Utility company's proposal to rat out hidden marijuana operations to police raises privacy concerns

Yea, guilty until proven innocent isn't really something people want.

With how common LEDs are nowadays it'd probably be hard to spot a difference between a small grow operation and a 14-hour-a-day streamer. A consistent 1200+ watt jump at around the same time, day in and day out in both scenarios

The common denominator is that criminals appear to be taking advantage of laws legalizing marijuana in an attempt to fly under the radar to produce marijuana that’s sold in states where cannabis is illegal.

Sounds like the solution is to legalize it everywhere.

Only a matter of time before some no-knock warrant gets some botanist killed or something.

How about letting the police do the cheapest trick in the book and investigate things on their own? Like they did somewhere in Europe. They waited for the snow to fall, and then told the police to look for homes where the snow was melting earlier - a potential sign the the house is way warmer than humans need it to be.

All the poor basement bitcoin miners are gonna get their moms houses raided

More than a dozen states that legalized marijuana have seen a spike in illegal marijuana grow operations that utilize massive amounts of electricity.

I don't know what a grow operation looks like, I'm betting charging my Electric Vehicle at home consumes more electricity than plant lights. That EV charging can pull 40 amps for upwards of 6 hours if the battery is dead flat when returning from a long trip. Seems like an easy way to mask a grow operation would be just to lower your EV charge (say to 20A or so) rate to stretch out the duration, then run the grow lights at the same schedule as the EV charging. There's no way to know from the electrical meter what is consuming the electricity.

lame ass Karen ass snitches 🥀

It's fucking stupid we're even having this conversation. Weed should be completely legal.

So the utility company rats customers out who pay more? Capitalism inversed.

This doesn’t make much sense. How are they supposed to have probable cause? I don’t know how you can have a “reasonable amount of suspicion” from just utility data. They would then have to do more investigating, which makes me think they’ll just have “civilians” check out or just casually walk by places the utility company suspects.

This already happens. No idea why this is news now.

Utility companies for basically every place in the US give the police the names, addresses, and utility history of all of their top residential users. You have no privacy and no way to stop the pigs from warrantless spying on you.

They've been doing that shit since at least the 70s.

The common denominator is that criminals appear to be taking advantage of laws legalizing marijuana in an attempt to fly under the radar to produce marijuana that’s sold in states where cannabis is illegal. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration are investigating any ties these operations might have to criminal syndicates including Chinese organized crime.

In Oklahoma, farms, empty nursing homes, bowling alleys and warehouses were transformed into marijuana production operations after voters legalized cannabis for medical use in 2018. Police began cracking down after realizing straw owners in China and Mexico were running many of the licensed operations, said Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

From what I heard the moisture really fucks up the house.

Microgrid / self sufficient power generation and storage is the future.