13 ms·

DEA redacts tactic that's more secret than parallel construction

309 points by morisy 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mr_luc 13y ago
This is fantastically interesting. I probably just missed it, but I hadn't seen such clear-cut, Snowden-style proof of parallel construction at other, non-intelligence agencies before.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Why would you need proof? The technique is much older than NSA/FBI fusion.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    What's new--and has potentially wide-ranging impacts on criminal prosecutions--is public, documentary and testimonial, evidence from inside federal law enforcement that it is systematic policy.
ItendToDisagree 13y ago
If the public knew what it was they might no longer 'approve' so best to keep it secret I guess? Interesting article and that they didn't redact the other 'methods' to be totally honest. Also I love the "(So Far...)" in their presentation. Its as if they know what they are doing likely isn't acceptable but they haven't been called out on it (yet...) Awesome!
- sehugg 13y ago
  Note that the slides don't say "4 methods that are legal".
pstuart 13y ago
The DEA is evil. They operate under a pretense of "reducing harm" yet are actively trying to create more crime to validate their existence. In the course of doing so they create far more harm than they ostensibly prevent.
- jrockway 13y ago
  To be fair, I think you're blaming the wrong agency here. The Drug Enforcement Administration is going to do everything it can to prosecute as many drug violations as they can. That's their charter. You should instead convince legislators to make drugs less illegal, and use the police resources for something else. If the Preventing Kids From Being Kidnapped Administration was as well-funded as the DEA, these agents would be coming up with clever ways to catch predators instead.
  - protonfish 13y ago
    I think you are blaming the wrong branch of government. The DEA and the policy of "War on Drugs" are both responsibilities of the executive.
    - revscat 13y ago
      And, in turn, the executive branch's job is to enforce the law. Could the current administration do more to scale back the War on Drugs? Possibly. Probably, even. But they are taking some measures, however small. E.g.: [1] [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/24/5341284/obama-administration-to-set-rules-for-banks-to-handle-weed-money http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/24/5341284/obama-administrati...
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        >the executive branch's job is to enforce the law. That's starting to become a very quaint idea.
      - Crito 13y ago
        I don't think they are required by law to employ parallel construction, and whatever the hell this redacted technique is. At a certain point even people in the executive branch become responsible for their own actions and decisions.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
It's time for this nonsense to stop. The courts need to get their heads out of the sand and restore the rights Americans used to have: -No more wiretaps -Drug dogs can't provide cause for a search -No law enforcement tips originating from DoD/CIA, never -Law enforcement can't data mine -No more undercover agents of any kind -No more entrapment -No plainclothes officers (extremely unprofessional) -Paid and compensated informants must be banned Almost exclusively, all of these nonsense "tactics" have been permitted due to the war on drugs. The rights of the public have been trampled, and it's disgusting.
- Guvante 13y ago
  I was going to go into more detail, but I will keep it short. None of those were permitted due to the war on drugs. The closest you could call is drug dogs, but those were allowed after research showed their effectiveness. Additionally they all are based on previous things cops were allowed to do. If you actually research the core of how law enforcement acts you will see it isn't nearly as willy-nilly as you imply here.
  - gress 13y ago
    The problem with drug dogs is not that they can't sniff out drugs. It's that they can't testify.
    - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      Also, if drug dogs are so effective, then their use constitutes a search! Thus a warrant should be required in order to deploy the dog.
      - redblacktree 13y ago
        The justification is that drug dogs detect only contraband, and thus do not constitute an unreasonable search.
        13y ago
ipsin 13y ago
My guess is that this program involves officers laundering classified information by lying to other police officers, who then conduct the searches. "We had a confidential informant..." and so forth. That would explain why there's so much focus on the intent of the officers.
krapp 13y ago
Constitutional Scholars hate them ! Drug Enforcement Agency discovers One Weird Trick to guarantee conviction regardless of evidence...
- dhimes 13y ago
  It took me a moment to see what you did there, but I must confessed I lol'd
zach 13y ago
This is probably referring to "SOD tips" or "SOD tip-offs", where intelligence-community information is "laundered" through a source that provides a tip to investigators, as discussed in this Reuters article from last year: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
- gwern 13y ago
  What's the difference between SOD tips and parallel construction?
  - dhimes 13y ago
    It looks like one implies an outside source, the other originates with the officer at the scene. In the case of a traffic stop, the officer stops me 'because I am speeding' and searches me until he finds something. In another case, s/he stops me because of a 'tip.' The cover story of the officer differs. If they won't stop this they should at least keep stats on how many of these things pan out.
    - joe_the_user 13y ago
      You can be 100% sure these things "pan out" in the sense of resulting in convictions, because a lot of people are going to plea-bargain when confronted by the DEA, whether they are actually guilty or not. Essentially, once you have poisoned the actual trial process (and this shows just how poisoned it is), no statistics about "how effective this is" are going to mean anything. After all, I'm sure some DEA agents know they're convicting innocent people I'm sure others have blanket belief in the guilt of many innocent people. It's kind of a truism - once you abandon objective, unbiased inquiry, it's gone.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      To the best of my (limited) understanding, if you pull someone over because of a 'tip' and then search them, absent some other cause, the source of the tip needs to be documented to the court. You can't generally search people based on anonymous tips. (It's a little more complicated than that, of course: http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/criminal-procedure/criminal-procedure-keyed-to-israel/arrest-search-and-seizure/illinois-v-gates-2/ http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/criminal-procedure/crimin...)
j_baker 13y ago
The federal government is incredibly good at finding reasons to charge people. It makes me wonder exactly why it is that the government wants to keep this secret. I'm sure they have a good (ostensible) reason to do so. But at the same time, it is also likely that the tactic is a means of trumping up charges against people.
- fredgrott 13y ago
  ExplainLikeIamfive: 1. Fed Legal staff at court hearings cost money,overtime hours,etc, etc..purpose hear is a court trial where defendant pleads guilty. 2. If the technique is known than that has to be brought up at trial as the defendant has the right to know both the evidence and the accuser which makes for longer messier trials that cost more.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    "has the right to know both the evidence and the accuser which makes for longer messier trials that cost more." That sounds awfully like a quaint oft-forgot notion most people know as "due process".
    - marvin 13y ago
      Why bother with a trial at all, right? If most people at the government agency that investigated the case figure he's guilty, just throw him straight in prison.
aidenn0 13y ago
It sounds like you basically run into this: if you have information you can't use to arrest someone, you just wait until they commit an arrestable moving violation (how serious that is varies from state to state; in Virginia and DC, "failure to give right of way to a pedestrian," for example, is an arrestable offense, and is routinely violated by nearly every driver on the road. You now can arrest them and impound their car. When you impound the car, you can search it. If there are drugs in the car, you can arrest them. The supreme court has ruled this legal: even though you would give a ticket to anyone else and not arrest them, since you legally can arrest anybody that does it, you can use information obtained illegally to decide who you are going to do this to without violating the 4th amendment.
- Guvante 13y ago
  Don't blame the Supreme Court for this. The root problem is that the law allows for impounding of a vehicle. We like to put the Supreme Court into the position of "fixing things to make them correct", but realistically that isn't their role. All the Supreme Court said is that your right to unreasonable search and seizure does not stop a cop from using a legal method of search and seizure that would not normally be used. Put another way, if the law gives cops the ability to do inappropriate things and the cops use this to do inappropriate things, that does not make the action illegal.
  - argv_empty 13y ago
    The Supreme Court could have declared that the search can only be for evidence of a particular nature for which the police already have probable cause and that failure to yield to a pedestrian is not probable cause for drug possession (of course, if we're just evaluating things on epistemological grounds, failure to yield to a pedestrian is not a probable indication of anything interesting).
    - Guvante 13y ago
      Nothing in the judicial system supports that at the moment. Reason for action is considered immaterial for fourth amendment purposes across the board. I was going to point out an example of the complexity of this, but someone else pointed out that the right of cops to search an impounded vehicles is an interesting one.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Drug enforcement agencies are the Western version of religious police. Their only purpose is to enforce fundamentalist lifestyle values upon the general population. It has nothing to do with maintaining safety, order or justice. These agencies do not belong in a free society. I'm not a libertarian, far from it, but for some government activities there is absolutely no justification.
- interstitial 13y ago
  Hmmm. That makes this ironic: http://www.theagitator.com/2008/11/21/new-report-cia-lied-about-missionary-plane-shot-down-over-peru/ http://www.theagitator.com/2008/11/21/new-report-cia-lied-ab...
- lotyrin 13y ago
  Hmm... addiction makes it so you can't really trust people's decisions surrounding their own health and having lots of addicts looking to get their next fix at any cost means lots of petty crimes. Disease and crime are hugely damaging to society. You might (in internet-"libertarian" fashion) decide that people should be free to damage themselves, and that health insurance providers should be free not to cover those people (and you'd have a completely logical rationale for being a selfish asshole), but how do you account for the additional costs to the security infrastructure from the crime? With socialized security infrastructure (state run police and prisons) everyone pays for the damage that drug manufacturers and importers are doing to society. Without it (private security/insurance) you could decide that premiums for those services will just follow the increase in drug-related crimes in a given locality, but then you've completely given up on solving the root causes, and we'd just have the same kind of security profiteering surrounding drug use we see now, minus a whole lot of effectiveness. Do all of the people who resist addiction and want to have a decent level of security in their lives and possessions move to gated communities? What about the ones who are not so privileged? Do we just give up on entire neighborhoods of addicts and those too poor to leave. Certainly, prosecuting users and low-level dealers with hugely inflated mandatory minimums is a crime against them and their families. Certainly, criminalizing production of tobacco, alcohol, or cannabis inhibits the potential for economy surrounding them without much benefit to society. Is the value of preventing the import and production of hard and/or impure drugs like methamphetamine and the damage that their use does to civilization not as certain? It seems pretty obvious to me that having social infrastructure surrounding drug laws and their enforcement, and treatment for addicts is hugely beneficial - society benefits as a whole so everyone should pay, and there is definitely potential for benefit greater than the costs (I suspect that even as bad as we are screwing this up now, we are past the break-even). It seems pretty obvious to me that we must disconnect sentencing from politics by making mandatory minimums unconstitutional - judges and juries must be free to sentence as they see fit. And it seems pretty obvious to me that we must refocus law enforcement on the sources of drugs, not the users or dealers - who are mostly victims of social effects and mental behaviors which are outside their control (this is very likely to mean reduced spending in total surrounding drug law enforcement).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rch 13y ago
My grandfather worked in law enforcement for most of his career, after his stint in the military (in the 40's and 50s). I think he would be really disappointed with the legal system as it is today. I support the ACLU, but I wish there was an organisation working to limit the scope of our domestic legal system across the board. It would be tough politically, but I'd eagerly lend a hand to anyone willing to try.
1457389 13y ago
"Tips and leads" huh. So basically I am imagining a secretive "IC" office somewhere that sends an intern with whatever illegally collected intelligence they have to another unmarked room. The intern then passes the document across a table to some guy the Feds have some leverage on. He scans the documents, seeing carefully delineated highlighted sections and bullet points. He takes some papers out of the file, devoid of all identifying details, and places it into his bag. He walks out of the building and delivers this via sealed deposition to whatever domestic law enforcement authorities are relevant. Plausible deniability, done. This is just ridiculous.
- moconnor 13y ago
  "Tips and leads" fits the document very well. It's also used in context in e.g. http://thecenter.uab.edu/media/2013/01/Intelligence_and_evidence_as_of_29_JUN_2011_minus__TF_4351.ppt http://thecenter.uab.edu/media/2013/01/Intelligence_and_evid...
  - 1457389 13y ago
    This is fascinating. May I ask how you came across it?
midas007 13y ago
Any organization that use intelligence accomplish its goal is going to try to hide its sources and methods, but we should not condone all means of getting there.

309 points by morisy 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

This is fantastically interesting. I probably just missed it, but I hadn't seen such clear-cut, Snowden-style proof of parallel construction at other, non-intelligence agencies before.

tptacek 13y ago
Why would you need proof? The technique is much older than NSA/FBI fusion.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  What's new--and has potentially wide-ranging impacts on criminal prosecutions--is public, documentary and testimonial, evidence from inside federal law enforcement that it is systematic policy.

ItendToDisagree 13y ago

If the public knew what it was they might no longer 'approve' so best to keep it secret I guess? Interesting article and that they didn't redact the other 'methods' to be totally honest. Also I love the "(So Far...)" in their presentation. Its as if they know what they are doing likely isn't acceptable but they haven't been called out on it (yet...) Awesome!

sehugg 13y ago
Note that the slides don't say "4 methods that are legal".

pstuart 13y ago

The DEA is evil. They operate under a pretense of "reducing harm" yet are actively trying to create more crime to validate their existence. In the course of doing so they create far more harm than they ostensibly prevent.

jrockway 13y ago
To be fair, I think you're blaming the wrong agency here. The Drug Enforcement Administration is going to do everything it can to prosecute as many drug violations as they can. That's their charter. You should instead convince legislators to make drugs less illegal, and use the police resources for something else. If the Preventing Kids From Being Kidnapped Administration was as well-funded as the DEA, these agents would be coming up with clever ways to catch predators instead.
- protonfish 13y ago
  I think you are blaming the wrong branch of government. The DEA and the policy of "War on Drugs" are both responsibilities of the executive.
  - revscat 13y ago
    And, in turn, the executive branch's job is to enforce the law. Could the current administration do more to scale back the War on Drugs? Possibly. Probably, even. But they are taking some measures, however small. E.g.: [1] [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/24/5341284/obama-administration-to-set-rules-for-banks-to-handle-weed-money http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/24/5341284/obama-administrati...
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      >the executive branch's job is to enforce the law. That's starting to become a very quaint idea.
    - Crito 13y ago
      I don't think they are required by law to employ parallel construction, and whatever the hell this redacted technique is. At a certain point even people in the executive branch become responsible for their own actions and decisions.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

It's time for this nonsense to stop. The courts need to get their heads out of the sand and restore the rights Americans used to have: -No more wiretaps -Drug dogs can't provide cause for a search -No law enforcement tips originating from DoD/CIA, never -Law enforcement can't data mine -No more undercover agents of any kind -No more entrapment -No plainclothes officers (extremely unprofessional) -Paid and compensated informants must be banned Almost exclusively, all of these nonsense "tactics" have been permitted due to the war on drugs. The rights of the public have been trampled, and it's disgusting.

Guvante 13y ago
I was going to go into more detail, but I will keep it short. None of those were permitted due to the war on drugs. The closest you could call is drug dogs, but those were allowed after research showed their effectiveness. Additionally they all are based on previous things cops were allowed to do. If you actually research the core of how law enforcement acts you will see it isn't nearly as willy-nilly as you imply here.
- gress 13y ago
  The problem with drug dogs is not that they can't sniff out drugs. It's that they can't testify.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    Also, if drug dogs are so effective, then their use constitutes a search! Thus a warrant should be required in order to deploy the dog.
    - redblacktree 13y ago
      The justification is that drug dogs detect only contraband, and thus do not constitute an unreasonable search.
      - 13y ago

ipsin 13y ago

My guess is that this program involves officers laundering classified information by lying to other police officers, who then conduct the searches. "We had a confidential informant..." and so forth. That would explain why there's so much focus on the intent of the officers.

krapp 13y ago

Constitutional Scholars hate them ! Drug Enforcement Agency discovers One Weird Trick to guarantee conviction regardless of evidence...

dhimes 13y ago
It took me a moment to see what you did there, but I must confessed I lol'd

zach 13y ago

This is probably referring to "SOD tips" or "SOD tip-offs", where intelligence-community information is "laundered" through a source that provides a tip to investigators, as discussed in this Reuters article from last year: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

gwern 13y ago
What's the difference between SOD tips and parallel construction?
- dhimes 13y ago
  It looks like one implies an outside source, the other originates with the officer at the scene. In the case of a traffic stop, the officer stops me 'because I am speeding' and searches me until he finds something. In another case, s/he stops me because of a 'tip.' The cover story of the officer differs. If they won't stop this they should at least keep stats on how many of these things pan out.
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    You can be 100% sure these things "pan out" in the sense of resulting in convictions, because a lot of people are going to plea-bargain when confronted by the DEA, whether they are actually guilty or not. Essentially, once you have poisoned the actual trial process (and this shows just how poisoned it is), no statistics about "how effective this is" are going to mean anything. After all, I'm sure some DEA agents know they're convicting innocent people I'm sure others have blanket belief in the guilt of many innocent people. It's kind of a truism - once you abandon objective, unbiased inquiry, it's gone.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    To the best of my (limited) understanding, if you pull someone over because of a 'tip' and then search them, absent some other cause, the source of the tip needs to be documented to the court. You can't generally search people based on anonymous tips. (It's a little more complicated than that, of course: http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/criminal-procedure/criminal-procedure-keyed-to-israel/arrest-search-and-seizure/illinois-v-gates-2/ http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/criminal-procedure/crimin...)

j_baker 13y ago

The federal government is incredibly good at finding reasons to charge people. It makes me wonder exactly why it is that the government wants to keep this secret. I'm sure they have a good (ostensible) reason to do so. But at the same time, it is also likely that the tactic is a means of trumping up charges against people.

fredgrott 13y ago
ExplainLikeIamfive: 1. Fed Legal staff at court hearings cost money,overtime hours,etc, etc..purpose hear is a court trial where defendant pleads guilty. 2. If the technique is known than that has to be brought up at trial as the defendant has the right to know both the evidence and the accuser which makes for longer messier trials that cost more.
- malandrew 13y ago
  "has the right to know both the evidence and the accuser which makes for longer messier trials that cost more." That sounds awfully like a quaint oft-forgot notion most people know as "due process".
  - marvin 13y ago
    Why bother with a trial at all, right? If most people at the government agency that investigated the case figure he's guilty, just throw him straight in prison.

aidenn0 13y ago

It sounds like you basically run into this: if you have information you can't use to arrest someone, you just wait until they commit an arrestable moving violation (how serious that is varies from state to state; in Virginia and DC, "failure to give right of way to a pedestrian," for example, is an arrestable offense, and is routinely violated by nearly every driver on the road. You now can arrest them and impound their car. When you impound the car, you can search it. If there are drugs in the car, you can arrest them. The supreme court has ruled this legal: even though you would give a ticket to anyone else and not arrest them, since you legally can arrest anybody that does it, you can use information obtained illegally to decide who you are going to do this to without violating the 4th amendment.

Guvante 13y ago
Don't blame the Supreme Court for this. The root problem is that the law allows for impounding of a vehicle. We like to put the Supreme Court into the position of "fixing things to make them correct", but realistically that isn't their role. All the Supreme Court said is that your right to unreasonable search and seizure does not stop a cop from using a legal method of search and seizure that would not normally be used. Put another way, if the law gives cops the ability to do inappropriate things and the cops use this to do inappropriate things, that does not make the action illegal.
- argv_empty 13y ago
  The Supreme Court could have declared that the search can only be for evidence of a particular nature for which the police already have probable cause and that failure to yield to a pedestrian is not probable cause for drug possession (of course, if we're just evaluating things on epistemological grounds, failure to yield to a pedestrian is not a probable indication of anything interesting).
  - Guvante 13y ago
    Nothing in the judicial system supports that at the moment. Reason for action is considered immaterial for fourth amendment purposes across the board. I was going to point out an example of the complexity of this, but someone else pointed out that the right of cops to search an impounded vehicles is an interesting one.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Drug enforcement agencies are the Western version of religious police. Their only purpose is to enforce fundamentalist lifestyle values upon the general population. It has nothing to do with maintaining safety, order or justice. These agencies do not belong in a free society. I'm not a libertarian, far from it, but for some government activities there is absolutely no justification.

interstitial 13y ago
Hmmm. That makes this ironic: http://www.theagitator.com/2008/11/21/new-report-cia-lied-about-missionary-plane-shot-down-over-peru/ http://www.theagitator.com/2008/11/21/new-report-cia-lied-ab...
lotyrin 13y ago
Hmm... addiction makes it so you can't really trust people's decisions surrounding their own health and having lots of addicts looking to get their next fix at any cost means lots of petty crimes. Disease and crime are hugely damaging to society. You might (in internet-"libertarian" fashion) decide that people should be free to damage themselves, and that health insurance providers should be free not to cover those people (and you'd have a completely logical rationale for being a selfish asshole), but how do you account for the additional costs to the security infrastructure from the crime? With socialized security infrastructure (state run police and prisons) everyone pays for the damage that drug manufacturers and importers are doing to society. Without it (private security/insurance) you could decide that premiums for those services will just follow the increase in drug-related crimes in a given locality, but then you've completely given up on solving the root causes, and we'd just have the same kind of security profiteering surrounding drug use we see now, minus a whole lot of effectiveness. Do all of the people who resist addiction and want to have a decent level of security in their lives and possessions move to gated communities? What about the ones who are not so privileged? Do we just give up on entire neighborhoods of addicts and those too poor to leave. Certainly, prosecuting users and low-level dealers with hugely inflated mandatory minimums is a crime against them and their families. Certainly, criminalizing production of tobacco, alcohol, or cannabis inhibits the potential for economy surrounding them without much benefit to society. Is the value of preventing the import and production of hard and/or impure drugs like methamphetamine and the damage that their use does to civilization not as certain? It seems pretty obvious to me that having social infrastructure surrounding drug laws and their enforcement, and treatment for addicts is hugely beneficial - society benefits as a whole so everyone should pay, and there is definitely potential for benefit greater than the costs (I suspect that even as bad as we are screwing this up now, we are past the break-even). It seems pretty obvious to me that we must disconnect sentencing from politics by making mandatory minimums unconstitutional - judges and juries must be free to sentence as they see fit. And it seems pretty obvious to me that we must refocus law enforcement on the sources of drugs, not the users or dealers - who are mostly victims of social effects and mental behaviors which are outside their control (this is very likely to mean reduced spending in total surrounding drug law enforcement).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rch 13y ago

My grandfather worked in law enforcement for most of his career, after his stint in the military (in the 40's and 50s). I think he would be really disappointed with the legal system as it is today. I support the ACLU, but I wish there was an organisation working to limit the scope of our domestic legal system across the board. It would be tough politically, but I'd eagerly lend a hand to anyone willing to try.

1457389 13y ago

"Tips and leads" huh. So basically I am imagining a secretive "IC" office somewhere that sends an intern with whatever illegally collected intelligence they have to another unmarked room. The intern then passes the document across a table to some guy the Feds have some leverage on. He scans the documents, seeing carefully delineated highlighted sections and bullet points. He takes some papers out of the file, devoid of all identifying details, and places it into his bag. He walks out of the building and delivers this via sealed deposition to whatever domestic law enforcement authorities are relevant. Plausible deniability, done. This is just ridiculous.

moconnor 13y ago
"Tips and leads" fits the document very well. It's also used in context in e.g. http://thecenter.uab.edu/media/2013/01/Intelligence_and_evidence_as_of_29_JUN_2011_minus__TF_4351.ppt http://thecenter.uab.edu/media/2013/01/Intelligence_and_evid...
- 1457389 13y ago
  This is fascinating. May I ask how you came across it?

midas007 13y ago

Any organization that use intelligence accomplish its goal is going to try to hide its sources and methods, but we should not condone all means of getting there.