Chinese Law Enforcement Alchemists Turn Shit To Drug Bust Gold
from the put-on-your-waders,-boys dept
Oh, the glorious career path that is the drug enforcement wing of Chinese law enforcement! (h/t Boing Boing)
Dozens of cities across China are applying an unusual forensic technique to monitor illegal drug use: chemically analysing sewage for traces of drugs, or their telltale metabolites, excreted in urine.
One southern city, Zhongshan, a drug hotspot, is also monitoring waste water to evaluate the effectiveness of its drug-reduction programmes, says Li Xiqing, an environmental chemist at Peking University in Beijing who is working with police in these cities.
Li says Zhongshan police have already used the technique to help track down and arrest a drug manufacturer. He says a handful of cities are planning to use data from waste water to set targets for police arrests of drug users, some as early as next year.
That's exactly the sort of statement one would expect to be made in the wake of "do what now" responses from not just journalists and citizens, but also many of those on law enforcement drug task forces.
That drugs can be found in bodily excretions is no surprise. There's an entire corporate/medical industry reliant on that very fact. That you can track down drug manufacturers by grabbing anonymous… um… data by tapping the sewage backbone is a bit of stretch. It may have helped police get a general sense of where some sort of unadulterated drugs might be flowing from, but my guess is regular, non-shit-sifting policework was involved. Chinese law enforcement have plenty of more effective methods to deploy, especially considering they're not "hindered" by concerns about civil liberties or reputational damage.
As the article points out, this isn't the first time sewage has been examined for drug content. But prior to this point, it was done as a really odorous form of drug census. People may not be willing to talk openly about their drug habit(s), but a whole bunch of anonymous donations can be collected without worrying about consent waivers or a rush of entrepreneurial spirits diving into the brown gold for better ad positioning.
What does appear to be more useful is mining the effluvia for "data" showing the efficacy of new drug policies. If law enforcement is targeting certain illegal chemicals, measuring the output is a quick (AND DIRTY!) way to see if drug use is dropping.
Chinese law enforcement suggests its program should be adopted by other countries with drug problems. I'm not sure it will find many takers. While collecting human waste presents approximately zero civil liberties issues, the spokesperson has greatly overestimated law enforcement's willingness to get its hands dirty… I mean, at least not in this sense. We can hardly get cops to play by the rules we've had in place for more than 200 years. I don't think they're quite ready to move from the unpleasant task of trash pulls to something even more unappealing.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: china, drugs, surveillance, wastewater
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
So, shit does flow uphill?
When (not if) this comes to the US, are our sewers going to be considered third parties and all the data collected available? At what point in following sewage upstream, as it gets closer and closer to your house/apartment, when does it become curtilage and therefore require warrants?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: So, shit does flow uphill?
When the data is used against a prominent politician (cf. Robert Bork and the VPPA).
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: So, shit does flow uphill?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
While it's true that trash left at the curb is considered searchable without a warrant, sifting through stool and urine excretions is not so open ended. There, it gets into the messy category of medical information since its going to be medical personal sifting through those bodily excretions: there's the small matter of HIPAA, which judges tend to not be allowed in their courts. Not to mention it would involve a lot of doctors losing their medical licenses. HIPAA is a federal law.
This also provides civil penalties for civil lawsuits to be filed against doctors who violate patients rights regarding the HIPAA law. The United States doesn't operate like China does. It would take a lot to rewrite medical privacy laws to allow mandatory release of medical information about patients, meaning, a repeal of the HIPAA laws that are in effect for the entire country and that's a mean bull for any politician to fight, which could cause Medical Boards in every state to develop their own HIPAA laws, similar to what's going on with the Net Neutrality laws. Simply put, he HIPAA law is too large of a shark for the politicians in congress to fight over.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
Stool and urine samples are very much covered under medical records, and lab technicians already do most analytical work rather than doctors. Further, it is irrelevant whether or not any particular individual, group, or organization "has patients" or not, the law specifically defines which entities are covered by the law irrespective of their relationship with any actual patient.
That's not to say HIPAA would necessarily be helpful. Only specific entities are covered by HIPAA, and the police are not one of them. So potentially, the police could develop their own analytical facility to do all the analysis and thus avoid contact with any existing covered entity. Whether or not that would work would would depend on whether the courts buy the argument that non-consensual creation of medical data is substantially different from consensual creation of medical data, such that this new organization would not be covered.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re:
Then again, how do they get around HIPAA laws when they test an arrested suspects blood or urine sample for drugs? That happens all the time and would seem to make some parts of your argument moot.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
While Techdirt does the opposite: turns all to CRAP.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Ah, I apologize for my misunderstanding.
First, on the question of arrested suspects, HIPAA allows for transfer of medical data to law enforcement in response to a warrant, subpoena or various other types of request depending on the exact circumstances. Most generally, a warrant is required or, in the event of exigent circumstances (such as drugs which may not be detectable in urine later), a subpoena can be used. This process would help if you wanted information about a single individual and could get a warrant, but wouldn't help for larger scale collections (e.g. a neighborhood) since that would require a general warrant, which are illegal.
To get back to the original point, HIPAA allows for "de-identified" medical data to be transferred freely. What qualifies as de-identified data is defined in law. The most relevant term to sewage collection that I can find is the requirement that data can be identified by the first 3 digits of the zip code, but only if the geographic area formed by combining all zip codes with the same initial three digits contains more than 20,000 people. So a large neighborhood would likely not qualify as de-identified. But a city might be ok.
Also, to be clear, HIPAA does not make the distinction that you are making between "records" and "unidentified samples." If the sample was analyzed for medically relevant data, then it is a medical record, even if nobody knows where the sample came from. If no identifying information is included with the sample data (again, defined by law), then the sample data can be freely transferred, but it is still a medical record and HIPAA is still the applicable legal framework.
A brief aside, but it's actually very, very hard to create datasets that cannot be linked to individual people. In the case of your neighborhood, you could combine knowledge of the local sewage system and water usage at each house (which would allow rough estimates of when toilets are flushed/when samples should reach your collector), good old-fashioned surveillance (to monitor when people are home), and analysis of intestinal bacteria in stool samples (which varies pretty widely between people) to eventually get a pretty good map of which stool samples belong to which individual.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
SmartPipe in real life
This looks to me like the first staggering steps of the SmartPipe "concept" implemented in real life. Oh, it's obviously not general yet, but big brother must start somewhere.
But, make no mistake, it is coming. As the detectors necessary to process effluent become cheaper, there will be more and more pressure by the governments to install this on everyone's home. The expressed purpose will be to track illegal flushing, but somehow drugs will just happen to be included as well.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: So, shit does flow uphill?
I wonder what it would have been like if that wasn't applied however and we started to see how they'd try to spin their rentals into negatives about them like desperate for tally marks prosecutors. Horror movies? He must be a bloodthirsty freak! Feature a woman with large breasts anywhere in the movie? A degenerate pervert! Doesn't rent anything? Must spend all of his time reading like a freak!
That might have been good for our collective critical thinking skills however that would also assume that most people learned from past events which unfortunately they tend do so poorly or not at all generally - see the War on Drugs soon after Prohibition was revealed to be a resounding failure.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Well you are a pretty shitty commenter.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
DMCA voted.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Judge to witness cop: "and your method for collecting the evidence against the defendant?"
Officer: "uh.. we honeydipped your Honor."
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: While Trolls the opposite
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Getting harder to keep secrets
Same for computers. We are going to have to come to grips with that.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Getting harder to keep secrets
People like you are defeatists, and as much I wish you'd get exactly what you deserve for that outlook on life, unfortuantely for the rest of us, we can't allow that "dream" of yours to come to pass.
Do us all a favor and grow up. Is it a crap ton of fighting? Yes, but the consequences of bending over in defeat are far worse. More so than you can imagine.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Getting harder to keep secrets
People like you are defeatists, and as much I wish you'd get exactly what you deserve for that outlook on life, unfortuantely for the rest of us, we can't allow that "dream" of yours to come to pass.
Do us all a favor and grow up. Is it a crap ton of fighting? Yes, but the consequences of bending over in defeat are far worse. More so than you can imagine.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]