Originally published at: "Funky pickles" contain $4 million in smuggled meth | Boing Boing
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RIP…
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I’ve read that if if a discovery is attributed to a sniffer dog or a random stop, etc, they are usually using it to protect an informant who enabled them to intercept a particular shipment.
I keep seeing these drug busts of drugs packed into weird things and i just gotta wonder what portion of these kinds of shipments are they catching and which ones go through undetected 
they wouldn’t be going through this trouble if it didn’t work i would guess.
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It’s called “parallel construction”, and it’s also (allegedly) been used to hide the illegal gathering of evidence.
The most notable example are the police use of “Harris Stingrays”, which are secret portable cell tower simulators. Stingrays can identify all mobile phones in a nearby area. However, warrants need to be focused on a suspect, not a blanket “everyone within a mile of Chicago Ave.” That, and they violate FCC rules on unlicensed transmission and disruption of phone services, including the prevention of dialing 911 in case of emergencies. Harris also makes police departments sign dubious Non Disclosure Agreements before selling them, contractually requiring the cops to hide them from everyone including judges!
Stingrays are highly illegal; and so the cops (allegedly) resort to parallel construction to hide their existence and use.
The good news? Some 4G and all 5G phones use secure modern protocols that completely neuter these illegal interception devices. Harris has read the writing on the wall and has discontinued the Stingray line. But older phones will remain susceptible for quite a while.
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I’d like to call together a vote on Boing Boing that all drug shipments that fail to reach their destination be referred to as “A funky pickle situation” for the foreseeable future. This is for any drug shipment legal or illegal that doesn’t reach it’s destination.
Will someone second this to get it on the table? =P
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I was wondering about this - there’s probably limited opportunity for one-off, infrequent or casual smugglers to learn from others (or their own mistakes), so knowing what works and what doesn’t might be a matter of luck. Presumably the cartels do it often enough that they get to learn from their mistakes* and stick with proven strategies, and you’d expect them to keep quiet about what works.
*those that aren’t buried in the desert or doing a stretch.
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