I think a lot of people have made good points here, it seems clear that a naive dead drop is a foolish idea, but I also think it's wrong to throw out the baby with the bathwater.Some points:-> Like the RandomFellow says, using mobile phones or carrying them is an enormous no-no.-> I very much like the fact that the buyer doesn't have to give his address to the vendor. -> But on the other hand setting up dead drops for 5 grams of weed or 10 MDMA pills seems a bit James Bond.  Clearly this makes most sense with larger quantities, esp. the kind vendors are likely to pick up.Most importantly, the thing missing from this conservation we're having is that there's at least five additional methods of securing the buyer's anonymity or security in a very big way. The first three are only applicable for smaller quantities of product, and the others are for larger quantities.1. You can 'fake' a dead drop. That is; you can just walk up relatively close to the dead drop area e.g. within 10 feet, and pick up the 'contraband'. Then you can just walk off.Of course, you picked up nothing except some object you carried along which was the same size/appearance as the item you expected to really pick up.Then, you can wander away. Content in the knowledge that if you're going to get arrested then you've nothing on your person and there is no evidence that you picked up contraband. Once you're happy, having waited a few minutes, hours, days, even weeks, you can pick up the real cache later. This stretches any LE resources to the absolute zenith. Simple but highly effective.2. You can 'double-fake' the dead drop. That is; you can either do No.1 more than once, or you could send a pal to fake the dead drop in the first place. They can't possibly be implicated so there's no reason for them to worry.3. You need not really worry about CCTV, hidden cameras etc. Use a hat, sunglasses and swop your clothes + get a new cover bag for your things in a toilet somewhere. Simple, but highly effective, esp. in densely populated metropolitan areas. There is no image recognition technology I am aware of that can circumvent this. Even human eyes trained on you from A to B find it almost impossible to counteract. And did I mention that your pal could be awaiting you in the same restroom? (you could swop clothes/bag here for yet another red herring).4. You can use technology too! If the seller puts a cheap RFID chip into the cache, you can use a scanner to detect whether the cache is legitimate. Basically the tag is sensitive to interference (shop lifting tech) in some manner, so that it is only if the vendor is in cahoots with LE that the cache could be compromised. There is an entire universe of technology which could be adapted to this method, only imagination is the limit. This has been discussed many times on this forum, just search for RFID.5. Let's say the RFID tag thing fails completely and there is a tracking device in the cache (a very likely attack vector against dead drops once LE wises up). This is actually trivial to circumvent, you just need to pop the cache into a Faraday Bag. These devices look like regular bags, except that they prevent *any* signal from getting in or out of them. Microwaves, radiowaves, you name it. It's the communications equivalent of carrying a lead safe around, but much more fashionable. *Boom*, off the radar. This in combination with with restroom swop mentioned before would bamboozle even highly tech proficient and intelligent LE.6. For large deliveries, you can of course deposit fake caches and real caches and mix them up.--And I'm sure there's plenty of other ideas out there too. The only problem I can see with this is some kinds of tracing technologies that aren't about communication e.g. dyepacks, radioactive markers etcHowever, all of these technologies I can think of seem very local, you'd need to be quite close by in order to detect their presence by sight, geiger counter etc.