Another helpful, almost necessary, piece of equipment is a phone or pager. The advantage of a corded home phone is that police need a warrant to listen to your conversations, but often times the convenience of a cell phone is worth the added risk.

I've heard from a couple people who claim that all cell phone conversations are recorded on some government computer network and if police need information they can listen to those recordings without a warrant. (According to the law, you do not have a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' on a cell phone or cordless phone, because of certain scanners that are available to the public.) These recorded conversations could not be used against you in court, but might be very helpful to police to figure out what you're doing and who you're doing it with.

I've also heard rumors that there are computer programs that constantly scan cell phone conversations, searching for keywords.

(If anyone out there can confirm or deny these rumors, please contact me. If the rumors are true for cell phones, I would bet all (or most) emails and instant messages are recorded as well.

With any cordless or cell phone, I highly recommend making a rule to never say anything more telling than "Can I come over and visit?" Using codes is an option in order to fool a computer program, (e.g. "Can I come get some cookies from you?") but if human police are listening to your conversations, it would be extremely difficult to work out a code that would fool them.

The advantage of a pager is that if the police wanted to listen to your conversations, it would be twice as difficult since you're constantly using different phones, but they can still make a clone pager without a warrant and record every number that pages you.

But no matter where or when or on what type of phone you're calling, remember, never talk about drugs, and make sure your customers and suppliers don't either. It might not seem like the phone is how busts happen, but the cops never admit that that's how they figured everything out.