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The DEA Disinformation Campaign To Hide Surveillance Techniques
An anonymous reader writes: Ken White at Popehat explains how the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has been purposefully sowing disinformation to hide the extent of their surveillance powers. The agency appears to have used a vast database of telecommunications metadata, which they acquired via general (read: untargeted, dragnet-style) subpoenas. As they begin building cases against suspected criminals, they trawl the database for relevant information. Of course, this means the metadata of many innocent people is also being held and occasionally scanned. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit to challenge this bulk data collection. The DEA database itself seems to have been shut down in 2013, but not before the government argued that it should be fine not only to engage in this collection, but to attempt to hide it during court cases. The courts agreed, which means this sort of surveillance could very well happen again — and the EFF is trying to prevent that.
There were times where even wiretapping was controversial and you make it sound like metadata is so innocent as well as easy to prevent by a single user. Surprise surprise - it is not - in modern times, in developed world not using modern communication devices has serious consequences to one's ability to live normal life. If you consider this and the fact that there is really no other way to use such devices as not to leave a trail in the hands of the operators of the infrastructure used for those communications that left the trail, then you realize that there is not much that a person can do if courts just ignore the fact that gathering such data is a massive violation of people's freedoms.
As for the second thing - I think DEA or alike agencies elsewhere may actually have a role to play in our societies - there are chemicals that are outright killers and even weed is not something that I would like to see in a schools and alike. This said the grown people can do whatever they want with themselves and the state has (should have) as little authority over this as over sex life that is - as long as all are informed and consenting adults then there is no crime.