What a headline. Even I, a regular cannabis consumer and drug policy reform advocate, fell prey to this. I saw another article earlier today about this and thought something like, "well, no surprises there."

But indeed if this were some soccer mom, I sense my reaction might be different.

This is a pretty serious crime and the legal implications unclear. Any thoughts on what will happen next?

edit: I just noticed this is Radley's writing. Love that dude - definitely full of hacker spirit.

Original headline/title was "Once you’ve dehumanized drug offenders, it’s easy to steal their identities". Just got changed to "Government Set Up a Fake Facebook Page in This Woman’s Name"

Oh wow, really? That's crazy! I'm so sick of WaPo. I'm glad they're letting Radley write, but they're a rag.

edit: Wow, what happened? It's now not even Radley's piece?!

We changed the URL because HN prefers original sources, and the original story was the Buzzfeed piece. On the other hand, neither article is an obvious fit for HN, so I'm not sure what the right call is. Suggestions are welcome but may not be acted on until morning here.

I think Radley's piece was a great fit. It was about identity theft, which itself is usually on-topic, and also about government activity rubbing up against the norms and policies of an online social network, which is usually on-topic.

Here's the thesis (and spirit) that makes Radley's piece more HN relevant, to me:

It shouldn’t be all that surprising, then, when drug enforcement officials subsequently treat drug offenders as something less than human. If you aren’t fully human, you have no identity to steal.

It never ceases to amaze me. Every time I think the conspiracy theorists are the real lunatics, the government manages to one up them. First Snowden, now this. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.

The DEA has no purpose other than to enforce drug laws. The public has consistently shown that it wants drug laws to be more liberal, but to the DEA, that's an existential threat. The DEA has a vested interest in the drug police state. It's a monster. What a mess.

It should be thoroughly dismantled. It won't be though, because we have no control over our government.

We have control in principle, and, in practice, if the public was energized enough about this it would get done. It's just that the bar is set extremely high and it's almost unthinkable what abuses might need to occur to get that much attention to the drug issue. The reason we're in this situation to begin with is that drug users are poor advocates for their own cause and they are easy targets for discrimination and persecution. The biggest reason is that drug users are a small minority that's mostly invisible. If you eliminate marijuana it gets even smaller.

This has been flagged pretty quickly by pro-government forces, I guess. 27 votes in one hour and on the second page...

Might be more because of the source, Buzzfeed. HN seems to penalize some sources pretty heavily these days.

Personally I think that's a change for the worse. I've seen a number of interesting stories with a decent vote/age ratio be buried a number of pages back. For me, it's decreasing the value of visiting the site.

It was originally Washington Post. It was changed to Buzzfeed by dang.

Cute. Wouldn't that be a reason for the account to be booted out of Facebook in the first place?

Good reporting, here.

Url changed from http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/10/07/o..., which points to this.