
The big drug database in the sky: One firefighter’s year-long legal nightmare - Errorcod3
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/the-big-drug-database-in-the-sky-one-firefighters-year-long-legal-nightmare/
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UnoriginalGuy
Someone please explain: Who are the victims in this supposed "crime?"

It would be a huge understatement to claim that the US has a strange obsession
with so called prescription narcotics. Sending doctors and patients alike to
jail for supposed overuse or over-subscription.

Look, yes, there is a public interest case where someone is known to be
selling or allowing others to be selling such medications onto the black
market. But in many of these case (most?) that isn't really the case, or at
least they have no evidence of that.

So, again, what exactly is it they're trying to accomplish? Why is the victim?
Why do they care?

On a related note, I have a family member (in the US) who works in a clinic,
the sole purpose of this clinic is to get people with chronic or in some cases
even terminal conditions off of narcotic painkillers. These people provably
are in pain, but the system in the US is such that they'll kick people off of
painkillers who actually need them simply because of some kind of "narcotic
painkillers are bad" circular logic which nobody can explain to me.

I'd really like someone to explain to me why the prescription of painkillers
isn't a matter best left to patients and doctors in most cases where there is
no suggestion of resale or other corruption. It just boggles my mind that the
police are getting into people's personal treatment plans and calling their
painkillers illegal.

~~~
noonespecial
The cynic in me finally thinks that it simplifies to this:

Pills can make you feel good. You aren't supposed to just be able to feel good
without doing some sort of "work" to "earn" it. So the pills are cheating.
We'll give you a concession if your circumstances make you feel extra bad, but
_only_ until you reach the normal level of "feel-good" that should be afforded
to you by your station in life.

The whole "war on drugs" exploits this involuntary tic in popular opinion.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It's all about "if somebody has something I don't, I'm _worse off_ as a
result". It's the same psychology that leads to people telling a lunch lady
she can't make such good food because their kids' lunch-lady-prepared food
isn't as good[1], so, therefore, their kids are worse off than they would be
with everybody having crappy food. People try to justify it as "we should all
be equal" or some garbage.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/annika-eriksson-
swe...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/annika-eriksson-swedish-
lunch-lady_n_1948486.html)

~~~
qiqing
From the link: "Update: The day this article was published, it was announced
that Eriksson will be able to continue baking her own bread and providing
healthful vegetable options. The incident has been called a
'misunderstanding,' according to Swedish news source dt.se."

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SoftwareMaven
_According to the order of dismissal, the state admitted that it had
“insufficient evidence to establish the culpable mental state of the Defendant
beyond a reasonable doubt, and that dismissal prior to trial is in the
interest of justice.”_

I'm sure it had nothing to do with his attorney filing an appeal, showing he
was ready to fight a law that was far too lenient towards police access, which
might get the law overturned and make other, easy convictions suddenly
impossible to get.

The Third Party Doctrine _needs_ to go.

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JshWright
So, if the officer _had_ gotten a warrant (which I assume would be more
limited in scope than 'everyone'), and had come across similar information, it
would be completely reasonable that he investigate it, right?

I'm also curious if they caught the original perpetrator. Tampering with
narcotics would be tough to pull off in our agency... To get access to the
narcs you have to swipe a ProxCard and enter a pin to access a safe (logging a
timestamp attached to your identify), which gets you to a locked metal box and
a numbered seal (which is checked twice daily). Any tampering would be caught
within ~12 hours, and would be easily traced back to the card and pin number
of the person who accessed it.

~~~
andrewpi
The officer never would have had probable cause for a warrant for this
individuals information though, since he didn't even work at the sites that
had the missing/tampered drugs.

~~~
JshWright
Sure, obviously the warrant would likely be far more limited in scope (i.e.
only people that had access to the drugs at the time), but the same scenario
is certainly still possible.

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tinco
There's something super strange about how this article is written. There's a
very heavy emphasis on how the government invaded this poor fireman's privacy
and endangered the adoption process of two young children. The fireman is
emotional, and feels victimized by the police and is even sueing the mayor,
the main argument of the article seems to be that the police has too much
information about people.

But when you extract just the factual statements from the article there's a
whole different picture. The police was investigating a pretty serious crime.
One of their tools in this investigation was checking medical records of
employees of the fire department to find irregularities that might point to
someone with motive to steal opiates. Instead of finding a direct motive they
found out a person was committing fraud with prescription drugs. The person
was charged, but eventually the charges were dropped because they couldn't
round out the evidence, the reason is unclear.

Did this person really commit prescription drug fraud? Did he make money off
that? Is that the sort of crime that should throw a wrench in an adoption
process?

I obviously don't know the guy, but it seems a bit weird to me to just
disregard the idea that the authorities have hard evidence of him
circumventing a law. Using the properties of that guy that make him seem like
a stand-up guy just to make a larger point about privacy feels a bit
disingenuous.

~~~
ScottBurson
> Instead of finding a direct motive they found out a person was committing
> fraud with prescription drugs.

Where does it say that? All I see is this:

 _Pyle had been prescribed short-acting and long-acting opiate-based
painkillers for years after being diagnosed with an inoperable mid-back disc
herniation from a dirt-bike accident._

If that counts as evidence of fraud sufficient for criminal charges to be
filed, I think we have a problem.

~~~
shirro
Evidence only counts if you can't get the victim to plead guilty to a lesser
charge. A bit of trial by media, career damage, pressure on the family, legal
costs and who is going to contest a charge. Sadly society doesn't seem to care
about the occasional Aaron Swartz getting caught in the machine.

------
nickodell
I feel conflicted about this.

On one hand, a nice guy has had his life upended during the most stressful
phase of parenthood.

On the other hand, having a sympathetic defendant has paved the way for
meaningful reform of third-party doctrine.

------
danschumann
This seems like a Rand Paul issue.

------
daily_dose
It's your fault, not the doctors that legally gave you drugs goy!

~~~
IvyMike
Doctor shopping usually means going to multiple doctors and keeping them in
the dark about each other.

Whether or not you agree this should be a crime (see UnoriginalGuy's
comments), current laws _do_ make this a crime.

And it's hard to imagine how the doctors could be implicated in that crime--
essentially, they are the ones being duped.

~~~
phkahler
But isn't the point of the database to allow doctors to know if there are
interactions with other things a patient may be taking? Is other prescription
information hidden unless there is a conflict, or does each doctor have access
to the patients prescription history? If they can see the history, then they
should be able to decide if he's seeing multiple doctors to get more drugs. If
that history is hidden from his doctor, why should the police get to look just
because?

At a higher level, let's assume for a moment that 3rd party data should not be
protected by the 4th amendment. That does not mean the database maintainer is
obligated to hand over records to the authorities. It just means they can if
they want to without violating a persons rights. The DB owner is certainly
allowed to say "come back with a warrant" with will of course require probable
cause.

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rayiner
I disagree that third party doctrine is outdated, as the article states. The
fact is this: the Constitution says nothing about "privacy" or "information."
The literal text of the 4th amendment prohibits essentially what are
trespasses (to one's house, person, papers, or effects) in the name of
gathering evidence. The whole "expectation of privacy" concept is itself a
judicial bolt-on, and to go further and pretend that people have an
expectation of privacy in records that were never their own property to begin
with strains reason.

It's not like third party records did not exist in 1791. The framers, being
lawyers and businessmen, would have been intimately familiar with the concept
of entrusting their person information to the documents of third parties. Had
the framers intended "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" to
actually mean "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects [and their
doctors' or accountants' or lawyers' concerning them]" they could have written
the text that way. They didn't.

~~~
ScottBurson
_The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people._

\-- Ninth Amendment to the Constitution

~~~
tptacek
The Third-Party Doctrine dates back to the time of the framers of the
Constitution. Not merely the idea that there are third parties that have
searchable documents, but the Constitutionality of the resultant searches.

~~~
ScottBurson
Whether or not that turns out to be true, I still don't care for Rayiner's
argument. Attorney-client privilege is also older than the Constitution, and
the framers didn't see fit to mention it here either. I think their intent was
to get the broad outlines right and let future generations hash out such
details.

In keeping with that intent, the phrase "their papers and effects" is not
precisely defined. I think it's up to us to hash out the appropriate meaning
for our day and age. _Pace_ Rayiner, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to
imagine that that phrase was not _necessarily_ intended to encompass only
papers and effects that happen to be within one's house.

~~~
rayiner
Attorney-client privilege isn't a Constitutional right, it's just an
evidentiary privilege. And it can be lost by disclosure to third parties.
Moreover, you're glossing over the fact that much of the information held by
third parties doesn't fit within any conception of " _your_ papers and
effects." Even if we assume that your Google Docs are covered, what about
information like your facebook friends? Those database records linking you to
other facebook users aren't your documents, they're Facebook's.

