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U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
- mtgx 13y agoThis is exactly the nightmare scenario we were fearing - and lo and behold, it has already happened: using mass spying data of the NSA to launch fishing expeditions against Americans, and find them guilty of crimes. You could say "yeah but that data can't be used in Court!". But they can very trivially skirt around that. They don't have to use that data. They just need to use some of that data to show a judge "probable cause" - and BAM: now they have a warrant to legally get access to anyone's data, and that data they can use. But in practice such process by the authorities makes the "limit" of a warrant essentially useless. The warrant just becomes an extra beaurocratic step that they have to take, but doesn't represent a limit on who they can investigate and how anymore.
- dragontamer 13y agoWiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst. Sounds like a pretty big limitation to me.
- falk 13y agoThe operative word being "generally". Political limitations are worthless. If they have the capability, they will abuse it. We already know they don't care about the constitution and that they have secret interpretations of laws.
- dragontamer 13y agoIgnorance of the law and imagination can get you pretty far. Lets be frank here, Political limitations are the only thing stopping government agencies from shooting Laser Microphones half-a-mile away listening to your entire house. (4th Amendment, Illegal Search) You have no idea of the abuses that can be possible with law enforcement equipment, and are probably just scared of a little bit of the possibilities or powers afforded to them. Keep your wits about you, this can get much much worse before it may get better. And hyperbole now will only harm your argument in the long run. Reality is, intelligence agencies are under DoD. They aren't supposed to be investigating Americans, period. If they manage to nab information about American People (which includes legal immigrants btw), they are not allowed to forward it to law enforcement. We know that anything pulled out of the NSA system is recorded and checked by the FISA courts, to ensure that Americans were not part of the targets. (Edward Snowden admitted it himself, although he wanted more than just 5% random checks on this log).
- falk 13y ago"Lets be frank here, Political limitations are the only thing stopping government agencies from shooting Laser Microphones half-a-mile away listening to your entire house. (4th Amendment, Illegal Search)" Why go through all the trouble when they can turn our cellphones into listening devices? http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323997004578641993388259674-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwMTEwNDEyWj.html http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142412788732399700... "We know that anything pulled out of the NSA system is recorded and checked by the FISA courts, to ensure that Americans were not part of the targets." That is absolute bullshit! Have you not payed attention to the latest leaks on XKeyscore?
- betterunix 13y ago"Reality is, intelligence agencies are under DoD" You left out the two intelligence agencies that are under the DoJ: the FBI and the DEA.
- pessimizer 13y agoYou mean that it's "usually" and "generally" a limitation, right?
- beedogs 13y agoAfter an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction." Jesus fucking Christ. They were lying to prosecutors to get charges pressed against people.
- perlpimp 13y agoIsn't it perjury, a free pass to the jail?
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoNot if you're on Team State.
- Spooky23 13y agoAccording to articles that I've read in the past, when the Feds get caught in trial doing something like this, they'll say "Whoops, we screwed up, but we were acting in good faith". Generally, that makes it ok.
- betterunix 13y agoNobody goes to jail when the DEA's soldiers invade the homes of innocent people and kill them. Why would they go to jail for perjury?
- deveac 13y agoThey weren't necessarily lying, -just omitting the cause prior to the traffic violation. If the traffic violation as primary cause was never challenged, they wouldn't technically be taking a position on the origin often. They'd simply state the facts: "Vehicle X was driving southbound on I-94 and failed to utilize a turn signal while switching lanes. I pulled car over and noticed x,y,z..." As a police officer friend of mine told me many years ago "If I want to pull you over, there is nothing you can do to stop me. All I have to do is follow you for one mile and you're going to violate some portion of the traffic code." I'm not defending this at all, as I think it is outrageous and that the link to harvested NSA data is beyond the pale . I'm just pointing out that this is, as the article mentioned, de rigueur, and when a technically legal starting point is provided, the defense likely almost never challenges that, thus eliminating the need for the prosecution to take a formal stance on the origin. Hopefully this begins to change.
- falk 13y agoAfter hearing all of this stuff, I feel like the television show The Wire was either way ahead of its time or had really great law enforcement consultants. I'm leaning toward the latter.
- objclxt 13y agoBefore David Simon created The Wire he was a reporter on the Baltimore Sun, covering the crime desk. He somehow managed to convince the Baltimore PD to embed him in the homicide department for a year. Ed Burns (who co-wrote a lot of the series) used to work as a Baltimore PD detective, and the technical advisor for the first two seasons was a Baltimore police commander. A lot of the plots on The Wire are based on actual cases and occurrences. In some cases quite loosely, in others not so much. It's a depressingly realistic show.
- InclinedPlane 13y agohttp://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/features/10-real-people-that-inspired-characters-on-the-wire.html http://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/features/10-real-...
- Volscio 13y agoThe director was a 12 year journalist for the Baltimore Sun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Simon Ed Burns worked 20 years in BPD in the homicide and narcotics divisions, then became a school teacher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Burns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Burns
- agilebyte 13y agoGreenwald now discussing it live here: http://www.democracynow.org/ http://www.democracynow.org/ Edit 1: Has ended, will post a link when in archive. Edit 2: The interview starts at 18:00 and a direct link to the MP4 file is http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-0805.mp4 http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-0805.mp4 Edit 3: Starting 43:15 pertains to DEA SOD
- northwest 13y agoThe next question: How come with all this, the cartels continue to exist?
- falk 13y agoBecause the U.S. government secretly loves to profit off of both the direct selling/transportation/etc of drugs and the prison industrial complex. I recommend you read the following for more details and proof: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global/dp/1556524838/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global/... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South... Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond http://www.amazon.com/Acid-Dreams-Complete-History-Sixties/dp/0802130623/ http://www.amazon.com/Acid-Dreams-Complete-History-Sixties/d... The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1595586431 http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1595586431
- aidos 13y agoThanks for that list. It feels like in a world where people were generally interested in solving the issues with the drug trade the DEA wouldn't need to exist. It's something that should be solvable. People will take recreational drugs, so obviously the solution is not to create an organisation to fight that. There has to be a safe source for these drugs that plays nicely with society and the political system. Do you have any good recommendations for information regarding places where this has been tried in earnest?
- northwest 13y agoPortugal is on it: http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/23/portugals-drug-experience-new-study-confirms-decriminalization-was-a-success/ http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/23/portugals-drug-experie...
- wikiburner 13y agoRite-Aid? :) Seriously though, I wonder what will happen to the prescription/drugstore model if full drug legalization ever took place. It's an interesting question - you can get cocaine or heroin walking in off the street, but you need a doctor's prescription for some Xanax or Aderall? Would everything go over the counter? Is that wise?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ojbyrne 13y agoHere's hoping that everyone who was convicted via this method gets their sentences overturned, because that's about the only way this will stop.
- sophacles 13y agoI think it is less nefarious than that - it feels more like the problems that arise from fixing bugs in code. We've all encountered this - you fix one bug and it breaks 3 other things, because of unexpected/unintended consequences. Something else was relying on the broken code to work right. Systems thinking is just plain hard... So how do we do unit tests for laws?
- chiph 13y agoLawyers are like that guy in that complexity favors them and gives them job security. Simplicity and clarity is not a virtue in law.
- mcguire 13y agoThat would be difficult: how are you going to make the case that your conviction is due to this method?
- ajarmst 13y agoUnlikely. "Your honor, I should get a new trial because, in addition to the evidence that was apparently quite sufficient to convict me, it turns out they also had an illegal wiretap recording of me arranging the buy."
- alphadenied 13y agoA government that hides its actions is a government that is overstepping its bounds and needs to be slapped around a bit. I think we're decades behind in the slapping around department. Make everyone a criminal and spy on everyone so you can control them and scared them to death. What a wonderful way to run the "land of the free" I bet most people thought the spying was for terrorists.
- chunkyslink 13y agoI've said it before and I'll say it again. The USA is a tyranny, there is nothing you can do about these things.
- mr_spothawk 13y ago>there is nothing you can do about these things. It's gonna take generations of work to resolve it, but there's absolutely a way out of this. We may never find it, though.
- DamnYuppie 13y agoI agree with your first statement, yet we have many avenues open to us still before all is lost, but that window is closing fast.
- api 13y agoOne of the principal mechanisms used in the USA to maintain its system of oligarchy / tyranny is distraction of the population via "culture war" issues and identity politics. As long as people vote based on who they'd rather have a beer with, or based on issues like homosexuality and religion, they will not vote based on issues of social justice, economic well being, or against the politics of corruption. The culture war and identity politics are a classic divide and conquer technique. It's used because it works.
- cavilling_elite 13y agoI've long thought this, but never read someone say it so starkly. My heart dropped with every sentence. Any suggested reading?
- uptown 13y agoTies directly into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154302
- mb0 13y agoSomething tells me we will soon learn that the judicial branch purposely creates loopholes for the executive branch to exploit.
- DamnYuppie 13y agoI will literally cry myself to sleep that evening if such a thing comes to pass :(
- cheald 13y agoI'd start hydrating now.
- flurie 13y ago"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations." This implicit double standard plays a role in allowing this kind of thing to happen. I wonder when we'll start reëvaluating it?
- jusben1369 13y agoImagine if you were listening in to communications on US citizens as part of an NSA program and you came across what appeared to be the distinct planning of a murder - one that had nothing to do with National Security now or in the future. What do you do? This is part of the interesting range of unexpected consequences when you stretch boundaries.
- walshemj 13y agoThis is the premise of person of interest - does raise some interesting moral questions for TLA officers.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoJust watched full 2 seasons after recent HN recommendation. "Person of Interest" is a good series, and in some moments not-so-suprisingly-now scary.
- rdtsc 13y agoBefore the leak -- nothing probably. It would have revealed the existence of the program. Now -- sure! They could just come knocking to the door. This is dark side of the leaks in way. If they know we know, they they can expand the use of the tool. (Or rather I should say this is the dark side of apathy to the information in the leaks, now they now public doesn't care enough).
- cavilling_elite 13y agoThe apathy is the scary part. I fear it would take a mass roundup of people before the "we need this because of X" people might start questioning it. OTOH, it may be mental (illness?) for people to blindly follow authority.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoIsn't this practically the plot of The Conversation?
- gnosis 13y agoFirst they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%2E%2E%2E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%2E%2E%2E
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lukifer 13y agoWe rightly vilify the Third Reich, but the lesson of history is not that the Nazis were intrinsically evil; it's that any culture has the capacity to normalize and systematize its own unique brand of evil, via a thousand baby steps. Just because America is not and never will be Nazi Germany, that's no reason to accept or ignore the American flavor of fascism that has been quietly brewing for decades.
- dmix 13y agoI highly recommend this documentary on the Gestopo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtgB4qiiWBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtgB4qiiWBI The first thing the Nazis started doing when they got power was set up a secret investigative unit. Where they started creating detailed records of all of their enemy targets (starting w/ the communists and the competing political party). This intelligence was then used by the SS/SA to harass, round up and assassinate anyone who was a threat to their power. The intelligence agencies were the foundation of Nazi fascism. The signs of power abuses were present in these agencies way before the Gestopo became publicly infamous for targeting Jews.
- lukifer 13y agoI've very much come to hate Godwin's Law. There are important lessons, perhaps the most important, to draw from that dark time of history, and we won't see them if we insist that the comparisons are only apt if every little thing is exactly the same, or as 100% evil as the Nazis. There should have been far more attention paid to the specific comparisons of the Patriot Act to pre-conditions of Nazi Germany, rather than getting distracted by "BUSH=HITLER LOL".
- btipling 13y agoThe data-mining aspect could be troubling depending on the details, but the parallel construction isn't. They're not planting the drugs on the suspects when they stop stop them. But the hysteria here is thick so one can't even begin to have a reasonable discourse in this comment thread. The paranoid one-sidedness of the discussion is mind boggling. Look at these downvotes for disagreements. There's nothing I've said that warrants the downvotes.
- MisterWebz 13y agoThere's nothing I've said that warrants the downvotes. Maybe you're getting downvoted because you're complaining about downvotes and not actually contributing anything to the dicussion?
- btipling 13y agoI did contribute something, the point that drugs are not being planted on people. The parallel construction wouldn't work if the suspects were not actually committing crimes. Nobody wants to talk about it I guess however, too busy getting their fix on today's outrage porn.
- gnosis 13y ago"The parallel construction wouldn't work if the suspects were not actually committing crimes." See "Three Felonies a Day"[1] Also, note the following quote from the original article: "most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial" In fact, something like 90% or more of people accused of crimes in the US never get a trial, because they plead guilty. They plead guilty because prosecutors pile on so many charges that the defendants are afraid to risk life in jail if they happen to lose (in a judicial system that's usually stacked against them). Defending a case in Federal court is also incredibly expensive and traumatic. See the Aaron Swartz case for good examples of all of the above. [1] - http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
- pivnicek 13y ago
- hughdbrown 13y agoSo suppose this is true: A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said. How do you square that with the claim that the NSA is tracking only metadata? I'd say you need the phone call contents to know where to stop a particular truck.
- mpyne 13y agoBecause SOD has more investigative inputs than just the NSA, and also because they are not required to track only metadata for foreigners. More mundane (and perhaps more likely) is that the source data for that kind of tip comes from wiretaps from existing open investigations. You might not get probable cause for a search based on the wiretap data alone, so SOD gets the local cops to alert on the car instead and "start" the follow-up investigation.
- walshemj 13y agoyes could be an informant or a undercover cop - back in ww2 the ultra decrypts where disguised as coming from other sources. You not going to tell some random cop this is from bob our inside man on the crew in case the cop is corrupt and sells out your DEA agent
- benburleson 13y agoSuppose you had enough (meta)data on a particular user, if that user spent a disproportionate amount of time at a specific truck stop, it wouldn't take too long to extract that from your data.
- mcovey 13y ago> How do you square that with the claim that the NSA is tracking only metadata? It's horseshit.
- zeteo 13y agoSecrecy in law enforcement is contagious precisely because it makes things so much easier. Kafka's "Trial" was a nightmare for the accused, but think how convenient it is for the authorities to not publicize charges or sentencing and to do everything on their most expedient schedule. As soon as it was decided that accusations of "terrorism" could be treated this way, the seed was sown. The programs and procedures developed by the "anti-terrorist" agencies will be readily used and copied by any other branches of law enforcement that have the ability to do so; this case is a prime example. So, if you thought Orwell was scary, say hello to Kafka now.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoHave a dose of snark: You crackpot tinfoil hat-wearing kooks imagine all sorts of bizarro world stuff: the Bildeburgers, Skull and Bones, One-world elite conspiracies straight from the imagination of Dan Brown. I mean, how crazy do you have to be to think that every prosecutor in the US is conspiring with the DEA and the NSA, and that this has been going on for years without anyone noticing? You know what else? If you don't want to go to jail for drug smuggling, don't smuggle drugs! What's that? The gov't admits it? I see. Well you know, nobody made the drug smugglers use a cell phone. There has never been any privacy expectation for business records! That's between the phone company and the gov't. These programs are lawful and they have been approved by every single congressman. They all agree unanimously. Don't like it? Get a different phone company! The gov't needs this to protect our children from terrerrerrorism. Do you know how many terror attacks there would have been if they weren't working to keep us safe? No! Because they can't tell you; that would compromise the operations! The truth is that the vast majority of gov't agents are honest hard working people trying to keep your children safe. They should be celebrated as heroes. These disclosures only serve to harm the Motherland^H^H^H Homeland security. Now we'll have to just spend more taxes for new secret programs to replace the ones revealed by treacherous commie spies! /s
- andrewcooke 13y agoi have no idea what you are trying to say.
- mpyne 13y agoWow. Hadn't heard of this 'parallel construction' stuff before, and will have to reserve judgment for now... but telling agents and investigators that they can't so much as mention the provenance of the info to the prosecutors or the court is rather beyond the pale.
- coldcode 13y agoThe next agency I expect to hear about ... the IRS starts using this kind of data.
- c0ur7n3y 13y agoI'd bet tomorrow's lunch they already have.
- LoganCale 13y agoNot long before the NSA story broke in June I recall a few quickly forgotten stories about the IRS reading people's emails without warrants, and monitoring transactions and social media to find people cheating on their taxes.
- john_b 13y ago> "As a practical matter, law enforcement agents said they usually don't worry that SOD's involvement will be exposed in court. That's because most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial and therefore never request to see the evidence against them. If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement." This is interesting, as it's basically an admission that Aaron Swartz-style prosecutorial bullying is not limited to just computer-related cases.
- mr_spothawk 13y ago>This is interesting, as it's basically an admission that Aaron Swartz-style prosecutorial bullying is not limited to just computer-related cases. I guess I always took it for granted that prosecutorial bullying is ever-present. It's interesting to come face-to-face with the reality that it's not part of everybody's worldview that the State is 'out to get you'. (no sarcasm)
- w_t_payne 13y agoIn light of the "Three Felonies a day" phenomenon, and given the sweeping nature of the surveillance, it seems likely that the number of cases that are prosecuted represents only a small fraction of the number of potential cases that could possibly be taken to trial. This gives the criminal justice system considerable latitude to select and prioritise certain cases over others. How are these decisions made? Can we be sure that political considerations and/or racial / sexual / gender biases, (conscious or unconscious) do not play a role in the decision making process?
- cheald 13y ago> How are these decisions made? When it's convenient for the career of the person with their finger on the button. > Can we be sure that political considerations and/or racial / sexual / gender biases, (conscious or unconscious) do not play a role in the decision making process? Quite the opposite, we can be sure that they do play a role. When you get to pick and choose your targets, it's a foregone conclusion that the targets you pick will be selected because of some criteria beyond the fact that they are merely in violation of the law.
- neilk 13y agoJust a couple of days ago somebody on HN speculated this was happening, and I dismissed it as paranoia. Surely nobody is going to risk revealing the existence of a universal surveillance program over a few drug convictions, right? Twenty-eight of you agreed with me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134821 I give up. Apparently no speculation is out of bounds any more. If someone says it's all due to Nazi reptoids, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- Homunculiheaded 13y agoI've had similar experiences about many things I used to think were paranoid becoming provable fact. However the other day the news about the google search for back packs and pressure cookers I thought was completely false and it was. What I've realized is that the things I thought were paranoid and came true are things that I thought were paranoid because I had "trust" in various organizations not to abuse power, not because the actions seemed out right implausible. With the backpacks and pressure cookers story, I was skeptical not because I trusted the fbi, but because it seemed implausible given the way the fbi typically acts and strongly against their interests. So my updated rule is that 'trust' is no longer a valid reason to rule something out as paranoid. This is an ethos that the security world has long held as obvious, that many technical people formerly not particularly interested in security are waking up to.
- jivatmanx 13y ago"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." -John Adams
- neilk 13y agoI thought it wouldn't happen for cynical reasons. I assumed that government agencies would want to guard their powers jealously, and given the potent justification of national security, the NSA could easily do so. Also, because they're smart people who understand the danger of revealing their programs to too many people. Maybe I misjudge how many favors bureaucracies are willing to do for one another. Or perhaps the higher-ups in the NSA are true believers in the drug war. I guess I'm not and I assume people in the NSA wouldn't be either. That said, I think I've made it abundantly clear that nobody should listen to my speculations.
- gyepi 13y agoA former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said. I live near a section of a federal highway that is well known to be used for transporting drugs from New York to Vermont. For the past few years, I've been struck by the number of arrests that always seemed to start with a traffic stop. Given the daily traffic volume of 60-25K vehicles per day, I had always wondered how the relatively few officers covering a wide area could be so effective.
- Canada 13y agoWhat a shock!
- declan 13y agoThis is a far bigger story than PRISM or XKEYSCORE. Both described databases compiled through known processes (FAA orders and fiber taps) and used for terrorism and foreign intelligence investigations -- not domestic criminal investigations. The Reuters report today shows significant abuse of intelligence intercepts that should make all of us angry. The NSA has been allowed to assemble its vast intelligence-gathering apparatus on the theory that terrorists and foreign spies do not have Fourth Amendment rights, and the executive's power to conduct surveillance is at its height when non-Americans are the focus. Now we've learned that the Feds have engaged in a bait and switch maneuver: databases are collected on the "terror spies" pretext, and then they're used for domestic criminal prosecutions. This is very dangerous. It also shows that the Supreme Court justices who blessed the NSA's FAA intercepts in February 2013 were fare too optimistic. They said if the Feds used NSA intercepts to bring domestic criminal prosecutions, they "would be required to make a disclosure": http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-1025_ihdj.pdf http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-1025_ihdj.pdf FYI here's my article from last month on how the DEA's Special Operations Division, cited in today's Reuters piece, does e-mail wiretaps: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how-the-u.s-forces-net-firms-to-cooperate-on-surveillance/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how-the-u.s-fo...
- dendory 13y agoI've thought about writing a program that would randomly send search queries to Google, Facebook, etc for specific keywords like pressure cooker, drug, bomb, etc. Just overwhelm them with traffic.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoThere have been some half-serious discussions about this elsewhere. The idea is to start flooding the web with encrypted traffic, which is supposedly enough of a red flag in and of itself for the NSA to consider it worth storing. The back-of-the-napkin math predicts that if you do enough of this, they'll be unable to store all of it. Or they'll just open a new datacenter.
- splrb 13y agoMind blowing lack of sense of right and wrong from govt agents who think laundering the trail of their investigation is the right thing to do. We really are living in post-constitutional USA.
- joshfraser 13y agoI was excited to see this story being broken by Reuters instead of the Guardian. The US press have been sleeping on the job, but this article gives me hope. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that the Guardian have been openly bragging about the amount of traffic they've gotten from covering the NSA scandal.
- LoganCale 13y agoWhy did both the headline and the source article on this get changed? It was initially a link to Yahoo News and is now the Chicago Tribune.
- bgentry 13y agoOriginal headline mentioned the specific allegation that the DEA was using this warrantless information to springboard investigations into previously unsuspected persons.
- lubujackson 13y agoThere needs to be a phrase for that moment when the wholesale discarding of the law is so accepted within a government agency that it ends up embedded in a tutorial Powerpoint slide, which eventually gets leaked to the press and (hopefully) implodes the whole practice. "PPTerrorism"? "PowerPointillism?" Or maybe a wonderful German composite word.
- osth 13y agohttp://www.archives.gov http://www.archives.gov lynx -dump http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_tra... |sed '/The right of the people to be secure/,/be seized./s/ \[ Redacted \]/'
- georgecmu 13y agoOff-topic, but still interesting in context of social networks as a leakage vector: Since its inception, the SOD's mandate has expanded to include narco-terrorism, organized crime and gangs. A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit's annual budget. A recent _LinkedIn_ posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.
- ajarmst 13y agoLet's not get too carried away. Secrecy in law enforcement can be a valuable tool: it allows things like protection and development of informants, lawful surveillance, undercover operations, etc. Prosecutors have never been required to turn over ALL evidence -- only exculpatory evidence (and that does not include evidence that might be useful in jury nullification, only evidence that would tend to prove the accused innocent of the charges). Withholding evidence of guilt from the defence is common: it is done to protect sources and ongoing investigations or even to shorten a trial. If you have more than enough to convict, why trot everything out? The described "parallel" investigation is another common technique. If you have a source of evidence you need to protect, then you develop different evidence and instead use that to secure the conviction. Provided the evidence used is real and is sufficient to prove guilt, no laws or moral codes have been transgressed. Law enforcement and prosecutors use inadmissible evidence all the time to pursue an investigation. The point of an investigation is to secure sufficient admissible evidence to successfully convict (prove guilt of) the perpetrator. But the rules don't say you can't use all the information at your disposal -- only that some of it might not be useful for you at trial. (Full disclosure: there are, and should be, rules governing what law enforcement and other state and federal agencies can do in collecting evidence. But disclosure of all information, evidence, and techniques to the defendant is definitely not one of them.) An interesting corollary is the so-called "fruit of the poisonous tree" problem. If a critical piece of evidence is deemed inadmissible, it might take with it a bunch of other evidence that was generated based upon it. Courts frequently permit the prosecution to re-introduce some of the evidence if it can be shown that it could have (not "was", "could have") been developed without access to the inadmissible piece. This is precisely the parallel development narrative described, and it is a very common tool. I agree that this particular system seems well beyond the pale, but lets not pretend that suddenly getting rid of secrecy in law enforcement and removing prosecutorial discretion is a no-brainer solution. Lets also not pretend that this isn't a clear extension of standard practice (albeit a pretty major and troubling extension we might want to trim back a bit).