Privacy is another victim of the war on (some) drugs

[Bill Stewart]

At 11:10 AM 12/11/00 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40532,00.html
>    Privacy a Victim of the Drug War by Declan McCullagh (declan at wired.com)
>    2:00 a.m. Dec. 11, 2000 PST

			(.... noticing the timestamp ...)

>    They got even. Edmond and Palmer filed a federal lawsuit claiming the
>    drug-stop violated the Constitution's rule against unreasonable
>    searches, and the Supreme Court recently agreed with them in a 6-3
>    ruling.

It's pleasant to see the court doing the right thing on occasion.


>    By last year, the vast majority of the wiretaps had become
>    narcotics-related: 978 of 1,350, according to government figures.

The majority of non-drug-related wiretaps have been for gambling
investigations, another ban on consensual behavior which encourages 
police invasion of privacy because the participants don't
have an incentive to report violations.  

>John Gilmore adds:

>> I doubt that ALL privacy invasion has been engendered by the 
>> War on Drugs.  

Definitely not - the invasion of privacy engendered by taxation
far exceeds that from the War on Drugs.  It's primarily violation
of Fifth Amendment issues rather than Fourth Amendment,
and invades the individual's interactions with other people
rather than focusing on their state of mind and body,
but it's a much higher volume and much more pervasive invasion.

In particular, it leads to large databases of information on
individuals and businesses, requires businesses to maintain
their own large databases on individuals, and requires 
huge expenditures of effort on tracking and reducing taxes
by people who could otherwise be engaged in productive activities.
And the power to tax is used to extend government control
into areas that would otherwise not have legal justifications -
confiscatory marijuana taxes were the beginning of drug prohibition,
car taxes are used to require license plates and car registration 
which are then used to track and control people's movement.

Medical privacy has been largely eroded by government health care
insurance and regulations requiring common identifiers for databases
(SSNs) and centralized decision-making, and also by insurance
companies which are largely shaped by the taxation-driven
market for employer-provided medical insurance.

>>The Internet has produced a major privacy problem by
>>making previously hard-to-access or hard-to-correlate records readily
>>available; search engines have been co-conspirators with the WWW
>>inventors in building easy cross-indexes.  

I'd attribute the correlation issues more to the rapidly decreasing
costs of computers and storage than to the communications capabilities.
They're obviously overlapping, but even clumsy systems like SNA
and magnetic tapes by overnight mail were sufficient for 
business information sharing to reach critical mass a decade ago,
before the internet explosion, and to some extent even in the 
60s and 70s when our privacy was beginning to be bent, folded, 
spindled, and mutilated.  For example, credit-card transactions
and check scanning generally don't use the Internet -
check scanning is a computer/optics/storage problem, 
and modems or SNA networks are enough for credit cards,
and also for buying credit reports on customers.

The big differences the Internet has made, besides fueling 
the growth in computer power affordability, have been in 
reducing the costs of correlation by small organizations, 
allowing the decentralization of privacy invasion.  
This will have a lot of unforeseen implications;
it may also have foreseen implications, with authors
such as Brin and Vinge exploring possibilities.


>>The drug war-crime makes big problems for whatever lives or policies
>>it touches, and it has certainly had a big negative impact on privacy.
>>We would all have much more privacy rights if the drug war had never
>>happened.  Restoring those rights after we end the drug war is going
>>to be a 50-year project.

Hear, hear.


				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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