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Comment by graedus | Hacker News Reader

> So now the DEA is using it to bust drug dealers. Why isn't the SEC using it to bust criminals on Wall St.?

Because the SEC is captured. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

There's kooks out there who think the DEA is captured too. Obviously that's a ridiculous paranoid notion. It's not like there's any money in illegal drugs or anything, and everyone knows being a middle manager at the DEA pays the big bucks.

What I'm fundamentally getting at in my OP is elite deviance:

http://www.amazon.com/Elite-Deviance-Edition-David-Simon/dp/...

The NSA will not protect us from the deviance of those with real power, because those with real power can fight back. Those with real power are also those who have the resources to execute a real worst-case-scenario attack-- exactly the kind of terrorist attack this is supposed to be protecting us from. If somebody nukes New York it will not be an anti-government windbag with an Internet connection who just got fired from their job and decided to search for "how to build an atomic bomb." It will be an elite deviant, supported by a network of elite deviants and powerful ideological sympathizers. Someone with the motive and the means to execute on such a thing.

This system might detect motive with some probability of success, but it will not be used against those with means because those people (and their supporters) will pull strings and hire million dollar attorneys. (Or turn agents, pay off managers at government contractors, etc.)

I also have serious doubts about whether it'll stop the next Boston bomber or Timothy McVeigh either, but for different reasons: small players easily vanish into an ocean of false positives. There are mathematical limits that come into play here-- it's why undirected fishing expeditions in seas of scientific data are rarely successful.

This project is a dangerous, politically and socially irresponsible pork-barrel boondoggle that creates far more opportunities for crime and corruption than it prevents. Limits to government power and requirements for judicial oversight (a.k.a. peer review) aren't arbitrary whims or kooky notions supported by paranoids. They're a lot like the OSHA rules put in place at factories and industrial facilities. They are there to keep people from getting hurt and to keep expensive, dangerous accidents from taking place.

I don't think the DEA is at nearly as much risk of being captured by those they're meant to regulate compared to the SEC. Power and money are extremely concentrated on wall street, and there is a well-documented revolving door between wall street and the SEC that I don't think exists between drug dealers and DEA officials. [0]

Totally agree with the rest of your posts.

[0] http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/sec-revolving-door.html

I think you're partly right. The risk is much higher with the SEC, and I agree that SEC regulatory capture is a virtual certainty at this point.

But with drugs I don't think it's the dealers we have to worry about. The dealers are the little fish. It's the financiers, the money launderers, the ones who profit. They -- if they are smart -- never touch the stuff. They invest in it like they'd invest in any other venture.

My suspicion is that a captured DEA would behave not as an actual facilitator of drug trafficking but as a selective turf war tool to take politically unconnected competitors' drugs off the street. All you need there is enough influence to ensure that the DEA targets the other guys, not your bread and butter. That also helps to support the price of drugs, increasing your margins.

Actually it could be even simpler than that. If you have enough spies in the DEA you could be one ahead of them, have intel about how they conduct searches, etc. Then the DEA would act for you like a passive turf enforcement army. With your advantage you could fly under the radar, allowing the DEA to mop up your competition and prop up your margins by creating scarcity. Spying on an organization is orders of magnitude easier than influencing it, and requires the compromise of lower-level personnel. There's far more field agents and mid-level paper pushers than there are higher-up agenda setters and they make less money, making them easier targets to flip.

This is why the drug war is so bad for democracy and why prohibition encourages corruption. Put simply it creates a massive financial incentive for every kind of political corruption imaginable, and in so doing begets a "corruption infrastructure" that can be used for other kinds of crimes.

Interesting, that would be a different type of capture - partial capture, you could call it - and both potentially more insidious and far more difficult to prove. One: to the public the DEA still appears to be doing its job (and in a sense, it is), whereas the SEC often appears totally ineffectual in the face of massive and obvious fraud. Two: it would be far more difficult to trace any murky connections between the financiers of drug operations (who are presumably carefully laundering their money) and DEA officials, whereas the SEC regularly openly hires wall street execs and lawyers and vice versa, so the potential for conflicts of interest is obvious.

I wouldn't be too surprised if this was happening at some level in the DEA, but is there any information pointing to it or is it pure conjecture?

Mostly conjecture. There are people who talk about it, but they're independents who are usually tarred as "conspiracy nuts."

Example: http://www.madcowprod.com/

It's not the way the media portrays them that causes me to be skeptical, but the fact that they're so small and independent. Investigation is hard, and good investigative journalism with proper vetting of all sources costs a lot of money. It is very easy to be misled by misinformation or by kooks with an agenda. On the flip side, a good way to keep something quiet from investigative journalists is to spread a lot of phony BS, wait, and then point out that it's phony in order to discredit them.

For example, Daniel Hopsicker of the above link believed and perpetuated the "Mohammed Atta's American Girlfriend" story. I strongly suspect this story was BS and that he was misled by a stripper with psychological issues.

But he does have some good and verifiable information on the intersection between drugs and high-level corruption, and he did uncover some links to the 9/11 highjackers that point to similar corruption. His work on drug planes and their ownership is very interesting, and those kinds of things are easier for an independent to vet.

> I don't think the DEA is at nearly as much risk of being captured by those they're meant to regulate compared to the SEC. Power and money are extremely concentrated on wall street, and there is a well-documented revolving door between wall street and the SEC that I don't think exists between drug dealers and DEA officials.

The DEA regulates legal distribution of controlled substances (part of which is investigating and enforcing rules about the illegal distribution of those substances.)

Regulatory capture of the DEA wouldn't be capture by "drug dealers" -- at least of the Pablo Escobar, et al., variety -- it would be capture by, e.g., pharmaceutical companies.

I think regulation of pharmaceutical industry falls primarily under the purview of the FDA, not the DEA.

> I think regulation of pharmaceutical industry falls primarily under the purview of the FDA, not the DEA.

Different aspects of the operation of the pharmaceutical industry are regulated by the FDA (under the Food and Drug Act) and the DEA (under the Controlled Substances Act).

(Very loosely, the FDA regulates the manufacture/labeling of all drugs, the DEA regulates the distribution of controlled drugs.)

It seems like a lot of people don't know that prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban controlled regions had reduced opium poppy production by 99%, which was 75% of the global supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...

Just a coincidence I suppose.

A recent Forbes article talks about the data that the NSA is sharing with the DEA and IRS. The DEA and IRS are told to lie about where they get the data. This seems no different than when evidence in a criminal case is thrown out if police obtained it through an illegal means. The article calls for a special prosecutor.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifergranick/2013/08/14/nsa-d...

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