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

However many of the legal and investigatory techniques used to investigate drug-related "crimes" are perfectly cromulent ways to investigate many other actual crimes. I would like to keep those techniques available, in general. Each technique may or may not have it's place, for sure.

But a useful, cost-effective tool that's not otherwise unconstitutional should be used. We should then make sure that the oversight and transparency measures for each type of tool is in place to ensure that such measures are not abused.

The government is pretty much literally the only thing we the people have any input into... functions which rightly belong to "the people" at large should be placed into the government. Where government screws those up, the answer should be to fix the government, not for the people to completely abdicate that responsibility.

> How does it follow that we should then make sure the shit is evenly spread on everybody?

You're basically asking why a given system should be fairly applied? I would reverse the question completely and say that any given government system should start off completely fair and only deviate from that for very good reason.

Avoiding "Misery Loves Company" is a good reason, mind you. We levy administrative fines on people who actually screw up, for example.

But the Simon logic is, why is it permissible to surveil tens of thousands of cell phone calls within a predominantly poor, black & Hispanic neighborhood for literally years at a time, looking for evidence of small-time drug dealers, but it's not possible to get the same type of court order to surveil other communications (even at larger scale) for something that's actually important to society at large?

There is a difference in scale, that's for sure. But the difference is not really as large as the difference between no surveillance and what the police/FBI/others are already doing (and have been doing) throughout America. And so that's his point, if America agrees that this type of investigatory powers should be used (the kind that have always permitted incidentally collecting too much, or searching through all records reasonably relevant to a case, etc.), where and why does the framework behind those powers actually end here when it didn't there?

There may very well be a good reason, but if that reason is "we don't trust the government" then by what logic do we let the DoJ in general investigate criminal acts? I guess what I'm saying is that I really wish we would get back to a framework of control of government (like the EFF, ACLU, etc. have been pushing to do for years) instead of instinctive distrust of the idea of government.

But whatever we do decide the government rightly has the power to do, we should at least be consistent with it.

And even where it does start affecting other people, there are probably much better ways to regulate that effect than prison, and we should be using those ways instead. And we should switchover yesterday.

It's probably not yet practical politically to fix that (especially as its so tied toward racist tendencies dog-whistle style), but that would not be a reason for me to argue in support of it.

However I also don't presume that shedding the War on Drugs would eliminate crime, or the need to investigate and prosecute such. So we'll still have government enforcing law, protecting public security, and the like. And so I get very, very tired of the argument that government trying to get power $FOO to do such things is necessarily a dystopian power grab.

Don't get me wrong, it may actually be a bad idea for government to do $FOO, but no one is generally going to convince me of that by hyperbole or invoking the Sheeple Mantra (not saying you're doing that here, btw, just remarking on some HN threads I remember in general).

I think that all legal systems should be fairly applied.

I think that when abuse or imbalances become apparent, we should correct that imbalance by pulling back systems and ending enforcement, rather than applying more pressure on other areas.

After the imbalance is corrected, then we can discuss how to reapply the system in a fair balanced manner.

So, in concrete terms: The surveillance/law enforcement techniques being used in the War on Drugs may very well be something that we, as a society, could accept. However the War on Drugs is imbalanced and unfair in a very bad way. We should therefore throttle back on everything, correct the underlying issue, then determine if we still think that those surveillance/law enforcement techniques are still warranted.

Throttling back on these surveillance/law enforcement techniques is extreme, but I think that the accusations leveled against the War on Drugs (basically, that it is a form of class warfare, born of blatant widespread racism) are serious enough to warrant an extreme response.

Simon is pointing out a very clear problem; my suggestion is that we pull over to the side of the road and try to figure out just what the hell went wrong. The sooner we pull over, the better, because we seem to be doing a lot of damage.