I don’t have cable TV at home, so I spend a lot of time in the common exercise room in the building. (They have free cable there.)

The other night, I was watching a show called DEA on Spike. It’s essentially depicting real guys in Scene from DEAthe Drug Enforcement Agency going after drug dealers and building cases. (If it sounds like I’m oversimplifying their careers, I’m not. The show is.) The program’s not too heavy on content and it seems like they spend the three minutes after each commercial break recapping the four minutes before the commercial break. So my mind starts to wander and I think about school and it hits me:

These drug dealers that never get caught would operate much more efficiently and at lower risk if they hired a consultant to analyze their supply chain and make some recommendations.

Let’s take a step back here. All I know about the drug trade (the one on the streets, not this one) is what I see on The Wire. Standard practice would be going after the street level dealers and make deals with them, trying to get them to turn on the people at the next level up. McNutty, er… McNulty and the team went after the big players by doing the investigations required to uncover the evidence of wrong-doing at the high up levels.  The work is complicated by the institutional dysfunction everywhere and things succeed to varying degrees. But that’s like real life.

Anyway, an ebusiness concept that really makes it difficult for those high-level criminals to be caught and convicted is the idea of separating atoms and bits. That’s the idea where, given a business run over the Internet (or through other electronic communications, I guess) the data, i.e. the bits, involved in the transaction don’t necessarily have to travel together or even on the same path as the actual goods being bought and sold, i.e. the atoms. It’s like how you could arrange to buy an iPhone from me over Craigslist and I send it to you using UPS. Before the Internet, it would have been very difficult for this to happen in any practical manner.

And you see this in The Wire too. It’s stupid to have the same person take money for you and hand you drugs. The fuzz be watchin’ you all over, son! Applied to a higher level, the top decision-makers in the criminal organizations run everything without even touching the drugs that would get them a conviction.

In any case, it’s interesting. Please don’t take this further and run a drug distribution organization. Or arrest me.

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