NC readers are presumably a jaded lot. But if you harbored any doubts as to the operation of the rule of law in this country, this post and its predecessor, on how police can and in many states do grab personal property based more or less on their own say-so, should disabuse you of any lingering doubts on that front.
In a weird but more disturbing analogue to chain of title abuses, where banks would forge signatures and fabricate documents to remedy the failure to transfer assets properly to securitization trusts, Reuters reported today that the Drug Enforcement Agency would doctor up where it got evidence from so it could use it in court. Now why would the DEA bother to go to all that trouble? Chorus: Because if a decent defense lawyer found out where it came from, it would in most cases be inadmissible.
Of course, Reuters does not know that for a fact, so it can’t say that. But anyone with an operating brain cell can see through this practice. First, the key bits of the Reuters account:
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.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
So we appear to have a troubling domestic analogue to the NSA overreach (and better yet, sharing of information from “intelligence intercepts”) and aggressive scrubbing of where the info came from. And the experts are duly alarmed (emphasis ours):
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records….”It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”
Oh, and how do they keep this sort of operation out of the public’s purview? By classifying it. Yes, sports fans, domestic law enforcement operations are now given state secret status. Again from Reuters:
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
“Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”
And natch, the people involved in this sort of thing have all the right Orwellianisms to convince themselves that this evidence-history-doctoring is perfectly kosher. It’s called “parallel construction” and the DEA sorts report that it’s a perfectly routine practice:
“Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”….
“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean,” said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008.
The kindest thing some attorneys could say about it that the practice might be OK to establish probable cause for an arrest. Many seemed to regard any use as unacceptable. Ars Technica describes the ACLU’s critique (they’ve issued a formal statement as well as giving interviews):
Not surprisingly, those in the legal community are shocked that this type of wanton data sharing goes on unchecked.
“There’s nothing that allows lying to judges about the source of information in a criminal case,” Jennifer Granick, an attorney and the director of Civil Liberties at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society,
And troublingly, this DEA unit is funneling its massaged information to law enforcement officials at all levels of government:
Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations….; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE.
The DICE database contains about 1 billion records, the senior DEA officials said. The majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. Records are kept for about a year and then purged, the DEA officials said.
About 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have access to the DICE database, records show. They can query it to try to link otherwise disparate clues.
Do you notice all the caveats? “The SOD offers at least three services”…”the majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally…” So not only has Reuters uncovered that international information, which was collected by God only knows what means, is being used domestically, but the article tacitly admits that only a “majority” or the information in a ginormous database was gathered permissibly.
It was bad enough when we thought we knew about America’s star chambers, such as Obama’s position that he could kill any “suspected terrorist” and that the US engaged in extraordinary renditions and torture, um, enhanced interrogation. Now we learn of even more widespread and disturbing domestic practices. And this is only the part we’ve been permitted to see. Just imagine what else goes on.
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So, if we can’t know the source, how can we know if the information is true? The government, if it has the hots for you, can put you away for a long long time. And I thought reading tales from the Gulag was scary.
Reuters have their own “Handbook of Journalism”, at reuters . trust or something. It made sense to me. I think they say there “try to get a named source: it’s the most credible”, etc. etc. (common sense).
So I tend to believe Reuters stories. And yet, it seems harder and harder to separate “credible stories” from “incredible stories” …
For a legal case, apparently they try to work back to find a legitimate source, at least that’s how I read this. Of course the temptation to plant evidence when you know something to be true, but can’t prove it legitimately must be strong.
There is a simple moral in all of this: secret governance is uncontrollable and therefore bad.
Nothing the government does should be secret.
The idea behind democracy is to erect an institutional structure which makes abuse difficult.
Institutionalized secrecy is a structure which makes abuse easy.
The NSA will double cross that bridge when they come to it….
excellent..
Then burn it and plant arson evidence?
It’s even simpler: Government is uncontrollable, and therefore bad.
Every law and regulation promulgated today, and for the last couple of decades, serves no other purpose than to grant competitive advantage to the elites and the connected.
The people in law enforcement doing the illegal things described in this post are on a slippery slope. Most probably start out seeing themselves as good upstanding citizens, helping to maintain public order. But they become frustrated when confronted with illegally-obtained information that clearly implicates a law-breaker. Their moral dilemma is between the law breakers who illegally obtained the evidence, and the law breakers who are involved in illegal commerce. So they step off the top-dead-center of the slippery slope of rectitude and work out a system whereby they can use the illegal evidence against those doing illegal commerce.
The larger danger for society is that the law enforcement slippery slope will lead to the abyss for all those who deviate from legal rectitude, until we devolve into an East German or Soviet-style society wherein everybody is spying and snitching on everybody else. Instead of a presumption of innocence, there will be a presumption of guilt, and evidence will be fabricated or planted against anybody who seems even mildly anti-establishment.
The erosion of standards for probable cause is most troubling to me. To my way of thinking as a citizen I want to be able to do what I want in the privacy of my own home — eat what I want, read what I want, etc. — and as long as I don’t disturb my neighbors, as long as I conduct myself in a respectable way, cause no harm to others, pay taxes, and in every respect appear to be a respectable citizen — I want to be left alone by my government, because I have given them no probable cause to suspect I have done something illegal. And if I speak publicly about ending the war on drugs, for example, I don’t want a formerly upstanding law enforcement officer listening to what I say and concluding that I should be framed and locked up.
They push too far with their various wars, and then they are willing to trample the Constitution to try to contain the fallout.
Also, all the information govt owns, in fact, belongs to you, to me.
Jaded: “made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience or by surfeit”. NCers are aware of the surfeit (of dark and dangerous news), and are in a healthy sense cynical; but no way does dull and apathetic fit this virtual community.
Outrage Fatigue
noun. outrage fatigue. the exhaustion and entropy that occurs from too much outrage. Occurs in waves, often during peak election cycles. Outrage fatigue tends to afflict politically active people, and can be worse when your party is not in power, or has a power deficit. It escalates during environmental catastrophes, especially ones that are caused by human negligence. It also develops during troublesome economic times like corporate bailouts and high unemployment. Outrage fatigue may threaten close friendships.
After the week of union protests in Madison, I’m finished. I have serious “outrage fatigue”.
When I heard about the latest military intervention in Libya, I was stunned by my apathy,lack of concern and disinterest. This is my worst ever episode of “outrage fatigu
My favorite usage is “voter apathy,” which lumps all those who boycott elections from a sense of disgust or protest in with the ranks of the bored, uninterested, and apolitical.
Half past jaded, all the way to full cynical. Why are we suprised corners are cut in the Drug War, aka the War on the Poor, aka the New Jim Crow? But oh no. Let’s pretend we still have functioning institutions, agencies, Democracy and the rule of law in no particular order. We need to defund the storm troopers in short order, rebel!
Hear, hear, as Chris Hedges said in perhaps the essay of the century: rebel! But if we’re just isolated atomized individuals co-miserizing with each other on the NSA controlled internet, how? I know when not to obey, but not yet how to rebel.
You may wish to search for your “inner French”; however, frankly, as I have studied a bit the French Revolution, and being Canadian (no revolution happened here), I think too much “inner French” may not be what you, I or others really want …
I know Noam Chomsky favours anarcho-syndicalism as a decent humanistic way to arrive at a fully accountable political culture: grassroots, building consensus and all that. Unfortunately, it seems to me that anarcho-syndicalism may be too slow to respond to existential threats. Either that, or all the hierarchic political cultures wish to smash anarcho-syndicalist political culture; someone wrote a book “Hommage to Catalunya”, and the facts are grim. Perhaps nation-states resemble structurally a bit clans, and (without pushing too far) some kind of gang-like, loyalty-based “ideologies”. Faced with manicheistic black/white loyalty-based adversarial polities, sometimes it seems better to call Uncle, i.e. the higher echelons. It seems to me this essentially revolves around delegation of authority: too much leads to dictatorships; too little leads to Chomsky’s long-deliberating polity. In a crisis, from a game-theoretical view, swifter decisions are sometimes better, arguably. I’m not sure the data on grassroots-States is large enough to make good statistics on survival when faced with a “totalitarian” (or semi-t.) adversary.
“Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”….
-DEA spokes-slug
This one’s attempting to blur the distinction between figuring out alternate ways evidence may likely have been discovered to coax it into legality, an already suspect practice in my not so humble opinion, with lying about how info leading to an arrest was obtained. One instance of this type of fabrication from the piece was where the DEA would call local LE and tell them a truck will be coming through and they should set up a “random” checkpoint to catch it “on accident”. That way the DEA’s tainted data gathering and fruit of the poisoned tree situation is disappeared.
Nice try slug-o but no donkey-dick.
Goodbye to America as we knew it. The Constitution is dead.
Is this what it was like in Germany in the early 1930’s, before the boot came down?
USA-PATRIOT Act = Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State
Any questions?
A shifting mass of power influence groups, each trying to eat the most out of the government trough?
A citizenry thoroughly demoralized and stripped of value, purpose, and reason?
Yeah, a lot like that.
As important as this story may turn out to be in the long run, it only scratches the surface of the problem. Because it is focused on the “drugs” angle, I suspect most who read it would feel reassured somehow that law enforcement is using all the tools at their disposal to rid our world of this existential threat to all mankind. Even if some of those tools are… erm… questionable.
Haven’t you heard? Mexican drug lords decapitate the innocent.
Next, we’ll probably hear about how “intelligence intercepts” are used by local and state law enforcement to curb and control youth gangs …or some other existential threat to all mankind.
Wow, that’s a pretty big assumption there, Ché. Most readers won’t care because it’s aimed at Teh Evul Druglords and that is good?
Well, opinions are like a$$holes, everyone’s got one, but imho, the most low-information citizen is going to get the gist of the story— The government is falsifying evidence and won’t tell anyone where they got it.
And that is going to scare the pi$$ out of them because they have all watched enough crime shows on TV to understand what getting framed is, that it can happen to anyone and it can happen to them.
We’ll have to see, won’t we?
But that’s how these things have been turning out among the great unwashed.
Propaganda has been relentless and very effective in creating and institutionalizing all manner of Existential Threats to All Mankind.
Much as torture became an accepted tool in the fight against the Terrorists, so phony and fabricated evidence, false testimony and other subterfuges have long been used in pursuit of and in court against the Drug Devils (and the Terrorists).
This story, despite the way we may read it, has the potential to reinforce the notion that any tactic is fair game “to keep us safe.”
We’ll see.
I’m sure it does only scratch the surface, amigo, but if Reuters has evidence (does anyone wonder why the documents are ‘undated’?), it’s clear evidence that we’re being lied to continually, as is Congress.
This piece names another swath of *criminal* prosecutions aided by NSA surveillance, and ‘inadvertent’, my ass. ‘NSA can’t be tasked by the Justice Department: also my ass.
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/NSA-handing-over-non-terror-intelligence-4706227.php
“A little known by-product,” indeed.
Surveillance for the purpose of criminal investigation/prosecution been part of the ill-named Patriot Act for a good long time, and it’s one reason why certain elements in the House and Senate (Daschle, Leahy, among others) were reluctant to pass it. Oh, but look! Someone took care of that little roadblock with the Forgotten Domestic Terror Attack, remember?
“Inadvertant” dontchaknow. Just accidental uptake that happens to be useful in snagging other sorts of Bad Guys. You bet.
Harrumnph.
And once again, this is only scratching the surface.
[Not sure what’s going on, Ms. So far, my two attempts at responding to your comment have wound up in NSA hands — or some other surveillance swoop-bot. We’ll try again. One is nothing if not dogged. ;-)]
The point I was trying to make and so far have not been allowed to is that the criminal surveillance aspects of the ill-named Patriot Act have been there from the get, and they were part of the reason elements like Daschle and Leahy among others initially balked at the passage of this Enabling Act. Well, their reluctance was… taken care of… wasn’t it? Something to do with spores, I believe…
At any rate, we’re still only scratching the surface. More, no doubt, will emerge before the summer is done.
The question is, what will our assembled representatives do about it.
“…we’ll probably hear about how ‘intelligence intercepts’ are used by local and state law enforcement to curb and control youth gangs…”
We’ve already heard about how counterinsurgency tactics are being used to combat this existential threat:
“We met a Green Beret who is finding out — in his job as a police officer — that the strategy might actually have a better chance of working, right here at home, in the USA.
Call him and his fellow officers counterinsurgency cops! They’re not fighting al Qaeda or the Taliban, but street gangs and drug dealers…”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57582859/counterinsurgency-cops-military-tactics-fight-street-crime/
Youth gang “insurgents…” that’s the ticket!
Youth gangs have been around in this country since dirt was new, but now, thanks to Our Dauntless and Valiant War Fighters, this Existential Threat to All Mankind shall be no more…
Surely you’re grateful, no?
Since non-violent political protest has been classified by police state agencies as “low-level terrorism”, it’s not difficult to see where NSA spying and the secret sharing of this data with law enforcement agencies will lead. The compilation of digital dossiers on all U.S. citizens is not the accidental result of the GWOT, it is a deliberate first step in a program to crush dissent and destroy grassroots political organizing outside the corrupt two-party system.
Yves (or “anyone”) :
What has happened to Washuington’s Blog?
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/
Website Outage
Posted on August 6, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog
No, we haven’t received the Michael Hastings or Barrett Brown treatment.
Due to mysterious technical reasons (involving MySQL), our web host unceremoniously yanked the site.
We’ve now upgraded to a more expensive package.
Any Paypal or Bitcoin donations would be greatly appreciated, and would help us to be able to afford a web-hosting package which would allow uninterrupted reporting.
Thanks for your patience … and please click below to donate!
First they came for James Rosen and falsely accused him of being a coconspirator and many people didn’t speak up because….it was Fox News, after all.
I alwas get a good feeling when I see stories like this; I’ve had the intuitive sense for a while now that the government is run by depraved, delusional criminals. And seeing comfirmation of that fact out in the open like this, where everyone can see aside from the zombie MSM watchers), does tend to make me more certain that those other things I’ve been thinking lately are correct as well.
Um, … laundering money is illegal. So how is this a justification?
HSBC, Wells Fargo et al launder drug money and help build prisons because it’s profitable to do so, along with among mortgage lending, and helping a few old ladies across the street. We have a choice, pull your money from big banks, do it now, do it today.
Unless you have megabucks the big banks really don’t care if you move your money. Even with all the outrageous fees and hidden charges they still lose money on small depositors. I’m not saying don’t move your money, just that it won’t have any significant effect on the bottom line of the TBTF banks.
I believe this week’s award for thoughtlessly stupid statement goes to Mr. Selander. And this guy is one of the “best and brightest” supposedly protecting us.
News from the Hope fairy: Larry Wilkerson on the RealNews, somewhat counterintuitively predicted that whistleblowers would become more common as the national security state grows ever more draconian. Let’s hope this Reuters story is an instance of that.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10426
Yes to all of the above, BUT: we also share in the blame.
For a long time we have let elected officials and government employees lie to us, and we have let them get away with it. Now we are SHOCKED that they are lying to us?
Recall that everything that Obama promised in 2008 was a lie. Even as he was promising to renegotiate NAFTA, his agents were promising to his wealthy patrons that he didn’t mean any of it. We should have been outraged: that should have killed his career in politics. But we didn’t care and we elected him twice. Repeat a 1000 times and for politicians of all stripes: the message gets clear that we don’t care. And now it has grown…
In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
~G.O.
The second part of this quote was the key takeaway for me from the Reuters article I read on HuffPo:
“It was an amazing tool,” said one recently retired federal agent. “Our big fear was that it wouldn’t stay secret.”
Only one reason to fear it wouldn’t stay secret: Because it’s illegal and unconstitutional.
F@#%ers.
You can’t make up that type of irony.
Hopefully the Reuters source will not face really terrible consequences for exposing this activity.
Kleptocracy put simply is government by criminals and maintained by class war. There is nothing sacrosanct about the law in kleptocracy, indeed quite the reverse. The rich and their servant elites will only not loot or engage in criminality for one of three reasons: (1) it can not be used for looting or social control, (2) it will spark an immediate revolt among the proles, (3) they have not thought of it yet.
The second reason I should add is being increasingly challenged by them as David Addington, Cheney’s old henchman used to say, “We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.”
Hannah Arendt remarked that in the march to totalitarianism, the secret police first use their powers against those suspected of opposition to the state, often through the use of provocation and double agents. Most of the government’s victories against homegrown “terrorists” fall into this category. They move on to those who fit a certain profile, the so-called “objective enemy”. This person
This line doesn’t just work for those who are turned into red mist by drones but the George Zimmermans of the world. The final step is to the targeting of random individuals and is the beginning of terror on the part of the state.
Origins of Totalitarianism
What we are seeing in the revelations about the surveillance state we already have is a future foretold.
I don’t have to actually go out and buy and read anything by Hannah Arent, I get nice snack sized exerpts every day on NC as part of my Hannah Arent daily quote of the day.
Nah keep it up you and Mexico, it’s great.
Kleptocracy, pathocracy, kakistocracy, all rolled into one convenient package. How wonderful for us all.
I left the US in the 90s for a job offer (for lower pay) in part because decrepitude seemed inevitable for the US, plus I could not stomach watching Bill Clinton on TV any longer(this was pre-blue dressgate). I had no idea it would be this bad and come this quickly however.
It’s interesting that our literature rarely gets into our legal systems as bent in the way the old standard of PI fiction did.
Even as we hear these terrible stories we are duped into thinking regulation of surveillance is the issue. The honesty of our cops, prosecutors and judges is the issue – I already believe defence lawyers are beyond such call due to incompetence. Proper representation and ability to investigate by the defence would be next.
There is nothing new in any of this, except, perhaps, the rise in bent use of forensics. The only real hope we have is honest cops as lawyers are involved after arrests and most of them are professional scum. We should have control of the legal system by testing it out with known innocents as in mystery shopping. I’d guess 90% put up in front of courts are guilty and this is the only reason the system works at all.
Cops aren’t honest when pressured to perform and the vast majority learn to lie by default on procedure. Hillsborough is a great example with 160 cops lying in statements under massive procedural pressure (no noble cause here as no criminals invovled). Forensic ‘scientists’ are chronically biased to interpretations that happen to make them a fee. Complete barking wuckfits are allowed expert status (see Nico Bento).
Surveillance rules are irrelevant as cops will always say they adhered to procedure unless so dumb as not to know them. Our laws and courts need to be brought into public control and from under the influence of the legal profession. Bleating on about surveillance is to detract from the real horror story.
“…legally…”
For example, in the eyes of the Feds, everything gathered under a FISA writ of assistance — a general search warrant — was gathered legally. You know, liek every phone call and email in the US.
Add today’s NYT story about the TSA expanding it’s mission beyond air travel
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyond-airport-security.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print
My favorite bit is the TSA response below:
“Civil liberties groups say that the VIPR teams have little to do with the agency’s original mission to provide security screenings at airports and that in some cases their actions amount to warrantless searches in violation of constitutional protections.
“The problem with T.S.A. stopping and searching people in public places outside the airport is that there are no real legal standards, or probable cause,” said Khaliah Barnes, administrative law counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “It’s something that is easily abused because the reason that they are conducting the stops is shrouded in secrecy.”
T.S.A. officials respond that the random searches are “special needs” or “administrative searches” that are exempt from probable cause because they further the government’s need to prevent terrorist attacks.”
I wanted to add, has anyone thought about the numbers involved? If the DEA has a billion communications and it supposedly only keeps them for a year, what were the mechanics in it getting them? Did it go to the NSA or directly to the telecoms and ISPs? How many investigations was it conducting, involving on average how many suspects, making on average how many communications over this one year period? To come up with a billion data points, the DEA would need to be conducting 1,000 major investigations a year, each involving 100 people (or 100,000 people), each responsible for producing 10,000 communications (or some 300 a day). That gets you to a billion, but is it likely? Or are we talking about a program similar to or drawing its info from one of the NSA programs that can go out one or two hops and capturing the communications of multitudes of innocent people with only the most random and tangential connections to the DEA’s “targets”?
I caught the same point. It’s inconceivable that more than 500 million (a “majority” of the billion records supposedly dumped after being held for “about 1 year”) records of “phone log and Internet data” are “gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide” every year. There aren’t enough judges in the world to process that load. Someone was blowing smoke up Reuters’ behind, which the news agency proceeded to blow in our face.
300 a day > 30 a day
Oh you could easily get to a billion.
Anyone who has a normal job gets 200-300 messages a day easy. Then you have personal mail, texts, phone, junk mail, iChat and your Twitter and FB.
So depending how you count it, 500 per day per person would be low end.
So 550,000 people max.
anyone care to rethink how the feds ‘found’ spitzer’s 3k credit card (and how it ‘triggered’ more investigation…
At it’s core, policing is a protection racket. The most powerfull entity in the world, the US military, is the world’s policeman. Who controls the US military? Is it the people, or not?
I think not.
As far as Spitzer, the question I have is, who has the power to command the feds to go after him?
SOD
A British slang term meaning bastard
“Aw buggger off you corney SOD”
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sod