Someone please explain: Who are the victims in this supposed "crime?"<p>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.<p>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.<p>So, again, what exactly is it they're trying to accomplish? Why is the victim? Why do they care?<p>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.<p>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.
<i>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><p>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.<p>The Third Party Doctrine <i>needs</i> to go.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
I feel conflicted about this.<p>On one hand, a nice guy has had his life upended during the most stressful phase of parenthood.<p>On the other hand, having a sympathetic defendant has paved the way for meaningful reform of third-party doctrine.
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.<p>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.