Not so innocent trafficking

[Jan Klimkowski]

Market Ticker's Karl Denninger on how everything from illegal drugs to images of child abuse are distributed, and why the carriers don't get prosecuted:

Yet Another "Just-US" Decision (UPS)


In the you have to be kidding me department we have this:

United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) agreed to forfeit $40 million to settle a federal probe into shipments for illegal online pharmacies, admitting the company had information it was helping distribute controlled substances.

UPS signed a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. that requires it to set up a compliance program to prevent illegal Internet pharmacies from using its shipping services, according to a copy of the deal released today by the Justice Department. The accord, which requires cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration, will remain in effect for two years.

Can I knowingly deal with moving drugs around to people who I have every reason to believe shouldn't get them and get a non-prosecution agreement instead of going to pound-me-in-the-ass Federal Prison?

Wait, how do we know UPS knew about what was going on? How do we know the shipper didn't just stick something in a box, put an address on it, and that was that -- that is, UPS was just a common carrier doing what common carriers do, and had no reasonable knowledge that there was anything wrong with the contents or their intended use?

Oh that's simple, you see:

The company's drivers went so far as to drop off drug packages with pharmacy customers in parking lots and along highways, according to a law enforcement letter attached to the agreement.

Ah.

Poof -- there goes the "innocent common carrier" defense.

Two decades ago I got embroiled in a huge controversy over a thing called "Usenet", which at the time was the big Internet message system for public consumption. You posted things to a group and the software distributed them to thousands of systems all over the world. The "newsfeed" ran over disparate technologies, from dial-up modems to high-speed direct links. There were thousands of groups with various descriptive names, such as "alt.paranormal" and "comp.unix.programmer"

The controversy arose over a handful of groups that had names such as "alt.binaries.pictures.pre-teen" and "alt.binaries.pictures.teen-****." The name was, well, descriptive of what tended to be in there -- illegal (and outrageously so) child pornography.

I refused to carry them. My argument was simple: As a "common carrier" analog, even though at the time there was no statutory protection for message system operators as there is now, I could not make any sort of reasonable argument that the content was an unlabeled "box" that I had no actual knowledge of -- quite to the contrary, the very label on the box was strongly suggestive of illegality, and a 30-second look inside the open-to-public inspection box confirmed that this was in fact true.

This was, from my point of view, almost-exactly the same situation as taking a box to UPS to ship that happened to have written on the outside "Handle with care: Child pornography" or "Handle with care: Marijuana" and expecting them to transport it unmolested and not call the police.

In a word: Bullcrap.

What made the situation even worse was that these "pictures" groups, along with the blatantly-named stolen and cracked computer software groups, took up an utterly outrageous percentage of the total "newsfeed." In fact, they accounted for more than three quarters of all traffic, simply because binary images and such are much larger than text messages.

In short those providers carrying this junk were in fact spending somewhere around 80% of the total expense of carrying Usenet to transport and store blatantly illegal material. There was, in my opinion, simply no defensible position under which I could carry these groups and perform the engineering (along with the expenditure of funds) necessary to do so with a reasonable retention time while making the arguement that I was unaware that gross violations of the law were being knowingly enabled for profit by my conduct. It was my opinion then (and still is) that those firms who did so were knowingly trafficking in the material and should be exposed criminally to prosecution, including both the corporations involved and their officers.

My very-public position on this point was good for multiple death threats, "breathing" phone calls and all sorts of other harassment. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, given that it was insanely profitable, you see. There were, in fact, a shockingly large percentage of people who wanted to sign up for accounts on my network who in fact told our customer service agents they wanted access to this material -- we got literal dozens of such calls every week! Since we refused to carry that illegal trash they went elsewhere.

The idea (which many promoted at the time) that this was some "tiny little bit" of the Internet was utter crap -- it was, in fact, a very material proportion of the whole.

There have been a raft of news stories that have tried to paint the common carriers as "innocent victims" who had no reasonable knowledge that these illegal pharmacies were shipping drugs all over the place. That's pretty-much the same argument the Usenet folks were making back in the 1990s.

But the evidence, according to this story, is something different entirely -- when you start making deliveries into parking lots and along the side of the road, instead of to people's homes, or when you make deliveries to multiple "people" at a given address who really don't live there - that is, they're fictitious persons, then the "innocent common carrier" defense should instantly evaporate.

The problem here is that just like the big banks there are no handcuffs and no criminal prosecution. But if you or I were to start picking up shipments of these drugs in our car and hand-delivering them to people in parking lots, the exact same conduct being alleged here, we'd go straight to Federal Prison -- and justly so.

This crap must stop -- the rule of law must apply to all equally or eventually someone is going to come to the conclusion that the only law remaining is the law of the Jungle and take matters into their own hands.

[Magda Hassan]

There is good evidence that one of the big (and maybe the others for all we know) transport companies here TNT owned by Sir Peter Abels, good friend of PM Bob hawke and business partner of Rupert Murdoch, was used to transport drugs out of Australia. I think it is covered in Kwitney's book on Nugan Hand possibly also the Royal Commissions. According to some of the drivers the trucks were loaded up in the Griffith area, locked, and they were driven to the markets where the drivers were told to go off some where and have a cup of tea while others with keys unlocked and emptied the cargo. Rupert and Ables were also business partners in airlines and Abels helped his little mate Rupert out in Wapping transporting scab labour and their products in and out across the picket lines.