U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
9 replies, posted
[quote](Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.[/quote]
[url]http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805[/url]
[t]http://i.imgur.com/ezSbGOe.jpg[/t]
This should kind of come as no surprise, although before, you'd be accused of being one of these: :tinfoil:
How much more shit will people take before riots happen, seriously.
If they can riot about dumb treyvon shit why not this?
[QUOTE=Computrix;41724297]How much more shit will people take before riots happen, seriously.
If they can riot about dumb treyvon shit why not this?[/QUOTE]
So true.
[QUOTE=Computrix;41724297]How much more shit will people take before riots happen, seriously.
If they can riot about dumb treyvon shit why not this?[/QUOTE]
because people are told it's to prevent terrorism or other crimes
[QUOTE=Stroma;41724336]because people are told it's to prevent terrorism or other crimes[/QUOTE] Not quite: what's more important is that things like Trayvon are stirred up a lot more.
[QUOTE=Stroma;41724336]because people are told it's to prevent terrorism or other crimes[/QUOTE]
this
fear is a profitable and never ending business.
Unsurprisingly, the issue is a little less black-and-white than the sensationalist title would indicate. Please read the article before making knee-jerk reactions about living in a surveillance state. Here are a few highlights:
[quote]The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said [B]the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods[/B]. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. [B]"It's decades old, a bedrock concept."[/B]
A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.
"It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.
[B]Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using "parallel construction" may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest[/B]. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began [B]may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.[/B]
...
Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. [B]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[/B], according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst.
"They do a pretty good job of screening, but it can be a struggle to know for sure whether the person on a wiretap is American," the senior law enforcement official said.
Tips from domestic wiretaps typically occur when agents use information gleaned from [B]a court-ordered wiretap[/B] in one case to start a second investigation.
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. [B]If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement.[/B][/quote]
[QUOTE=catbarf;41725097]Unsurprisingly, the issue is a little less black-and-white than the sensationalist title would indicate. Please read the article before making knee-jerk reactions about living in a surveillance state.[/QUOTE]
You quote the former DEA agent in the article that invokes a money-laundering metaphor for "cleaning" the sources of these tips. And also the justification of "this is perfectly legal and we've been doing it for years."
Is that the America you want to live in?
[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;41725176]You quote the former DEA agent in the article that invokes a money-laundering metaphor for "cleaning" the sources of these tips. And also the justification of "this is perfectly legal and we've been doing it for years."
Is that the America you want to live in?[/QUOTE]
The money laundering analogy, if you read in context, is expressing exactly why it's understandable that people would be concerned about this.
I don't think this is a good practice, but let's not overreact. They're misreporting the exact process by which they came to arrest someone to protect confidential sources of information, not fabricating evidence or lying to the government about surveillance methods as the snippet in the OP indicated. Witness protection programs work the same way, the police or FBI will misreport how they came into possession of information so that the defendant isn't tipped off that someone ratted them out. It's still not a good thing but it's a significantly different issue.
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