The DEA Is Spying on Millions of Cars All Over the U.S.

[unhappycamper]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-dea-is-spying-on-millions-of-cars/384864/



With sweeping power to monitor the movements of so many Americans, the federal agency will continue to lose the hopeless drug war.

The DEA Is Spying on Millions of Cars All Over the U.S.
Conor Friedersdorf Jan 27 2015, 6:15 AM ET

Conor Friedersdorf Jan 27 2015, 6:15 AM ET

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Once again, Americans face a tradeoff between liberty and security. On one hand, the Drug Enforcement Administration has been building "a database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records." If you drive in populated areas your movements have very likely been tracked.

On the other hand, the result is that illegal drugs are no longer sold on U.S. streets, the price of getting high is too high for most to pay, and international drug cartels are all but gone, as are overdose deaths and street gangs that profit from narcotics.

I kid, of course–not about the huge imposition on the privacy of innocents that the federal government is perpetrating with a license plate tracking program run by the DEA, which is real, so much as the notion that the DEA will achieve success with it.

~snip~

We've traded our freedom to drive around without being tracked for next to nothing. Those who would cede essential liberty for the promise of security may deserve neither, but ceding it for the promise of a drug free America is just delusional. The federal government could imprison every recreational drug user in America and it still couldn't win the drug war because, among other things, the federal government can't even prevent heavy drug use within the federal prison system.