From: Matthew B. Landry <mbl@ml7694a.leonard.american.edu>
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 93 16:22:28 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Disturbing statistics on wiretaps
Message-ID: <9309302319.AA24431@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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>>And of course it should be remembered that there is still an old drug-war
>>thing on the books which allows 72 hours' interception without a court
>>order.  Now depending on how that's interpreted, 72 hours are a lot of
>>conversations.  This stuff can be used for background intelligence and
>>investigation where it never winds up in court but is used to get
>>information to be used in other ways.  "It's what they don't tell you..."
>
>This can't be true.
>
        I don't know if this specific law is true or not, but a lot of those 
drug war laws are the type of thing that would make a sane person say "This 
can't be true". Only it is.
        For example, say that I mow lawns for spare cash as a teenager. When I 
go off to college here at AU, I pay some of my tuition with money from my lawn 
savings. AU takes some of my tuition and pays Mariott for providing meal plan 
service. Mariott pays its staff's wages with the money from AU. The staff pays 
their rent out of their wages. Perfectly natural chain of events, and it 
happens all the time.
        Now we introduce a new factor. One of my lawn customers, without my 
knowledge (because it was none of my business) sold drugs. He put some of the 
proceeds from the drug sale into my pocket when he paid me for services 
rendered. _All_ of the assets of _every single person and organization I 
mentioned above_ are now considered tainted with drug money, and are legally 
government property. The Mariott corporation would suddenly belong to the DEA. 
So would everything else. Every single piece of property involved could be 
auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the government would keep it all.
        Fortunately for AU and Mariott, I never mowed lawns in High School. 
Thus, I couldn't possibly have drug dealers for customers.
        This is the kind of hysteria-backed power that Joe McCarthy most likely 
dreamed about. This is the kind of power that Hitler had. This, incidentally, 
is very much like what Castro did in Cuba that made him so unpopular here in 
the US.

        So think before you say "that couldn't be true", because it probably 
is.
--
Matthew B. Landry
ml7694a@american.edu
(Finally!) mbl@ml7694a.leonard.american.edu