Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 211 posts

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#91

Post by genwin »

jlgreco wrote: post #53
pyre wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were alcoholics robbing people for money to feed their habit during Prohibition?

Of course there were. Even today there are alcoholic bums that will mug you for booze money. You don't really think they are all crack or smack fiends, do you? Heroin withdrawal can make you wish you were dead, alcohol withdrawal can make you dead . More troubling however is community-consuming gang violence. The sort that we see today and the sort that we saw during prohibition.

> Of course there were.

Safe to assume a very small percentage of alcohol users, which makes the difference here. Safe to assume that during Prohibition the vast majority of alcohol users could have been sober during working hours to pay for it.

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#92

Post by warfangle »

genwin wrote: post #75
CamperBob2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same questions were once asked about alcohol. Did you get your answers then?

Apples to oranges, since unlike meth and crack users, the vast majority of those who drink alcohol can hold down a job to pay for it, instead of resort to theft or worse.

Prescription opioid drugs like oxycodone kill more people than meth or crack. And there are a lot of people able to hold down a job and pay for cocaine (see also: wall street). What was your point again?

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#93

Post by rhizome »

genwin wrote: post #82
baddox wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also conflating all levels of alcohol usage with crack addiction . It's possible for many people (though granted, probably nearly genetically impossible for some people) to use either without becoming addicted. And for alcoholics, it's often very hard to hold down a job.

It's a matter of percentages. Perhaps 5% of alcohol users have a significant problem with it, that drags down those around them. I don't know what the percentage is for crack but I bet it's over 90%, high enough that we shouldn't take a chance on the users who aren't addicted to it promoting it to the 90% who would become addicted it.

I don't know what the percentage is for crack but I bet...

Hello, old friend.

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#94

Post by jlgreco »

baddox wrote: post #71
whyleyc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's because as a stimulant it has a combination of relatively low addictive properties and is easy to withdraw from when compared to more "hardcore" substances [1] [1] http://www.drugsense.org/tfy/addictvn.htm

How about nicotine? Granted, there have probably been people who steal cigarettes are steal other things to buy cigarettes, but I think it's a much smaller problem than with illegal drugs.

If COPS is representative of real life, there are plenty of people willing to rob convenience stores of cigarettes. I have little doubt that this would turn much uglier if nicotine was banned.

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#95

Post by warfangle »

genwin wrote: post #78
baddox wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't imagine violence going up if drug prohibition was ended, even if you don't count the violence committed by public officers enforcing drug laws.

I can imagine that, because a crack or meth user can't hold down a decent job. Whether legal or not they'd tend to have to rob to get the money to stay high. And when legal it's likely more people would get addicted.

If you're expecting levels of drug abuse to rise with deregulation, let me just point you to ... well, everywhere that's deregulated drugs.

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#96

Post by peterwwillis »

lutusp wrote: post #52
mpyne wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without GPS, the cell phone position can often be triangulated by the tower itself. That even has a compelling public safety justification (911 calls) so it wouldn't surprise me if phone companies were already doing that as a matter of course.

> Even without GPS, the cell phone position can often be triangulated by the tower itself. Towers, not tower. With two towers receiving a cell phone's signal, the phone can be located along a line, with three towers, it can be located as a point -- not as accurate as GPS, but reasonably accurate. http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3278/2867853394_7703d6c99f.jp...

Or if you have a van and work with Verizon Wireless, once you know its general location near one tower, you can drive around with a high-powered femtocell, hijack the phone's tower connection and close in on its exact location.

If you're a GSM user you don't need to update the phone's PRL list to hijack its tower connection, so you could do something similar yourself with an OpenBTS setup (though without the tower information to correlate, you'd be doing a lot more driving)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-a...

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#97

Post by WildUtah »

viggity wrote: post #49
jivatmanx wrote: post #19

This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually be more dangerous to Liberty than the war on terror. No doubt it's basic premise, that putting a substance into one's own body is a "crime", is a pernicious lie. The War on Terror's pernicious lie is twofold: Terrorism isn't a crime, and th…

I can appreciate where you're coming from with regards to the basic premise of the war on drugs. Like the old adage says: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The thing that tears me up about it is that some of these drugs (primarily meth and to a lesser degree heroin) completely obliterate lives and leave a huge cost to the general welfare of society. I don't think that we should be throwing users in jail…

"a place where methamphetamine is legal and freely available is a scary place"

Like the USA in the 1960's? Benzedrine was sold over the counter to children and widely used throughout the country.

Now benzedrine is probably less dangerous than methamphetamine because it's slightly less hydrophobic, which often makes addiction less trouble. Meth showed up as the very similar black market substitute when benzedrine was made prescription only. It turned out methamphetamine was easier to make with household solvents in trailers; users would probably prefer benzedrine.

Both methamphetamine and benzedrine are available with a prescription. Benzedrine is the active substance in Adderall; in fact, Adderall is only a hair's breadth different from methamphetamine.

The difference is that today it's only black market customers that use methamphetamine. If we re-legalized dexedrine or benzedrine over the counter, the trouble would mostly go away.

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#98

Post by genwin »

chimeracoder wrote: post #56
genwin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If crack was dirt cheap, people would still rob to get the money for it, because they couldn't hold down a decent job while using it.

That's simply not true. I don't have any stats for crack cocaine, but look up the effectiveness of diacetylmorphine maintenance programs in Switzerland and the UK - these are government-run programs in which heroin users are given access to pure, unadulterated heroin so that they can have steady day jobs. Spoiler: These programs have been proven time and again to be effective in reducing crime. Crack cocaine is bioch…

If the percentage of crack users who could both hold a steady job to pay for their addiction and also not significantly drag down those around them was > 90% (e.g. workplace accidents, parenting), then I could support ending the war on crack.

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#99

Post by genwin »

warfangle wrote: post #92
genwin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples to oranges, since unlike meth and crack users, the vast majority of those who drink alcohol can hold down a job to pay for it, instead of resort to theft or worse.

Prescription opioid drugs like oxycodone kill more people than meth or crack. And there are a lot of people able to hold down a job and pay for cocaine (see also: wall street). What was your point again?

I'd include a lot of legal drugs in my war on drugs!

Re: AT&T gives DEA 26 years of phone call records to wage war on drugs

#100

Post by baddox »

genwin wrote: post #82
baddox wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also conflating all levels of alcohol usage with crack addiction . It's possible for many people (though granted, probably nearly genetically impossible for some people) to use either without becoming addicted. And for alcoholics, it's often very hard to hold down a job.

It's a matter of percentages. Perhaps 5% of alcohol users have a significant problem with it, that drags down those around them. I don't know what the percentage is for crack but I bet it's over 90%, high enough that we shouldn't take a chance on the users who aren't addicted to it promoting it to the 90% who would become addicted it.

> I don't know what the percentage is for crack but I bet it's over 90%

According to this spurious page [0], "up to 75% of those who try cocaine will become addicted." Of course, the page also says "an estimated one-in-four Americans between the age of 26 and 34 have used cocaine at least once in their lifetime, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy." Since it looks like around 15% of Americans are between the age of 26 and 34, that would mean that "up to" 11.25% of Americans will become addicted, which seems unlikely. We need some better data.

[0] http://www.treatmentsolutions.com/cocaine-addiction-treatmen...

Post reply on HN