care they do need at that point due to being unable to work to pay the premiums.

Evidence that the state takes better care of me than me? I guess the fact that I am alive and relatively healthy instead of dying on the 18th of july 2009 is reasonable evidence that the state does take good care of me. I couldn't have paid for the treatment that got me through my heart attack I just didn't have the money and who would loan it to me since there was a 1 in 4 chance i would be dead within the following year, even after treatment. Thing is thou I have paid into the system for most of my adult life, I gave blood regularly until my health disqualified me too. There is something to be said for a life long relationship with my healthcare provider. Your Insurance company may have only been getting a few years payments from you when you need the services you have been paying for.

yes I do have a relationship with a business and it doesn't make me a cent, the thing it does do is keep me active and doing something useful. Maybe you think I would be better to sit on the couch watching daytime tv waiting to die.

Your final question yes I do expect a Healthcare professional to have reasons beyond their pay check for doing the job they do. I would hazard a guess most Health Care professionals would be offended that you think so low of them. Trouble is with the private health care businesses is the underlying reason is to make a profit, before the welfare of the people who need the services provided. Which is why you get news stories like the one this morning where after an unannounced inspection of a private care home for the elderly it was found that residents hadn't even been bathed in over a month, and that was the least of the neglect that came to light.

You seem to have confused your value as a human being as being measured by your income at some point you will realise that is a very empty measure. As people we are born, we live, and we die, Between being born and dying we have the opportunity to make a difference to the world maybe not a big difference but to know that you brought some good into the world is some comfort before you leave it.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Uberbah]

Decriminalization is NOT the answer. If we'd simply decriminalized alcohol in 1933 rather than outright legalizing it, we'd still have the bar bombings etc we had when it was completely illegal.

How do you figure. Violence from Prohibition resulted from a lucrative black market in confrontation with law enforcement. Decriminalization means the black market disappears.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[mcgrew]

Decriminalization means the black market disappears.

But it doesn't. If sales are against the law, then the only thing that changes is that users don't go to jail. As long as selling is illegal, there will be a black market. The black market only disappears when sales are legal.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anyone here is arguing that drug use is necessarily good for society. But is our money best spent on incarcerating drug users or providing social services to get people off of drugs and education to discourage use?

The money we spend on drug enforcement (additional officers, tactical equipment, enlarged court system, additional jails + their upkeep) is insanely huge and has little tangible benefit other than maybe keeping the worst users off the streets. But what would it be like if the same amount of money was spent on outreach programs, education, and intervention programs? Surely it would be better.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[MightyYar]

I agree completely. I think we should increase the street price with taxes, and then use those taxes exclusively for treatment and education.

I still think employers should be allowed to drug test - especially where lives are on the line.

Re:Dismiss every drug case

[Uberbah]

Hence the "decriminalization" part. If buyers and sellers are no longer criminals, and it's a plant that grows pretty much everywhere, the black market disappears overnight. Drug sales would fall under existing sales tax laws and intoxication would fall under existing traffic laws.

It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[icebike]

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

DEA: Buy two drives. One for yourselves, one for discovery. You can take it out of the taxes I paid last year. Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges.

The trifling cost aside, this seems to suggest that the DEA is aware that their case is fatally weak, and relies on sifting mountains of data that no jury on earth is capable of understanding in the hope of finding some faint pattern in the data that suggests intent. If there were obvious infractions, it would be easy to prove by pointing out 20 or 30 of them and call it a day. If it is so subtle that you need two terabytes to prove it, you probably don't have much of a case anyway.

Even if the Goods Doctor (see what I did there?) was guilty as hell, and the DEA is worried that purging some evidence and concentrating on specific acts might give grounds for appeal due to hiding evidence, the simple precaution of copying it to cheap off line storage should be sufficient.

Something is rotten about this whole story, and I suspect its a huge smoke screen for some other operation, or perhaps proceeding with the case would put methods or undercover operatives at risk, or require personnel that are current not available. Or maybe they know the Doctor is on his death bed or will soon contract some fatal disease, at which will make the whole point moot. Or maybe the doctor is singing like a canary these days.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice job of making stuff up. You'll fit right in here!

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[MickyTheIdiot]

No.. they're just like so many other professionals and too uppity to talk to their own I.T. guys.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[fiordhraoi]

Agreed. Even if you want to say that they need the storage network-available and in a RAID, you could buy an entry level commercial NAS for under a thousand dollars plus the cost of drives. So even with say, 6 drives, you're still looking at sub 3 grand for 10TB of usable storage, and that's assuming you probably paid too much for the drives. I would be that cost wise, that is about the equivalent maybe five to ten hours of a government lawyer's time, to say nothing of the investigators, etc, etc.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[fiordhraoi]

To clarify: Agreed that the storage issue sounds odd. Dunno about the rest of your conclusions. :)

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they probably lack real evidence, like a truckload of cocaine or something. Somebody drove that off and baked it into crack, which everybody who believes them is smoking.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[TFAFalcon]

Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges

I think those only apply to civil cases.

[

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Dunbal]

When the government does it, it's $1.39 million per drive.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[hawguy]

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite (either through tape or live replication).

But still, that shouldn't bring the cost beyond a few thousand dollars - which seems a small price to pay to keep a 5 year old case alive.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[TubeSteak]

The trifling cost aside, this seems to suggest that the DEA is aware that their case is fatally weak, and relies on sifting mountains of data that no jury on earth is capable of understanding in the hope of finding some faint pattern in the data that suggests intent. If there were obvious infractions, it would be easy to prove by pointing out 20 or 30 of them and call it a day. If it is so subtle that you need two terabytes to prove it, you probably don't have much of a case anyway.

He spent five years writing and endless stream of perscriptions for painkillers and sedatives/anti-anxiety meds.
So an alternative theory, which fits the facts, is that the two TB and boxes of files reflect the massive scale of the the Doctor's illegal acts.

Something is rotten about this whole story, and I suspect its a huge smoke screen for some other operation, or perhaps proceeding with the case would put methods or undercover operatives at risk, or require personnel that are current not available. Or maybe they know the Doctor is on his death bed or will soon contract some fatal disease, at which will make the whole point moot. Or maybe the doctor is singing like a canary these days.

This is conspiracy theory fabricated out of thin air.
A journalist wrote an article about the Doctor's habit of perscribing pills, then the fraud unit of the US Attorney General started looking into his practice.
The DEA and Medicare had all the perscriptions on file, the illegal acts were out in the open.
There's no smoke screen or undercover operations.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[icebike]

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. .

If you are going to quote me in order to pontificate on the obvious, at least quote the first TWO paragraphs.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

a RAID array? Of redundant disks?

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[JDG1980]

He spent five years writing and endless stream of perscriptions for painkillers and sedatives/anti-anxiety meds.

He's a doctor. He's legally entitled to do that if there is a legitimate medical reason. And in borderline cases, he's entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[hawguy]

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. .

If you are going to quote me in order to pontificate on the obvious, at least quote the first TWO paragraphs.

I didn't include the second paragraph because it doesn't change my point:

DEA: Buy two drives. One for yourselves, one for discovery. You can take it out of the taxes I paid last year. Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges [cooley.com].

When drive #1 suffers a head crash and massive corruption, how do you recover your data when drive #2 starts developing random block errors?

Without RAID and constant consistency check with automatic rebuild, two independent drives are only marginally better than one.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Something is rotten about this whole story

charges of illegally selling prescription drugs

Big Pharm. They invent and manufacture insanely addictive narcotics, and are using incentives and even extortion to aggressively market these life-destroyers, pushing doctors to over-prescribe when the drugs are NOT necessary.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[turbidostato]

"A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep."

Yes it is, of course it is. IT claims to be an engineering and engineering is about solving problems, rationally, and under current constrains.

That means that when the current option is dismissing a case and trash all data , a meagre 150US$ SATA disk is a perfectly suitable alternative.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[defcon-11]

Yes, but this data is evidence in a case, which means it has to follow chain of custody rules. They can't just through it onto a harddrive and put it on the shelf. They have to ensure the data is not tampered with to have it admissible in court, which probably means access to the drive and storage is restricted and monitored, and they probably have to hash the data and restrict and monitor access to the hash, so that it can be proved that the data is untampered.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[icebike]

So, customary and normal police procedures is all that is required.
Buy drives (maybe 4 or 6 for contingencies.
Fill them.
Put them back in the protective shipping containers.
Put that in the evidence box.
Seal box.
Sign the seal.
Send to evidence locker along with 4 zillion other boxes.
Done.

Cops. Do. This. EVERY. DAY.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[timeOday]

This whole slashdot story is a sham, and so is your speculation. If you just follow a couple links you can get to the motion itself. What it says is, they know exactly where the guy is, efforts to get Panama to extradite him have failed for years, and since the case is dead they want to close out the files.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with these silly stories. They're always bogus, and they always lead to pages and pages of wild conspiracy theories and political rants. You're making fools of yourselves.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[hawguy]

"A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep."

Yes it is, of course it is. IT claims to be an engineering and engineering is about solving problems, rationally, and under current constrains.

That means that when the current option is dismissing a case and trash all data , a meagre 150US$ SATA disk is a perfectly suitable alternative.

Well, no, it's still not a suitable alternative because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had? For the cost of a week's worth of an attorney's time you can store the data properly, no need to shop at Newegg for the cheapest possible solution.

IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions, it's about pointing out why a proposed solution is not reasonable. My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable in our environment despite what seems like a cost savings.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a redundant array of independent RAIDs on my network for added redundancy.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[torkus]

Don't these things have to go out for bid? :)

Bidding process cost >>> actual delivered service or hardware

Go government! On a more serious note, a prosumer NAS sounds nice but this is storing evidence for a federal investigation. The server must be able to pass an audit review, show detailed metadata, and show that data wasn't tampered with. Just like physical evidence is secured and has a chain of custody. If you question where that pound of heroin came from, you can show - signature to signature - how it got from your trunk to the DEA's analysis office to the courtroom evidence table and question each individual in the process if necessary.

Just because the evidence is digital doesn't mean you can throw out all those requirements by slapping truecrypt on a NAS or eSATA drive. If anything, it's more important because digital information is easier to manipulate - especially from afar. It's much harder to replace that brick of coke with flour from outside the evidence locker unless you brought your portal gun.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[sl4shd0rk]

I suspect its a huge smoke screen for some other operation

It's probably not that interesting. The DEA is most likely the same as every other large user-base of users. Storing their cases in word docs, spreadsheets and Jet databases and saving them to the root of the C:, the Desktop, network drives, laptops, etc. Have countless directories named "New Folder" and "DEA stuff" in all levels of the filesystem along with sharing access to "My Documents"

Sure there's 14TB of data, but I'll bet nobody knows quite where the hell it's all at and not all that willing to dig through it all to find it.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[icebike]

None of that is a valid reason to dismiss the case.

Once an indictment is issued, the statute of limitation clock is stopped. It can sit dormant until the death of the subject. It costs nothing to move the case records to storage, and let them sit there for 20 years.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Forty Two Tenfold]

+1.21 Interesting. Why AC?

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[turbidostato]

"Well, no, it's still not a suitable alternative"

Yes, it is.

"because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had?"

In any first world county (and USA allegedly is) the heaviest costs are always those of personnel. You *already* have spent the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of hours needed to collect the evidence. If you *now* just dismish the case, it becomes a *lost* sink cost. Now, the MTBF of a consummer market HDD against the difderential of all the already incurred costs versus the delta of adding those because of the trial is enormously possitive such as *even* a Newegg HDD makes sense.

"IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions"

Of course not. And throwing away millions in already spent costs becouse you think unprofessional to store the data in a single HDD -provided that's the only option, is absolutly unreasonable.

"My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable"

Apples to oranges. What if your boss offers you the alternative of Netgear switches or no switches at all? Because that's what we are talking here.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[mcgrew]

perhaps proceeding with the case would put methods or secret police at risk

FTFY, call a spade a spade. If you have secret police, whatever the name, you live in a police state. Of course, without sex laws and gambling laws and drug laws, you would need no secret police. Which is the real reason those laws are on the books.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[geoffball]

There's more to this than a couple disk drives. You need RAID. An enterprise level datastore: EMC, Hitachi, etc. Replication and/or backup. Probably encryption and other security software to protect the data. Chain of evidence handling data. Network and backup resources. The database and application software itself. Support contracts for all of the above hardware and software. The compensation package of the workers (or payments to the contractors) who operate all of this equipment and software. The DEA like many non-IT businesses probably doesn't have the money to put into IT that it should and/or can. It's probably had to spend time and resources moving data around as the Federal government has consolidated its data center footprint. Yeah to my division of my company 5 TB is a drop in the bucket. We piss that kind of money a couple times a week. We don't notice most of these incremental expenses, because we do all this stuff at serious scale and volume. We have a couple million bucks a year for storage capital expenditures.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have drives sitting in archives (out of computers, on the shelf in sealed bags) since 1995.
They were put there to hold original Autocad files for electrical systems of buildings.

Periodically we have to dredge these up and extract copies of some documents. None has ever given us a bit of trouble.

A drive out of a computer in a sealed environment is an amazing storage media. Virtually zero bit rot regardless of what the end-of-the-world doom sayers tell you about decaying magnetic fields. Spinning storage is at far greater risk than storage sitting in a disconnected machine or bare drive.

The biggest problem is remembering to keep at least one controller that is capable or running these older drive types. In fact, that is the only reason we ever copy drives to newer media; simply because mfm controllers and the machines that can accept them are becoming extinct.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[icebike]

Dump it to flat files on an external drive or two.
Put it in storage in the police evidence locker. No need for encryption.
Evidence locker tags and signatures are good enough for any judge in the country.

If after the doctor sneaks back into the country in 20 years and gets apprehended, and you find you can't read the drives or someone stole them, you dismiss the case THEN, not now.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[s.petry]

Maintenance on the drives is higher than tape, why not buy a nice LTO library so that you can keep all your cases off disk and hands off till needed? A tape drive may cost more, but no need to trash other cases with mountains of evidence also. Also costs go down as data increases.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[hawguy]

"Well, no, it's still not a suitable alternative"

Yes, it is.

"because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had?"

In any first world county (and USA allegedly is) the heaviest costs are always those of personnel. You *already* have spent the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of hours needed to collect the evidence. If you *now* just dismish the case, it becomes a *lost* sink cost. Now, the MTBF of a consummer market HDD against the difderential of all the already incurred costs versus the delta of adding those because of the trial is enormously possitive such as *even* a Newegg HDD makes sense.

That sounds like an argument for storing the data on a properly backed up storage array instead of a risky single-drive solution. They've already spend hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars of dollars accumulating the data, and will likely spend hundreds of thousands more to take the case to trial - why risk hundreds of thousands of dollars to save $10,000?

"IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions"

Of course not. And throwing away millions in already spent costs becouse you think unprofessional to store the data in a single HDD -provided that's the only option, is absolutly unreasonable.

Throwing away millions to save $10,000 seems just as unreasonable as throwing away millions to save $139 so there's undoubtedly more to the story.

"My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable"

Apples to oranges. What if your boss offers you the alternative of Netgear switches or no switches at all? Because that's what we are talking here.

I'd leave the company because then I'm no longer an IT professional, I'd be an IT "hacker" hired to cobble together solutions that may or may not work, but are guaranteed to cause headaches down the line. I've gone into startups that had homegrown networks built on such gear and while it works for a while, it inevitably causes problems and eventually as the company grows, they are forced to rearchitect the network properly - in a 20 person office, no one cares so much if you have to power cycle the switch (again), but when you grow to a sizable office and can't reach their budget and forecasting server when the Marketing guys share a large video file among themselves, suddenly it's costing real money to have dozens of people costing $100+/hour sitting on their butts for 30 minutes a day waiting for the network to come back.

I'm not going to use consumer grade $200 network switches to network a large corporate office environment (I might not use Cisco, but I'm not going to build it on cheap $200 switches), nor am I going to store data that's worth millions of dollars on a single (or two) 3TB hard drives. That's called being set up for failure, and I'll leave before I let myself become the fall-guy for an under funded solution that was "engineered" by my boss looking up prices on Newegg.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[hawguy]

I have drives sitting in archives (out of computers, on the shelf in sealed bags) since 1995.
They were put there to hold original Autocad files for electrical systems of buildings.

Periodically we have to dredge these up and extract copies of some documents. None has ever given us a bit of trouble.

A drive out of a computer in a sealed environment is an amazing storage media. Virtually zero bit rot regardless of what the end-of-the-world doom sayers tell you about decaying magnetic fields. Spinning storage is at far greater risk than storage sitting in a disconnected machine or bare drive.

The biggest problem is remembering to keep at least one controller that is capable or running these older drive types. In fact, that is the only reason we ever copy drives to newer media; simply because mfm controllers and the machines that can accept them are becoming extinct.

I have drives that have been spinning for over 5 years without a disk error, and drives that have failed after a month, 6 months, a year, etc.

I don't trust my home mp3 collection to a single drive, nor would I trust data worth millions of dollars (or a criminal prosecution) to a single drive or even a single location. All of our important corporate data is replicated offsite (and is also saved to tape).

I've pulled 2 year old PC's out of storage (stored in a climate controlled datacenter) and had drives fail to spin up even though they all worked fine when they were stored. Keeping the drive powered off is no guarantee of data integrity, but if you keep the drive powered on and scrubbed you know that the data is secure. (with 2 backup copies of the data via RAID-6 or RAID-DP)

For powered off storage, I trust tapes a lot more than disk drives.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, without sex laws and gambling laws and drug laws, you would need no secret police. Which is the real reason those laws are on the books

The Government hates competition, and who do you think funds much of the Politicians in government and those lobbies for those laws? Oh.. that's right.. Big Pharma.. Maybe that was your point, it's hard to tell.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Mr.CRC]

So when Drs. prescribe too much medicine even though they are scientifically trained and should know better than to give someone something for long enough to get hooked, take an oath to do no harm yet break their oath, and when the user gets hooked on the medicine in the internet age when every detail of information is available at your fingertips--even to the people in the poorest of countries--it is the fault of "Big Pharm?"

I suppose "Big Oil" puts a gun to your head and makes you fill up at the gas station too?

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[lasvegasseo]

When the government does it, it's $1.39 million per drive.

1.39 million per drive?!? Egads..that seems just a biiiit high...

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

the Goods Doctor (see what I did there?)

First rule of humor: do not ever point out the joke. Either it's strong enough to stand on its own, or you shouldn't have made it in the first place.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[TubeSteak]

This wasn't a borderline case. Here's some news coverage from back in the day:
Drugging The Poor

Angulo and four other Miami-Dade doctors accounted for about $4 million of the $31 million Medicaid spent statewide on the drug [OxyContin] last year, according to the Sun-Sentinel's analysis.

.
Doctor Hit With Pill Ban By State

The department of health order said state investigators found an "extensive and troubling" pattern in which Angulo prescribed OxyContin and other dangerous drugs in "excessive quantities to many of his patients, including multiple members of the same families and to persons of varying ages who shared the same address."

And here's the Florida Dept of Health Emergency Order (PDF) being reported upon in the previous story

These cases are usually extremely clear cut, because the records are already on file.
The good news is that better enforcement is reducing the use of Oxy.
The bad news is that it's being replace on the street with heroin.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Toad-san]

Agreed. Something is rotten. As you say, buy a couple of big hard drives and just wait the bastard out.

In any event, what's so difficult about the concept, "Gather enough evidence to convict the bastard, and then stop."

Doh.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Grishnakh]

What if they skipped the entry-level commercial NAS, and went straight to whatever EMC's most insanely-overpriced offering is?

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they already got bitched out by their IT guy about how he has to pay $60 for an 8th of weed and if they ask again their quota is getting cut in half.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, they're dropping the case against him for something that nothing to do with 3.99TB of irrelevant files.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[catmistake]

I suppose "Big Oil" puts a gun to your head and makes you fill up at the gas station too?

Poor comparison. For the metaphor to make sense, you'd have to be a gas reseller. Let's say the large oil companies came out with a new product. In order to force the gas stations to sell it, all they'd need do is raise the prices of the standard products slightly, unless the gas station agrees to sell some amount of the new product. If the station hits that nut, the standard products get 'discounted' down to the normal, regular prices. Otherwise, if the station doesn't agree to sell the new product or doesn't sell enough, they're paying premium prices on the standard products and forced to raise their retail prices slightly, causing customers to get gas elsewhere to save a dime.

Patients generally aren't doctor-shopping (unless they're already addicts). Pharmaceutical companies offer inventives to doctors/hospitals using similar tactics. A good case-study of what the GP seems to be talking about is OxyContin. This is a relatively new drug formulation that could have been a miracle drug in specific instances of chronic pain or terminal patients, but Big Pharm pushed this pain-killer in a huge way for years under the FDA's radar, giving doctors incentives to overprescribe, and within a few short years on the market we have pregnant women robbing pharmacies to get at it. Big Pharm and the physicians they manipulated effectively created a new narcotic drug epidemic and were successful in massively boosting sales and profits on a drug formulation that initially had a limited application. Subsequently, the drug has been again reformulated, hopefully in a way that is a disincentive for abuse, but new stories are now coming out that its been replaced on the street with a different new drug, a time-release pill formulation of synthetic morphine... once again, a formulation that is completely unnecessary with questionable benefits to legitimate patients and is already proving to have an enourmous abuse vector. But Big Pharm needed a new synthetic morphine because the old synthetic morphine's patent had expired, which reminds us of why they needed synthetic morphine in the first place, because formulations of regular old morphine (which still works just fine and is regarded as a gold standard of severe pain relief) predate the drug patent system by a century.

Once you're hooked to a strong narcotic, no one needs to put a gun to your head for the body to want the drug. It changes the chemistry of your brain forever and the craving for it never goes away.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the operation lead to convictions across the country. His particular indictment lead to convictions for all, except Dr. Angulo and one defendant that died before trial. The doctor is a Panamanian citizen. He fled back to his home country.

Panama is unwilling to extradite their own citizens, so Dr. Angulo is beyond the reach of US justice.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Statement #1
A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep.

Statement #2
It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite

How is #2 supposed to function at all when you state #1?
Does not RAID store it's data and parity over a bunch of single disk drives? Isn't that the idea behind the "A" in RAID?

If RAID can not utilize disk drives for block storage because they are not someplace you want to store data you wish to keep, then where do you plan on storing all that parity data/duplicated data to detect and filter errors/copy in part or whole to take off site?

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Actually, studies show the opposite -- doctors undertreat pain in patients with long-term conditions, and that is life-destroying. It wasn't until I told my doctor honestly that my pain was persistently serious enough to be making me suicidal that she finally gave me something stronger than vicodin; she told me at the time that there are extremely high barriers to prescribing any substantial narcotics, and the added paperwork & government hassles deter most doctors. Given everyone else I've found online that has even vaguely similar birth defects is being left to suffer even when it means being unable to do much beyond lie on the couch, I'd say she's right.

Re:It smells, like yesterday's fish!

[hawguy]

Statement #1
A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep.

Statement #2
It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite

How is #2 supposed to function at all when you state #1?
Does not RAID store it's data and parity over a bunch of single disk drives? Isn't that the idea behind the "A" in RAID?

If RAID can not utilize disk drives for block storage because they are not someplace you want to store data you wish to keep, then where do you plan on storing all that parity data/duplicated data to detect and filter errors/copy in part or whole to take off site?

If you know what the "A" means in RAID, why don't you know what the "R" means? Redundant implies (well, outright says) that data is stored on redundant disks (nevermind that RAID-0 has no redundancy, since R * 0 = 0). When you write your data to a RAID array, the write operation is not complete until the RAID controller guarantees that the data has been written to multiple disks (or to NVRAM (sometimes mirrored across redundant controllers) where it will eventually make its way to multiple disks). Therefore, once the write is complete, the data exists on multiple disks, so there's no contradiction between statement #1 and #2.

Logically (as opposed to physically), at no point in time is my data ever written to a single disk. As soon as the write operation is complete, the data is guaranteed to be redundantly written to multiple disks. (the guarantee may depend on the RAID controller writing it out later, but it's still making a guarantee that the data will always have a backup copy on more than one disk). There are certainly RAID implementations that will lie and claim that the data is safe, even before the full RAID stripe has been completely (or at all) written, or while the data is still in non battery protected cache RAM, but if you're using such a controller, you're accepting the risk.

If you're going to nitpick over semantics, don't pick one letter of the acronym and pretend that the rest of the letters don't mean anything.

Someone is going to be "disappeared"

[ilikenwf]

Just watch...

Note to the DEA

[Sparticus789]

I guess $150 is too much for the DEA to spend.

Note to criminals: To avoid prosecution, buy a few 2TB hard drives and fill them with dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/hardrive1

Re:Note to the DEA

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no!

Make some TrueCrypt volumes with empty files named things like "cooked books.xls" and "illegal activities.txt", open them a few dozen times so the names get logged, then forget the password to the volume.

Bonus: Make a hidden truecrypt volume with the same file names, except have those be real... cough up the key, and gloat that the files are just dummies...

Re:Note to the DEA

[Anonymous Coward]

Your command would yield a file named hardrive1 in the /mnt folder.

Honestly formatting ext4 would probably be enough to keep these morons away from your data. But if you want to make honeypots put the effort into creating large files and then encrypting them. And name them: /soccer scores/munic/.deleted/.cache/workfiles/work_videos

Make them think they are 1337 hackers for discovering your highly encrypted large files generated with /dev/random.

sooo...

[MickyTheIdiot]

Okay... so based on that the DEA's storage capability is about 40 TB.

Well... that's a little bit less than stellar.

Re:sooo...

[icebike]

On the other hand.....

Maybe a good thing. If we can't limit the size of government lets limit the size of their data storage.

The DEA

[koan]

Is underfunded because they aren't there to stop drug trafficking, but rather to stop "unapproved" drug smugglers, some one/group in political power makes a lot of untraceable money by selling drugs, this is why they can not be made legal, the drug money finances black ops with money they don't have to ask congress for or get any approval on.

Re:The DEA

[Anonymous Coward]

Iran-Contra

Yep, been going on for a long time, and of course Republicans are behind it.

Re:The DEA

[Mr.CRC]

But liberals would never get involved in such slime, right? http://classicalvalues.com/2012/08/terrorists-dealing-drugs http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=209934

Re:The DEA

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get caught up in labels like "liberal" people are people, some good some bad.

Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems to me to be evidence that the DEA is purposefully underfunded... I mean sure, a "War On Drugs" is all well and good, until you give the feds the resources they need to start busting the bankers.

Re:Funding

[Mr.CRC]

They are over-funded, since their budget is > $0. The feds have the resources to bust the bankers. They don't want to. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. The gov. borrowing scheme and the primary broker dealers are like a snake eating its tail. This setup won't end because of reform. It has to collapse.

Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[Baloroth]

I noticed the summary conveniently forgets to mention that there are also several hundred boxes of paper evidence. The electronic evidence is only one piece they mentioned: claiming, as the summary does, that they are dropping it due to lack of electronic data storage is somewhat misleading. And of course if Panama isn't going to extradite him anyways, which seems extremely likely, keeping the case open is a waste of resources no matter how you look at it.

And of course it isn't like these are 2 terabytes of Blu-ray movies: it's probably mostly text and image files, and that is a lot of text documents to keep track of and make sure are backed up on a regular basis, with a full chain of custody to ensure they aren't being tampered with and whatnot. Sure, 40 TB sounds like a small amount of data, but then again if you introduce 4 or 5 backups with tampering resistance... it suddenly starts looking like quite a bit.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[DanTheStone]

I noticed the summary conveniently forgets to mention that there are also several hundred boxes of paper evidence.

From the summary:

In addition, information associated with the case had managed to fill 'several hundred boxes' of paper documents

Next time you decide to bash the summary, read it first.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[hawguy]

I noticed the summary conveniently forgets to mention that there are also several hundred boxes of paper evidence.

When you already own entire warehouses to hold evidence, storing a few hundred boxes of paper is not expensive

And of course it isn't like these are 2 terabytes of Blu-ray movies: it's probably mostly text and image files, and that is a lot of text documents to keep track of and make sure are backed up on a regular basis, with a full chain of custody to ensure they aren't being tampered with and whatnot. Sure, 40 TB sounds like a small amount of data, but then again if you introduce 4 or 5 backups with tampering resistance... it suddenly starts looking like quite a bit.

Any of the major storage vendors will be happy to sell you a WORM storage array that prevents tampering and has remote replication.

http://www.emc-centera.com/more-about-emc-centera.htm
https://communities.netapp.com/community/products_and_solutions/netapp_integrated_data_protection/blog/2011/12/19/netapp-snaplock-where-compliance-and-efficiency-meet

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[gstoddart]

I noticed the summary conveniently forgets to mention that there are also several hundred boxes of paper evidence.

But, really, is hundreds of boxes of paper records even that unusual in these kind of cases? (And, TFS actually does mention them, so it was either updated or you didn't read far enough.)

Sure, 40 TB sounds like a small amount of data, but then again if you introduce 4 or 5 backups with tampering resistance... it suddenly starts looking like quite a bit.

Industry handles these kind of numbers all the time. I know people who work in SAN stuff, and between the disks, the tape backups (which go off-site under lock and key) and whatnot ... 40TB of data, even with good backups, is in this day and age a manageable number.

It's not like it's petabytes or exabytes ... it's frigging 2TB of source data, plus a few hundred boxes of data. I should think a few hundred boxes of paper is a slow week for some government departments.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[fustakrakich]

...Panama isn't going to extradite him anyways...

That shouldn't matter. They didn't extradite Noriega either. If the DEA really wants him, they'll go and get him.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[icebike]

Exactly.

Further, storing several hundred boxes of paper documents is not a huge financial burden. Finding it again may be problematic, but the government has plenty of document storage facilities. Scan them all in and store them at the CIA's Utah Data Center.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[Talderas]

That's essentially what happened.

Panama will not extradite its citizens so there's no way the US will get him as long as he stays in Panama or only visits non-extradition countries. So the evidence, both digital and physical is just sitting there wasting space when it's unlikely that the case will go forward. So the case was dismissed and they get to dispose of all the evidence. The other thing to note is that the case was dismissed with prejudice so it cannot be reopened. The reality was that the only purpose to keeping the case open was to keep the doctor bottled up in Panama.

The case itself was a company setup to basically gives prescriptions to anyone who asked for them without consulting or even visiting the doctor and there's plenty of specific evidence regarding this doctor never meeting people that he gave prescriptions to.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[Anonymous Coward]

And this, in a nutshell, is why the current insanity of prohibition will eventually end: the expense is unsustainable.
Let me spell it out a little: the police forces and all their expenses (as illustrated by TFA), courts, jails, etc.
Then there are the human costs: the USA has (per capita) the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Are USAians more evil than the rest of the planet? I dont really think so.
We realise that alcohol prohibition was a mistake, but somehow we dont recognise the same mistake WRT
the other drugs, probably because those other drugs are much less popular and, until recently, were somewhat
restricted to certain minority groups.
Basically the problem is you cannot get people to respect and obey laws which:
(a) dont make much sense, and (b) cannot be fully enforced in a "free" society.
Don't misunderstand me: I know that some drugs can be used in very dangerous ways,
but prohibition laws are exactly the wrong way to deal with them
--
A.C.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[gstoddart]

Which then sounds like he could readily come back to the US.

So is the message here (guilty or not, because I have no idea) to skip off to a non-extradition country until they can't afford to keep your case open, and then come back a free man as the charges have been dropped with prejudice?

And, as I said elsewhere, I find it really hard to believe that it's beyond their means to keep storing this stuff. That just doesn't sound right. Storing large amounts of data is something the government should have a lot of experience in.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time you decide to bash the summary, read it first.

He may have meant to say the title, not the summary:

DEA Lack of Data Storage Results In Dismissed Drug Case

Documents are "documents" or "evidence" not to be confused with "Data Storage". Or perhaps this is splitting hairs.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[turbidostato]

"Panama will not extradite its citizens so there's no way the US will get him as long as he stays in Panama"

Maybe Noriega can illustrate you about the options.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[Talderas]

My gut feeling on the situation is that they're trying to get rid of the digital evidence which is probably more or less scanned copies of the hundreds of boxes of evidence along with getting the case dropped without prejudice so perhaps lure the doctor back into the US or an extradition country so they could reopen the case and get him arrested for trial.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[Mr.CRC]

If you keep the safer drugs like marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and meth legal, then the incentive to use really dangerous stuff like "bath salts" which have no medical or scientific data about their effects will be nil.

I know it may sound crazy to some to call heroin, cocaine, and meth "safe" but the fact is that they are primarily dangerous when impure due to being illegal, and when abused in large quantities. And the danger is mainly just getting addicted, rather than any serious inherent toxicity. Meth is an exception--but it's still not that bad--most of the damage is due to lack of nutrition. Neurotoxicity in reasonable doses can even be largely mitigated via antioxidants and NMDA receptor agonists. Meth is available by prescription as Desoxyn. It can't be that bad if it's "government approved" right?

People will abuse drugs no matter what we do. But the record is pretty clear that most people who clean up even after pretty horrendous addiction histories, can successfully recover the use of their minds and bodies. People are pretty tough. It's illegal drug impurities, black market crime, and crap like cathinones with little or no medical history of use that is scary.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[Anonymous Coward]

And then if you do ever manage to get hold of the guy watch the case get dismissed instantly because you broke chain of custody on all the evidence. Cheaper to just dismiss it now instead of paying for the effort to make sure it will get dismissed.

Re:Don't forget the hundreds of boxes of paper

[complete loony]

Speaking of custody chains for data, shouldn't they just hash the data when they duplicate your drive, cryptographically sign it and print a receipt?

40 terabytes ought to be enough for anybody...

[Anonymous Coward]

40 terabytes ought to be enough for anybody...

What the hell?

[gstoddart]

These materials include two terabytes of electronic data (which consume approximately 5 percent of DEA's world-wide electronic storage capacity)

I'm sorry, but a major government agency can't afford two terabytes of data?

What happens to all of the stuff they seize and sell off? There should be no good reason why they can't have enough funds to pay for this.

If 2TB is 5%, then they've got, what, 40TB total? At one point last year on a project we were using almost 100TB with various backups and the like, but we're easily using 40-50TB right now. This is a solved problem.

I realize large-scale enterprise storage gets a little more spendy, but surely they have tape backup technology or can afford some disks for a SAN.

This is like finding out they only really have 10 cars to share among themselves or something. It makes me wonder if this is the "real" reason they're looking to drop the case. It just sounds improbable they can't manage this.

Re:What the hell?

[gstoddart]

LOL, ok, so TFS even said 40TB. :-P

Re:What the hell?

[the eric conspiracy]

> I'm sorry, but a major government agency can't afford two terabytes of data?

I like it. We need more agencies like this.

2 billion dollar budget and 2TB is too much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.. amazon cloud service .. 2TB 1000$ per year. Problem solved. Government incompetence at it's peak right there folks.

Re:2 billion dollar budget and 2TB is too much?

[Feyshtey]

You grossly underestimate government incompetence.

Re:2 billion dollar budget and 2TB is too much?

[biodata]

For me the question is why would you want someone to spend $1000 per year of your money maintaining something that might be evidence against someone who might be guilty of something that might have harmed people? There are probably a large number of people who might be guilty of something and might have more than 2GB of data that might prove it, but do we want to pay to keep it all?

Re:2 billion dollar budget and 2TB is too much?

[Anonymous Coward]

You grossly underestimate government incompetence.

At least we now know not to underestimate yours... lol

What no confiscated assets?

[DarkOx]

Come one DEA, can't just say someone's data center was used in drug trafficking and just confiscate whatever they need and boom problem solved? I mean seams to cover the motor pool.

Absolutely not!

[Anonymous Coward]

The war on drugs is a disaster. Decriminalize all drugs, since that is the only thing that leads to a decrease in drug use and an increase in treatment.

I own stock in prison companies and if we decriminalize all drugs, then what am I to do?! And then there are all those cops, prosecutors, rehab, and the thousands of people who depend on drugs being illegal for their livings!

And then there is the morality of it all. Alcohol is different I say!

And it's important that someone who's been caught several times with a joint go to jail for the rest of their life because we all know stoners are causing all this trouble in society - being all mellow and such rot! They should be in the rat race - working themselves to death to make sure that the 1% keep their socioeconomic status. Don't those pot heads know that they are destroying the fabric of society?!

And the Bible says somewhere "Thou shalt not smoke a toke. Thous shalt not do blow." and some others; which means drugs aren't Christian - except for alcohol. Jesus had red wine for blood so drinking red wine is drinking Jesus' blood and therefore will get you into heaven. Really! It's in the Bible!

Enough for now. I just wish you anti-society hippies would keep your mouths shut!

Re:Absolutely not!

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Bible says somewhere "Thou shalt not smoke a toke. Thous shalt not do blow." and some others; which means drugs aren't Christian - except for alcohol.

Interestingly enough, the Rastafari cite a Biblical verse that, when suitably translated (and you squint a little bit) reads "smoke weed".

Re:Absolutely not!

[Sponge Bath]

Alcohol is different I say!

Alcohol has been tied to skinny dipping Republican congressmen. That's a pretty strong argument for prohibition.

Re:Absolutely not!

[Genda]

Newt Gingrich in the buff in the Sea of Galilee... I think I need that mental picture electro shocked out of my head... thanks for that!

move DEA to google docs cloud storage.

[Anonymous Coward]

open doors goverment! FOIA request? => Share doc with requestor

I added 2TB to my DVR before the Olympics . . .

[DutchUncle]

. . . so I have to figure it's the boxes of papers. After all, evidence is supposed to be tracked better than leaving it in a self-storage closet.

Properly backed up storage costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Properly backed up storage costs about $8,000 per terabyte a year. For backup, checking, replacement, and spinning drive costs.

Re:Properly backed up storage costs

[hawguy]

Properly backed up storage costs about $8,000 per terabyte a year. For backup, checking, replacement, and spinning drive costs.

I may have understated the cost by saying "A few thousand dollars", but I know that my incremental cost to add 2TB of storage is around $3500 including the cost of disk at both the primary and remote site (but excluding bandwidth). This assumes that I add an entire disk shelf at a time, which is more than 2TB.

Stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

First, 2TB is miniscule by modern standards. Second, if all 2TB is needed to convict, then something is wrong. The DEA has put people in prison for life without parole for just a few documents and some supporting physical evidence. If they can't find something actionable in a few minutes, then they never had a case to begin with. Blaming it on the size of the data set is foolish. They should run with the evidence that first led them to believe he was committing a crime.

Article is baseless speculation

[tomhath]

FTFA:

Yet the motion to dismiss refers to storage of evidence related to Angulo’s case as an “economic and practical hardship.” The reference to “practical” may be key

No, the practical means the guy is in Panama, and Panama has already said they're not going to extradite him. So quit wasting time and resources - drop the case and move on.

Re:Article is baseless speculation

[kelemvor4]

FTFA:

Yet the motion to dismiss refers to storage of evidence related to Angulo’s case as an “economic and practical hardship.” The reference to “practical” may be key

No, the practical means the guy is in Panama, and Panama has already said they're not going to extradite him. So quit wasting time and resources - drop the case and move on.

Which is what they did from the sound of it, they just offered up some lame excuse about that thar computer related stuff to placate the republicans.

Most likely he made a large campaign donation

[Anonymous Coward]

....thus effectively buying a pardon.

Re:Most likely he made a large campaign donation

[Anonymous Coward]

....thus effectively buying a pardon.

Only if mitt the twitt wins the election.

Re:Most likely he made a large campaign donation

[Anonymous Coward]

Grow up. The current administration already dropped the case.

everyone here can buy the storage for $100's

[a2wflc]

But don't forget the chain of custody requirements for evidence to be used in court. You need to physically store it securely. Provide an audit-able method for prosecutors (and others) to access it if they need. Provide a way to get it to court with a full report of custody/access. Any evidence costs much more to keep than you and I keeping the same paper or electronic data. And that's a good thing.

My fortune 100 company spends many 100x as much per GB to store customer data (web PII) than I spend to store my personal data. And that's just the direct $/GB/month, it doesn't include the process we have on top to use the data. I've argued a few times that it's overkill, but it's one area that I'm ok with the lawyer's replies when we disagree.

Let's get real here, DEA.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

In 2010, your budget was US$2,415,000,000. ($2.4B or so).

You can go on fucking Amazon and get a 6 TB RAID for $376, mmmmkay? So, all you need to do is get eight of these little puppies and that will give you 48 TBs of RAIDed drives. It will cost you all of $3008. And then you just need to hire some junior flunkie to keep an eye on the thing. Pay him or her, say $50k. It's not a tough job. So, with benefits etc. it will cost, say $100k to hire them, and that includes buying the arrays and a computer to track them. Now, let's do the math. This is going to cost less than 1/2 of 1/100th of 1 percent of your budget to protect all of your precious data, in a RAID no less.

Face it - the DEA is either lying, completely full of bullshit, or so hopelessly incompetent they should all be fired.

Re:Let's get real here, DEA.

[Zrako]

Face it - the DEA is either lying, completely full of bullshit, or so hopelessly incompetent they should all be fired.

Or all of the above ;)

Re:Let's get real here, DEA.

[UltraZelda64]

I would prefer to see the worthless government organization completely dissolved. Firing the whole group just to hire more lunatics wouldn't do shit.

Re:Let's get real here, DEA.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

They're gearing up to fight for more funding in next year's budget. "Senator, we had to drop a case against a dangerous drug dealer because we couldn't afford enough data storage!" "Okay, I know computer stuff is expensive. Here's a check with an extra couple of zeroes on it. Oh, and there happens to be an excellent data storage company in the great state of East Dakota."

Re:Let's get real here, DEA.

[aztracker1]

That was my thought.. I put together a 12x3TB NAS for around $2K earlier this year (20TB using 11drives with Raid-Z2 and a hot spare)... I can't beleive that they can't come up with a better solution for this... hell a couple 2-3TB external USB drives would be a few hundred and easily hold all the data in the case, and could be shipped to different locations for backup/redundancy. This is a total f-ing fail.

Roll it to tape?

[twotacocombo]

About $40 on Amazon gets you an LTO5 cartridge that would hold the entire case's data. This whole thing doesn't pass the sniff test.

Simple Solution

[maroberts]

Just use all those servers the US confiscated from MegaUpload to save your data on

Anyone being boring and pointing out they were only "borrowed" will be killed by custard pie squad.

The solution!

[kelemvor4]

For a mere $2200 bucks they can double their storage. Ok so they might need to spend 500 bucks more for a case to contain the drives.

Drives: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST320005N4A1AS-RK-Retail/dp/B002AQSVDA/ref=sr_1_13?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1345488036&sr=1-13&keywords=hard+drive

Case: http://www.mountainmods.com/extended-ascension-cyo-custom-computer-case-p-493.html?osCsid=lobk16afmjb8rq8kt13ns7bsc3

Now that I've solved the DEA's problems, I'm not sure what to do with the rest of my day.

An Exception to a Rule

[Scarletdown]

This must be the first time where preponderance of evidence (standard used for civil cases) was effectively applied to a criminal case and caused dismissal instead of the reasonable doubt standard.

Or did this not ever even go to court?

What? Am I reading that right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got TWO 3 TB hard drives from Amazon for right around $300. They are sitting right here on my desk, not doing much of anything. I wouldn't want the DEA to have them, but I can't believe that I read this right. I keep looking again and again to see if it is peta and not tera.

God told man, And a man told me

[Anonymous Coward]

They can drop the case. They know they can, but nice guy DEA has a plan. They smell the data center coming. They will pick the case up again when they can. They hope that for now people on drugs can stay that way, until said establishments have said data center. As for amazon, yes the jungle will be upon us soon.

Seriously? Only 40 TB worldwide?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have close to half that amount in my own household, including a single computer (running WHS 2011) that has 9.5 TB. ..bruce..

BULLSHIT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 10 Terabytes in my own home. Storage is cheap, and you expect me to believe the DEA only has 40 TB?

Either it's a complete lie and tied into Fast and Furious, or it is proof that government agencies are all incompetent idiots in which case they can all kiss my ass.

Not that much and Probably for the Best

[Anonymous Coward]

Two terabytes is nothing nowadays. They should revoke the DEA's charter if they can't figure out how to buy basic infrastructure like this.

That said, Two Terabytes of evidence, and they still can't get an extradition?, then yes, I think it's time to dismiss the case, and put your effort elsewhere.

So.....

[trout007]

It's not about selling illegal drugs it's about illegally selling drugs?

Re:So.....

[CanHasDIY]

Oblig:

And they said
"Aren't you the suicide bomber,
who blew up the bus last year?"

I said "No"
They punched me
I said "think logically"
and they said
"You think logically!"
And I said
"... what?"

-- Tripod, "Suicide Bomber"

Online Storage.

[RHoltslander]

It's a pity their sister agency took down MegaUpload. It would have been perfect for this.

2TB is more than you would think

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, 2TB should be easy to store but you are thinking of it as if that is all they have.

2TB collected from devices can easily triple and quadruple in size during an investigation. 2TB to start, then Deduplicate that and now you have a 2TB starting set and a ~1TB processed set. Now start processing that further, maybe load it into a review platform which will extract all the children from parent documents (~600GB), OCR (~400MB), TIFF image all the pages (~1TB), index everything (~250GB) and then you have to start worry about exports (500GB here, another TB there).

Also, this is law enforcement, so you generally have two to three copies of all evidence anyways. Now your 2TB is going to end up closer to 10TB.

Is 10TB still easy to store? Sure, but not as easy as 2TB, a simple trip to futureshop won't due. Now this is also only for one case. Assuming they have more than one going at a time, you are looking at about 100k for a storage appliance that will store ten cases. Then you get to worry about backing that up too.

 

Re:2TB is more than you would think

[Skapare]

I have 45 TB at home!

They need to get with the plan and have multiple locations (no fewer than 6) with large (24 petabyte minimum) storage at each site. Maybe manage it with OpenStack.

Re:2TB is more than you would think

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you /really/ want the DEA to have that much storage? like... really?

Re:2TB is more than you would think

[Charliemopps]

You should become a drug dealer. Apparently you would be completely immune from DEA prosecution.

Re:2TB is more than you would think

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. It's purely ineptitude.

I just put in 96TB at home for about 5 grand using an LSI SAS controller (~$150 on ebay), SGI SAS expanders (~$150 per 16 ports on e-bay), and 32 3TB drives ($150 each on newegg). (consumer drives, but worth the risk/price ratio for what I'm using it for). It fits in exactly 3u of space.

Even if it cost the government two orders of magnitude more than that, it's still inexcusable.

Derpy runs the DEA

[Quiet_Desperation]

All this just so Bubba Joe can be stopped from getting high after work down at the power plant.

Well, that and the lucrative asset forfeiture laws. And power hungry sociopath politicians. And power hungry sociopath local police chiefs who love stroking their boners while arming up a military grade (well, in hardware if not training and mindset) SWAT teams for their town of 20,000.

Keep voting for BigGummint[tm], though, kids. I'm sure it'll all work perfectly once you finally get the just the right folks into just the right place. Any day now. Maybe after just one more Most Important Election Of All Time. Or two.

I'll just leave this here: http://www.leap.cc/

Government problems with 40TB

[Ukab the Great]

Means they can't store my thoughts and that I've needlessly worn a tinfoil hat all these years.

Our tax dollars at play?

[jamstar7]

Just a lil something I found on from Google. They've spent about a trillion bucks on this over the last 40 years and can't spend a few thousand on some 4 TB drives to crank up their storage space? The question is begged, wtf did they spend the money on? My money's on 'hookers & blow'...

Noted

[Anonymous Coward]

Message received by the Department of Redundant Redundancy: Keep up the good work!

Waaaaah!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

O gaawd! We did soooo much spying and wire taping and took soooo many long distance surveillance video that our servers filled up.

STOP SPYING ON AMERICANS AND THIS GOES AWAY.

DNA

[Supp0rtLinux]

I heard last week you can cram 700Tb into DNA. Perhaps the DEA needs to look at DNA storage to solve their woes.

THX 1138

[markjhood2003]

Anyone else reminded of the ending to THX 1138? THX escapes, but only because the police finally exceeded the budget that had been allocated to capture him.

Magnets

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were the DEA I'd be more worried about the susceptibility of magnetic damage to digital evidence.

Reading Between the Lines

[ndykman]

Probably going to burn some karma here, but here goes. I'm fairly sure that the DEA has plenty of storage. I'd bet it's plenty more than 40TB too. Did anybody think that when the case review came up, they looked at and somebody said: "Yea, it's 5% of what we have stored electronically in terms of evidence." And then the lawyer tried to point out that it was taking a lot of resources for very little gain in the motion, but paraphrased incorrectly.

Why not read it is as: "We currently have about 40TB in electronic evidence for our active caseload, five precent is dedicated to this one case." Sure, it doesn't allow for bashing big government or current drug policy, but seems to make common sense, does it not?

And then there is trapwire....

[3seas]

They must have unlimited storage space to be doing what is claimed. See http://www.trapwire.com/ (grin) re: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUJIEbk3J_0

re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I can donate my old hard drives, it's more than 1TB(!) If others do the same problem will be solved for many years(?) And bad guy will finally get behind the bars.:)

Cheap get out of jail free

[Anonymous Coward]

So, for $200 worth of storage, and enough bandwidth to crawl google for random PDFs and put them in a suspicious filename generator, I can get the DEA to drop any case once they inevitably commandeer my desktop?

Good ta know...

Wait'll they see what I can do with a $500 drobo and a good markov generator... maybe if I hook it up to the scripts of a james bond and other detective movies it'll get extra intriguing

Re:Cheap get out of jail free

[frisket]

But WTF is filling this space? My guess is bloated file formats.

$150 a terabyte and the gummint can't do it

[swschrad]

whine, whine, whine. the real reason is DEA has a bunch of incompetents running around burning cash, doing nothing.

DEA: Long on short term memory, short on long term

[Swave An deBwoner]

They say that drugs destroy one's short term memory; that's not a problem for DEA. On the other hand, they apparently have very little long term memory capacity.

Wait, what?

[geminidomino]

As pointed out by Ars Technica, if two terabytes of data storage represents 5 percent of the DEA's global capacity, then the agency has only 40 terabytes worth of storage overall.

Someone actually needed Ars Technica to tell them that 2 * 20 = 40?

Missing Keyword

[Mana Mana]

joejobdefensa

Just Two Terabytes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have more storage than that sitting right here on my desk.

Sad...

[Brawlking]

That is just plain sad. The company I work for that severely under pays me, and has no IT budget has three time that amount of storage capacity just in NAS drives. Not counting all the computers, various external drives, and our cloud FTP. Maybe the bastards should hire me...

40 Terabytes are enough!

[Kirth]

For an agency which has no benefit to society at all, and just puts people into prison for violating some prohibition.

The only sensible course would be to abolish prohibition and the DEA with it. I'm sure somebody else could use the 40TB ;)

SCOTUS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, but why do I always seem to read SCROTUM?

Free Heroin

[Anonymous Coward]

Certain lawyers and Judges in Australia have suggested convicted recidivists be given free, unlimited heroin -
just one condition- a strict no resuscitation policy.
Excellent suggestion to let Darwin's laws run to their logical conclusion.

I could lease the DEA some space...

[Tastecicles]

...US$1,000 per MB.

They're getting a fucking good deal, there!

Megaupload busted...

[Anonymous Coward]

...because Feds were running out of space.

You're missing the point - they only have 40TB?

[Anonymous Coward]

If 2 terabytes is "approximately 5 percent of DEA's world-wide electronic storage capacity", then their TOTAL storage capacity is 40 terabytes! (simple ratios: 2t/5% == xt/100% - therefore, x=40t) The drug dealers appear to be uniquely positioned to completely saturate this "world-wide electronic storage capacity" and bring all prosecution to a screeching halt!

Note to criminals...

[psydeshow]

Note to criminals: stop using email, SMS, and phones to communicate. Switch to video.

You think they're running out of storage now, wait until they get an investigation with several hundred hours of FaceTime video as primary evidence. In addition to storing it, they'll need to log the footage and have all the audio transcribed.

Why pay for the storage?

[nobaloney]

No need for DE to store it themselves. Just put it on the 'net for a day, and let Google and The WayBack machine cache it forever. Sure, then it's in the public eye, but isn't it supposed to be?