Thinking Clearly

A focus on the war on drugs

Touré, @Toure @ MSNBC

...   We have courts that have okay’ed putting a GPS tracking device on a car without probable cause and search warrants based on anonymous informant tips and helicopter surveillance of homes without a warrant. The Big Brother state has been alive and well in the drug war for decades, a world where, as The Wire creator David Simon blogged this week, the government has used court orders to cull dialed numbers from thousands of calls to and from certain pay phones. Sounds like what the NSA is doing because now. Along with a drug exception to the Bill of Rights we have a terror exception which affects us all. But these authoritarian abuses were acceptable to most when it was the drug war largely because of who they were happening to.
 
Now it appears some of this is happening to all of us, but the fourth amendment has been eviscerated–so even if you think it’s discomforting, it’s not illegal. And thus it may be too late. It reminds me of that famous poem, which I’ll remix a little. First they came for the communists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the black men in drug-riddled areas and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t one of them. And when they came for my metadata there was no one left to speak for me.
 
The war on drugs was a war on the rights of all of us that we see manifested in many other ways. As one federal judge said, “It may profit us very little to win the war on drugs if in the process we lose our soul.” I wonder if we already have.

~~~Read the full article at MSNBC~~~