Thank you.
Besides what Lee has already mentioned about the precursors and things of that nature, I'll take two parts of your question.
On the big part, the importation, I think it would be wrong for me not to mention the fact that, whether it's huge importation or minor importation or above street-level dealing, one of the tools we are absolutely handcuffed by in policing—and it's taking lives in our country—is the inability of police officers to legally gain access to information that individuals have on their cellphones.
What I mean by that, and as a prime example I could talk over and over about, is that when a trafficker of any type of illicit drugs causing someone else to have an overdose or an overdose fatality, and we come to do the investigation, if they have specific information inside their cellphone, we can't get it unless we can gain their password. In other words, the person is holding a cellphone that answers why somebody is lying there dead, and we can't get access to that.
It's the same thing when high-level traffickers come into our country, whether they're dealing Mexican meth by the kilo or multi-kilo or they're bringing in precursors, when we bring our investigations to a conclusion, we often find they're using high-end encrypted devices that only they have the passwords for. We can catch them in vehicles with millions of dollars worth of methamphetamine and other products, and we can't get the information that we need to prove our case successfully because it's locked up behind a cellphone that's right in their hand or right in our hand, and we'll take months and months to try to open that cellphone. Sometimes we get lucky, and other times we don't. As a result, we lose vital information.
To me it's absolutely crazy that when we're dealing with victims' families, and a parent, brother, sister, husband or wife want to know what happened and how it happened, we can't tell them.
