It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's two-dozen government surveillance balloons over America Uncle Sam is testing a system that uses high-altitude balloons to conduct surveillance over American soil. Government contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation – the aerospace company, not the brewery – has released balloons that will drift over a large area in the United States' Midwest, and form a network capable of monitoring …
"conduct high altitude MESH networking tests over South Dakota to provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats."
I believe them.:rolleyes: Decriminalizing drugs would be a better option, the war on drugs will never be won.
Decriminalization will also help with the overdose problem by making clean drugs available. People will be able to get help without the fear of being arrested or charged.
@A.P.Veening ... while I don't disagree with the conclusion, the "profit" for politicians is not from the drugs but from the "illegal", and whether or not it is actually "corrupt" is debatable.
Political benefit from "the war on drugs" (etc) comes from (a) the carceral industry directly supporting election campaigns and (b) the ability to present a "tough on crime" stance, which appeals to significant chunks of the electorate and doesn't revolt other chunks. Morally corrupt, perhaps, but that's likely a necessary attribute for being a politician...
[ c.f. Priti Patels' "want criminals to feel terror" spew to the Daily Fail yesterday, which totally glosses over the issue that if the fuzz inspire terror in crims, how are non-crims and not-yet-convicted-proto-crims likely to interact with the plod? ]
So you "decriminalise" drugs. Do you think that Señor Billionaire Drug Trafficker is now going to
1) Go legit and run a huge drugs export business supplying high quality cocaine?
2) Carry on doing what he does at the moment, i.e. employing corrupt officials to let his product into the USA, Antwerp or Hamburg by the container load?
No, there is no experience of legally produced narcotics in the quantities that illegal drugs are being produced at.
>No, there is no experience of legally produced narcotics
If you go back about 90 years and consider the then in the US illegal drug C2H5OH, I think you get the idea.
Interesting enough, reading a biography of FDR I learned that possession was legal then, manufacture, import and trading not. You could legally have a tipple from you own wine cellar...
There were lots of exemptions - communion wine for instance; one vineyard in California offered fourteen types including port and sherry. In fact, land under vines in California increased from 100,000 acres to 700,000 during Prohibition. As Bill Bryson put it in ‘One Summer’ (recommended BTW), ‘that wasn’t because people were suddenly eating a lot of raisins.’
Doctors could also prescribe spirits; so much so that in 1927 the Prohibition Commissioner had to authorise the release of three million gallons of whiskey for ‘medicine’. When questioned why so much alcohol was needed, the US Treasury blamed ‘evaporation’.
It was illegal to produce your own wine, but it *was* perfectly legal to buy grape concentrate which came labelled with ‘Caution: Will ferment and turn into wine within 60 days’
a medical knockout dose of cocaine or heroin is less than £1.
The street value is considerably higher than this (as in closer to £100), so there's quite an incentive to flog it even if the risks are high
Interestingly the "Turkish opium" problem was solved by getting the growers to contract to the medical supply industry. Morphine and heroin are _extremely_ useful drugs which the artificial replacements don't come close to replicating. The growers were happy as they get paid more than the narcogangs were paying...
The parallel is with alcohol.There will always be drug abuse including alcohol whether drugs are legal or illegal. By making them legal, the manufacturers can be better supervised much like alcoholic beverage producers are today. Taxes can be added to the product, again much like alcohol. The overall quality of the product will improve, e.g. not be adulterated as the manufacturers now have a brand to protect. Sales will take place in regular businesses with much less risk to both the buyer and seller. The distribution will be through retail distribution channels again like alcohol. But the most important issue is abuse is not a criminal action for possession only a medical/psychological issue. DUI and other end result behavior (drunk and disorderly, etc) would still apply like they do with alcohol.
While bootlegging still occurs over here, most people in wet counties don't bother with the bootleggers as it is far easier to go to the local liquor store for the hard stuff. And in many areas beer and wine are sold in the grocery stores, again far easier to run down to the grocery store. Note there are no dry states on dry counties over here.
"...Sales will take place in regular businesses with much less risk to both the buyer and seller. ..."
I heard an interview with a serving drugs officer on the radio shortly after Ulbricht was jailed.
The officer, as I recall, didn't want to be named because of some of the things he was saying:
Transactions were safer because people weren't buying from random dealers in back alleys in the middle of the night, and weren't being ripped off/attempting to rip the dealer off;
The quality of narcotis actually improved notably because now people had real market choice and if yours weren't up to muster, there were plenty of other sellers. Purer product tends to lead to lower harm as it's the crap they're cut with that causes most immediate problems;
The prices went down which meant that pressure on buyers to maintain a level of purchase went down with it;
The dealers ran loyalty schemes and try-before-you buy schemes with usually accurate (or as accurate as could be expected) descriptions which lead to less harm due to taking something that was completely unknown.
He also admitted what everyone with half a brain already knows - the war on drugs is lost. It was lost before it ever really began!
We've actually been down this road before in the US, so we have a pretty good idea what will happen. Back in the 1930s legalization of alcohol dealt a body blow to organized crime financing that the traffickers survived by moving into the illegal drug trade. As for the future, I think we'll see a move into areas dominated by global economic elites like the arms trade and investment banking.
"the future"?
As J I M Stewart and others pointed out long ago, the investment banking and the arms trade are run by the "respectable" descendants of slave traders, drug dealers and pirates.
One of the big problems for the Quakers, that eminently respectable sect, is that much of its wealth was founded on drug dealing - tobacco - and indirect slavery - chocolate.
"Back in the 1930s legalization of alcohol dealt a body blow to organized crime financing that the traffickers survived by moving into the illegal drug trade"
Except there virttually wasn't an illegal drug trade back then.
A lot of it had to do with the fact that the newly created FBI had a shitload of newly minted G-Men who were about to be unemployed if there wasn't a new public enemy to deal with and it mostly started with a substance smoked primarily by mexican immigrants.
Cocaine and heroin were a rich peoples' party drugs at the time and nobody blinked an eye, Opium smoking was frowned on in the USA but not usually illegal. Remember the british empire went to war with China for the right to sell the stuff when China wanted nothing to do with it.
The overdose problem with street narcotics is because of the variable amount of the active drug in the sample. Taking heroin as as example, according to National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in Sydney the average purity of the samples they collected from the street was 66%, but ranged from 20% to 90%.
If someone is used to using 20% product, then gets a dose of 80%, then they ingest 4 times as much drug as normal using the same dosage. That is more than enough to push them over the edge into overdose.
Let us put this in terms that the rest of us are more likely to encounter and understand:
A tourist who is used to drinking a 12-pack of American "Light" beer in a single sitting drinks a single decent stout and gets smashed, and when they drink 12 they die of alcohol poisoning.
"The overdose problem with street narcotics is because of the variable amount of the active drug in the sample."
AND the fact unscrupulous dealers have been swapping out the drugs for more potent stuff that's still easier to get. Fentanyl overdoses have been increasingly common. There's also the truck of swapping for stuff not intended for humans such as swapping out several mg of heroin for just a single speck of carfentanil (WARNING: that stuff is only meant for use with large animals such as bears).
PS. Even if drug markets went legit, there would still be a black market for people who want the stuff cheaper, without pesky taxes and so on (think the stolen cigarettes being sold back in Goodfellas).
"Decriminalizing drugs would be a better option, the war on drugs will never be won"
Of course not. Drugs are a symptom, not a cause. The motivation is PROFIT, not narcotics - and keeping them illegal benefits both the sellers (higher profits) and the enforcers (various)
Like terrorism (another symptom), it's your FOREVER WAR and the authorities can shout down anyone who disagrees as a traitor and supporter of the enemy.
The real homeland security threats are the "domestic terrorists" - Unabomber, McVeigh and their ilk. The ones who actually believe that Obama was coming for their money, nasally implanted mind control chips and that a certain Pizza place in Washington DC has a basement (hint, the water table is just below street level. Washington DC is built on a swamp.)
Since balloons are not steerable it strikes me as this is not a particularly effective method of deploying sensors. If the wind is blowing in the wrong direction they could either end up in say Mexico or not monitoring the area intended. Effective balloon spotting in WWI used tethered balloons so they would not drift away. A blimp or dirigible would be more effective as they are steerable and could be kept on station better.
And balloons are cheap so you can have lots of them, as opposed to the satellites high above that can already see everything but cost billions so are too few to be squandered looking at mid level stuff. They also pass over head rather quickly so give a poor coverage duty cycle.
In 2011 the Sierra Nevada Corporation developed Gordon Stare, a 100 megapixel Airborne Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance System extensively used both in drones over Aghanistan and in drones, balloons and planes over the USA. It has now been superseded by a.o. ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 Gigapixel video system composed from 368 cell phone cameras, 5 megapixels each.
Back in the days, privacy could be taken for granted. If you wanted to have a conversation with somebody and it was important not to be overheard by anyone, all you had to do was take a walk in the countryside. So there was no need to make laws about these things.
Today, an entire industry has grown up, monitoring people's behaviour online in ways that would not have been possible in a traditional context without at the very least having someone turn around to you and ask "WTF is wrong with you? Leave me alone, you creep!"
And now there is a generation of kids growing up never having known what it's like not to be under continuous surveillance. These really aren't good conditions for any efforts to pass privacy laws.
Intrusive mass surveillance is always sold as a weapon against criminals, but nobody is ever more than one government vote away from becoming a criminal. And Angry from Tunbridge Wells writes to the local paper, saying "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" -- but he still seals the letter in an envelope.
Rubbish. This will be contentious particularly because it gives oversight of rural areas.
Cities are already heavily monitored, and the people who live there know they are being watched by cameras and other people at all time. Out in the country, they aren't used to having people watch them all the time, and they won't like it.
"conduct high altitude MESH networking tests over South Dakota to provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats."
It's puzzling that the DHS haven't gone after the narcotic trafficker finances. Same with the international arms trade, surly the DHS should be able to trace the arms back to the manufacturers.
Drug traffickers are masters of money laundering. By the time the money comes back to the US, it's often too remote and tied up with legitimate interests to really pick out.
And the arms trade doesn't have to go through the US or any interests tied to the US, meaning they have no leverage.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
