U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
chicagotribune.com
chicagotribune.com
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
Also, its possible to be a statist who is disgusted with the government's behavior; its not black and white as the libertarians would try to convince everyone is the case (the NSA is spying us...and we have to pay taxes!). Ya, some of us are pragmatic.
So without a better alternative, we are free to shake our finger at the gov without advocating violent revolution or even deep systematic change. The devil you know...
Of course, living in China gives me quite a different perspective on it all. The US could definitely do much worse, and it is important to stop going in that direction.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean they all are.
> it is quite difficult to tell which ones are actually reasonable.
Isn't that the truth. I used to work with a fellow who was absolutely paranoid about gov't surveillance. Some people might think he was a lunatic off his medication if you got him started talking about it. He was an Air Force avionics tech in the 1970's. Everything he ever told me about gov't surveillance has turned out to be true.
> The illogical fallacious arguments are spewed from both sides of the debate.
That happens at the extents of every political faction. Look at the debate surrounding Abortion/Gay Marriage/Drugs/Welfare
>Also, its possible to be a statist who is disgusted with the government's behavior;
I never considered that. I should have though. I can see no reason why someone who would identify as a Statist would be any different than a person from any other political faction. We're all people.
> its not black and white as the libertarians would try to convince everyone is the case (the NSA is spying us...and we have to pay taxes!). Ya, some of us are pragmatic.
I'd be a Libertarian if I thought it could work. And be fair, there are a lot of different folks in that particular faction too. IMO, those Johnny-come-lately post Koch Bros. Libertarians don't really count.
>So without a better alternative, we are free to shake our finger at the gov without advocating violent revolution or even deep systematic change. The devil you know...
I'm not sure what you're getting at.
>Of course, living in China gives me quite a different perspective on it all.
It does give one a different perspective. I lived there in '08 & '09 (though not full time).
>The US could definitely do much worse, and it is important to stop going in that direction.
I have a feeling it could be a _lot_ worse in the US, but that's no reason to accept the status quo. IMO acceptance of the status quo practically guarantees a pretty terrible outcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_control_code_chart
Job control (with ^Z and ^Y) entered at the same time. At least Linux/SysV saw the usefulness of that....
(The lack of ^T on Linux really annoys me too. What is worse is that it isn't just a matter of the line discipline sending SIGINFO for ^T... because Linux doesn't have SIGINFO at all. Means you can't even really hack up a pty wrapper program that emulates it, unless you are willing to have everything use a different signal in lieu of SIGINFO...)
Control-W is what you use to delete the previous word (Edit: word, not character), so ^W is what you would have seen on TTYs/Editors that didn't support that command.
Instead, what's alleged here is that the DEA is provided with enough information from intercepts to "always be in the right place at the right time".
This kind of evidence --- legit evidence traceable to illegit sources --- would be excluded if it involved torture, but apparently the jurisprudence hasn't caught up to its use in unlawful surveillance.
Actually, there mostly are no trials at all.
As the article states, "most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial"
One has to wonder if a "justice system" in which the majority of convicts have never even had a trial is worthy of the name.
But I'm not alarmed that the majority of offenders plea out.
Trials are enormously expensive, and, in a coldly rational statistical sense, most of the accused are in fact guilty --- the fact patterns in many of these cases and the evidence supporting them are very straightforward. That there would be some incentive for the accused to spare the system the expense of litigation doesn't bother me, especially because the more resources get freed up from pointless controversies, the more resources are available to handle meaningful ones.
So, I think we agree that there's a problem, but not what its causes are.
Either way: plea out or not, these cases don't get brought without "untainted" evidence. The problem is that the DOJ's definition of "untainted" is subtly broken. "Fruit of a poisonous tree" is a good Google search to follow up on this.
I'm still not sure how it has come to pass that Americans simply blithely accept all this.
If you wanted to find a quick way to synthesize a dispute where none needed to exist, taking a shotgun to the whole of American criminal justice would be one way to accomplish that.
They're all related. They're all policies and actions of overly zealous bureaucrats with too much power and little to no accountability.
If 4 different terror operations were coming from Al Qaeda affiliated cells, we'd say they were all Al Qaeda related. If 4 different drug dealers were busted that were all being supplied by one source, we'd call it a drug ring.
All of the operations mentioned - the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, the DEA intelligence program from today, the TSA - are a ring of government operatives that are terrorizing, robbing and imprisoning Americans.
I suppose my point was that there is an underlying cause here, of encroaching authoritarianism in American jurisprudence that I find both alarming and surprising, but if you feel threatened by that, then by all means feel free not to take it as delivered to your address.
Without a trial, how do we know that?
If I am accused of something terrible, of which I am innocent, but a plea bargain gets me back to my family in N years instead of Never (or 10*N), I'm likely to lie and plead guilty. We've seen that the government doesn't merely use plea bargaining as a cost reduction tool, but rather as a very large hammer with which to ensure that people get punished in extreme ways.
While there are good police and prosecutors, as a system they are driven to increase convictions rather than to find the _guilty_. Given the chance, they can find something to convict nearly anyone of, and guilty verdicts can be nearly guaranteed against even people who are innocent by heaping up enough charges that either defense is too expensive or the penalty of losing at trial too large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain#Use_in_civil_law_...
Edit: Seems a bunch of civil law countries have introduce plea bargains the last 15 years, but before that almost none of them had it. This makes it a bit hard to find a concrete list of examples since almost all hits are about the countries introducing it with little discussion about why some countries do not do the same.
True, if primary cause isn't challenged the legal system doesn't consider antecedents as evidence; but the courts only make decisions - they have no input into the consequences of those decisions, other than the making of them.
How do you reconcile this allegation with your statement that "the evidence is all public" and the "chain of custody of all evidence" is public? It appears that what is being described is a secret, shadow set of evidence, that in fact is not made public in any way, shape, or form.
(I still think this kind of evidence gathering should still be excludable, as it no doubt would if the root of the investigation was torture and not foreign intelligence).
So, effectively, despite the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, there isn't real, persistent transparency going back more than a step or two in the evidence gathering process. It's more like judging immediate evidence on its own, without questioning the steps that lead up to its (otherwise valid) finding?
If that's done, the only obstacle left would be corruption and deliberate lack of fidelity (a big only, but still an improvement).
In fact, secret evidence is used as the probable cause basis to effect searches, but the government is playing a neat trick where instead of admitting it's secret, they're just substituting the secret evidence with some innocuous basis for a traffic stop ("driving erratically", "changing lanes without indicating", etc.) that in reality never would have come up if not for the secret evidence.
I agree that not informing the accused of the application of secret information is one of the multiple problems with this program, which just to be clear I do not support.
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.
The car "drifted" or "failed to signal a lane change" or "failed to maintain a safe following distance" or "moved suspiciously as the patrol-car neared".
The officer "smelled something". The driver was "acting weird", or had "bleary eyes" or "droopy eyelids". A drug dog smelled something (which could just be (a) the dog didn't but the officer says it did; (b) the dog follows a subverbal cue from the officer; (c) the dog reacts to traces planted by the officer.)
Once the actual search succeeds, the flimsiest fabricated "probable cause" that was "parallel-constructed" will pass muster. So the defense that such searches "must still be based" on something legitimate isn't very convincing. Once you've already been coached to cover-up the true source of information, what's one more "white lie" to catch a "really bad guy"?
But in reality, the sources of PC sufficient to search a car aren't all that easy to credibly fake. Can they be faked? Certainly. Trivially? With the possible exception of drug dogs (which bother me a lot more than this program does), no.
That is naive. The bar for documentation is the officer's own recollection or a written report based upon their recollection. Officers receive training on how to obtain PC, and how to subsequently pivot to full searches. SCOTUS has granted wide latitude WRT such techniques.
State vehicle codes are written to provide law enforcement officers ample opportunity to establish probable cause to initiate a traffic stop when an individual is suspected of having committed, or about to commit, a crime other than the infraction of the vehicle code.
http://www.lawofficer.com/article/magazine-feature/probable-...
In this particular surveillance-tipped condition, you are asserting there's still some useful check from the necessity of "articulable probable cause". But because of the strong (and legally out-of-band) tip, very few searches are necessary, the searches always succeed in finding contraband, and the only contrary witness to the flimsy smell/dog/eyes/joint-on-the-seat probable-cause rationale is the suspect himself -- whose credibility is shot by the successful find.
That's what makes the phony 'probable cause' tricks trivial in these cases, and your reassurances hollow.
And once the authorities have started down the road of deception of the courts to get a conviction, it's only a small additional step to planting the drugs/guns/porn. "The NSA/DEA-SOD has assured us this is a very bad guy, but all the evidence of that is non-admissible. So let's just 'parallel construct' another incriminating scene from what's handy."
UC Davis study finds detection dogs may exhibit the "Clever Hans" effect
http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/2...
No one but you thinks it's OK to start investigations with "tips" based on excludable evidence. The rest of us literally consider that something we are protected from by the Bill of Rights. Investigations handled according to the excerpts in the article are precisely what we consider to be disgusting and evil.
Most of us do not support the government trying to find loopholes in the Bill of Rights. We want the government to follow the constitution not only technically, but in spirit.
Yes, I see that you claim to not support the program. It's hard to tell with how vigorously you are defending indefensible aspects of the program and seem to support parts of it on legalistic grounds when the issues at stake are legal AND moral. You continue to parse the posted article in an odd way that gives huge benefits of the doubt to the government when it would appear to deserve none.
Meanwhile, your comment is yet another instance† of someone not being satisfied that we agree that the program is bad, but instead demanding that we find it bad for exactly the same set of reasons. Again: case in point for why HN is a terrible venue for political discussions.
Incidentally, you might do better than "yes, I see that you claim not to support the program" [em: mine] when in effect admitting that you were not only wrong, but wrong in the entire premise of your response to me.
It's entirely possible that I don't understand the situation. Could you rephrase the reason you believe the original poster was wrong? i.e. That the evidence trail is public.
It's a shadow, secret set of facts, but it isn't evidence and can't be used as such.
And, to be clear: I think the program is bad news and don't support it. But my reasons are probably different from those of many other HN readers, and have more to do with precedent (I think if we're going to do extensive foreign SIGINT --- and, sorry, we just are going to do that --- we should at least firewall it off from domestic law enforcement).
1. Monitor absolutely everything 2. Place yourself in the right place 3. Book people for what you're able to stop them for
Isn't there some law or legal doctrine that prevents this sort of police omniscience? Everyone is guilty of some infraction.
In other word, doesn't the law require that police show what led them to stop a person, not that the stop was legal according to one condition.
It seems like the real probable cause is being hidden.
I don't actually know the answer to this, it's a serious question.
The real problem here is that there are far too many laws, which has led to a situation where the police can find a "legitimate" reason to arrest/search anyone. There is also the matter of victimless crimes (like possession of certain drugs), which can turn minor infractions like speeding into 20-year prison sentences. The massive increase in police budgets and power over the past few decades added fuel to the fire, but we were in trouble from the beginning.
A personal question, sorry: legality and constitutionality aside, are you comfortable with ample surveillance of other countries? If so, why? From your posts on HN since the PRISM leaks, you've stressed NSA's mandate to spy on other countries. NSA exists and has this function, yes, but why is it acceptable for the US to spy on all foreigners?
[1] Like John DeLorean, Angela Garmley, or those few moron terrorist/pizza deliverymen.
Once again: the information generated from this program does not generate evidence. It generates intelligence.
There is an evidentiary issue involved in the program, which is that it might generate exculpatory facts that the defended might want to introduce into evidence, which the defendant should have the right to discover. But that's (a) going to happen very infrequently and (b) isn't close to the biggest problem with the program, which, for the nth time today, I don't support either.
Consider this. Ptacek rents a car to travel from A to B. NSA/DEA/SOD tips off DPS officers to search Ptacek's car for drugs. Of course, they find drugs. At trial Ptacek's defense is "What drugs? I don't know anything about any drugs!" All the judge, prosecutor, defense knows is that you were pulled over, and you [consented, or PC was otherwise obtained] and lots of drugs were found.
Now, if the origin of the intel hadn't been concealed, Ptacek's defense atty could subpoena President Obama, sorry, I mean the SOD agent, who could testify as to the source of the intel. It might be discovered that there was no evidence to suggest that Ptacek was aware of the drugs concealed in his rental car. It might even be further discovered that hiding drugs in people's car without their knowledge is one of many ways that drug smugglers move contraband.
You completely miss the point of what it means to have a right to face one's accuser.
That's a massive overstatement, as can be seen by noting that there is virtually no controversy over the anonymous tip hotlines that have been used for decades by virtually every police force in the country.
The idea was the NSA discovers a bunch of information about someone, then gives the DEA tips on where to look for evidence of lawbreaking. That way evidence is secret, because when the time comes to share evidence, the DEA has only looked in places to find inculpatory evidence. The superset of all evidence discovered remains 'off the record' with the NSA, and out of the hands of the defense.
(One concern from this article that doesn't ring true to me, but maybe someone else can expand on, is the likelihood that this information is exculpatory).
Then it damn well is exculpatory.
Like if I tap a drug dealer's phone illegally, find out he's making a deal tonight at 8p, and "happen" to be there when the deal occurs, can the deal itself be entered into evidence, or no?
Most obvious exception: if the actual introduced evidence comes from a drug deal that is done in plain site, where the accused is arrested with the money from a hand to hand or somesuch --- unlawful surveillance or not, the evidence from that arrest might not be excludable.
How is that possible? Surely evidence that is obtained that is derived from an illegal search is inadmissible.
1. There's nothing that special about drug crimes. It's reasonable to suspect other enforcement agencies are plugged into the NSA databases as well.
2. Let's say that, through complete surveillance of his communications, the Anti-X agency discovers that John Smith has probably committed crime X. However, there is no other way to obtain evidence on the matter.
3. As many people in this country, John Smith also happens to be a drug offender. Anti-X arranges for the DEA to be at precisely the right spot and time where the offense occurs.
4. John Smith is now in jail for interrogation, and there's a search warrant for his home to (also) look for the evidence that Anti-X was missing before.
(I'm less disquieted by the idea of DEA being at the right place at the right time; if that was the only implication of this program, I might be less bothered by it.)
Anti-X was able to indict him because they found evidence by using another agency - this seems intuitive and useful because they could not have ordinarily found it. If he genuinely committed the crime, they're not obstructing justice or even his privacy here, they're just being creative.
Strictly speaking, I don't really mind that agencies in the United States can do that, because it opens avenues to evidence they would not otherwise have. What I would mind is if law enforcement decided they could find admissible evidence by deliberately retrieving and opportunistically analyzing inadmissible evidence as a springboard.
I understand that those two can seem really similar, but I honestly believe the latter case is a much more serious violation - it just seems like a much more slippery slope to me.
In principle, I don't care about John Smith[1] and I wouldn't advocate solely for the lawbreaker's sake. I'm advocating for innocent people whose rights are violated. Now, if this scheme were directed against a different class of criminal like theiving bankers or corrupt policemen; I'd feel better about the result, but not much. Along those lines, it is offensive to imagine that our supposed inalienable rights are discarded for something as pedestrian as drug offenses when it is clearly possible for some violent crimes to be stopped[2]. Note that I am not an advocate for that. But IMO it is an added insult that we're here living a version of Orwell's nightmare, having just begun to suffer its abuses, but because of the priorities of gov't don't receive the benefit of pervasive gov't protection.
On the ZOMG! slippery-slope angle, imagine just how abusive and corrupt an individual or small group of gov't agents can be when they are allowed to conceal so much of an investigation. One person, or a small group can completely frame an individual for a crime with relatively little opportunity for the accused to defend themselves.
[1] Personally, I am an advocate from drug legalization, but that's a separate issue.
[2] James Bamford alludes to the notion that NSA folk have had to observe some pretty terrible things in the course of duty. I don't envy them for it.
1. Person P smokes marijuana by themselves, doesn't sell, doesn't buy large amounts, "Personal Use" 2. 3-letter-agency ABC is pretty sure person P smokes through some text/call/email/web browsing/etc but has bigger fish to fry 3. Person P is an outspoken critic of government G (or just a supporter of something government G is not a fan of) 4. Government G runs a search on person P through their database and find that ABC is 85% sure this person smokes marijuana 5. Government G tips off local police that they might just want to stop person P's car on X date 6. Person P is now either imprisoned which will greatly hamper their efforts or scared into shutting up and keeping their head down
Now let smoking marijuana be swapped out for some other crime, something that "everybody does", like downloading a song/movie/app, or maybe it's even more minor but they decide to "Make an example of you". The example zeteo gave is very good but most people can write it off with "Well he WAS committing a crime" but if the end goal of the first stop (the "Foot in the door") was actually to censor the person then I think people would see more of an issue.
technically, the only place where he miscalculated was tax. so they got him for that. they didn't plant false tax evidence on him, as the NSA/FBI did recently with that guy that refused to join PRISM with google and others.
- Suspect is detained and harshly interrogated, rights violated, possibly tortured.
- Suspect signs confession
- Suspect is given a drug to wipe his/her memory of the torture/abuses.
- Suspect is convicted of crime he/she committed.
The specific law that is being violated is different, but the effect is the same, since one could argue that if the drug the suspect was given wiped away any memory of the mistreatment, it might as well not have occurred.
The fact is that this is a psyop - an operation used to legitimize the NSA dragnet in the minds of the world. They are "revealing" this issue to show how they are using the NSA data to "catch the baddy" - so therefore this program has value, RIGHT?
Its too late. This has gone too far. The United States of America is no longer united - it is "us" vs. "them"; it is the people vs the government in that the government is literally tracking everything everyone does. You cannot have freedom under those terms. They are mutually exclusive.
America is officially a police state, though it has been unofficially a police state for a long time.
You have a solid grasp of what is technically being done, though I think you are less alarmed at what's already taken place than you should be given this.
The NSA is completely out of control and in a position to blackmail anyone, cut off and control the entire worlds communications and subvert anything they want.
The NSA and the USG are simply telling everyone that we should trust them to be the good guy, just because. While the government has already proven they will torture abuse and murder people with impunity.
These two things are incongruous - we can't have a political system that is proven to abuse and one that claims to be the moral good guy.
No matter how much we attempt to self-delude.
Here's why: we have a situation where, for once, we've landed on the same conclusion. We got there for different reasons. Instead of looking at that as a great opportunity to learn something new from our differing perspectives, it's something that somehow manages to piss you off. If political discussion doesn't work here, it's certainly not going to work anywhere else.
I'm not getting my wish that discussions like these simply be banned from the site, but maybe we could take a baby step towards civility by not calling people names.
Second, I actually really enjoy talking about these things with you on HN.
Third, we both get emotional about things we discuss - I recall a thread between us ~2 plus years ago where we were in heated discussion!
And C) - these items are political - but entirely germane to HN as the whole thing is enabled by tech and techies "just following orders" and tech companies "just making more sales".
We are on a very slippery slope; nobody wants to live in danger, but everyone is in danger of government abuse with these programs.
In political matters - the power of government vs. the rights of the individual - most people will fall into one of the two groups as a basic mode of operation for their perceptions and personal philosophy. When governments become tyrannical, as the US government is now proving itself to be, the contrast between the two modes becomes starkly delineated.
Authority vs. Liberty is an ancient human argument that is obviously still being played out. Those of us with an unbreakable attachment to Liberty will see any arguments in favor of the current regime as apologia.
Well there you go.
The DEA's use of NSA intercepts "sounds" a whole lot more sensible (catching 'drug dealers') than what may be potentially 1000s of other horrific uses the government is also using this data for.
>a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.
So how is my point wrong? This is trying to prove that the secret use of NSA data to catch baddies is an important function of the program.
Nominally private communications that are acquired without the benefit of a warrant, are excluded all the time. The notion of 'parallel construction' is antithetical to the presumption of innocence clause. Any conviction where it can be shown that the initial basis for investigation was acquired in this way and the evidence history had been "re-constructed" in order to avoid that taint, would be thrown out by any appellate court in the country.
No doubt there are motions being filed right now for such actions.
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.
Sounds like a pretty big limitation to me.
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).
Why go through all the trouble when they can turn our cellphones into listening devices?
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?
You left out the two intelligence agencies that are under the DoJ: the FBI and the DEA.
Jesus fucking Christ. They were lying to prosecutors to get charges pressed against people.
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.
You seriously need to read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
Fruit of the poisonous tree is a legal metaphor in the United States used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally.[1] The logic of the terminology is that if the source of the evidence or evidence itself (the "tree") is tainted, then anything gained from it (the "fruit") is tainted as well...Such evidence is not generally admissible in court.
You cannot conceal the source of evidence that leads you to other evidence.
Edit: So this seems to speak to a bit of what the main link was talking about. This extension of the exclusionary rule doesn't speak to whether or not omission of first cause is lying (under the legal definition), but rather about how if the first cause evidence was obtained illegally, then it cannot be used.
The crux of this issue seems to be that the prosecution is not volunteering information that might trigger the defense to look for Fruit of the Poisonous Tree in the first place (and does that cross the line into illegality, thus preventing evaluation). I would hope it does...
That's the tricky thing about the Reuters DEA revelation. Some drug offenders probably are cavalier about displaying evidence in the cars because the likelihood of their being stopped is low. Here, domestic surveillance is allowing the police to drastically increase the odds that they'll make a fortuitous traffic stop.
What would not work, in my understanding of the story, is for an intelligence intercept to establish the legal basis for stopping and searching a car.
Maybe it wouldn't even matter if the drugs were in plain sight? The cop could likely just use the old "I smell marijuana" trick and then he would 'inevitably discover' the drug dealer's stash, no matter where in the car it's hidden.
Honestly seems like the whole point of SOD is to get around the poison fruit guideline.
Also, I don't see any virtue to secrecy in this case; unlike organized Al Qaeda terrorism prevention or foreign hostile adversaries or counterproliferation, the tactics we're using in the "war on drugs" are a public policy matter that benefit from public discussion.
Source - "Also known as a continuing misrepresentation, a lie by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. When the seller of a car declares it has been serviced regularly but does not tell that a fault was reported at the last service, the seller lies by omission. It can be compared to dissimulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
The closest fit from your link (only listed lie I saw that pertained to legal proceedings):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Perjury
doesn't speak of omission, but rather only material representations that are verifiably false.
If you're seeing something that I'm not, let me know.
This is completely and utterly wrong. Please stop spreading misinformation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perjury
Further, statements that are facts cannot be considered perjury, even if they might arguably constitute an omission
You can see from my comment history that I am vehemently opposed to recent government actions including this one. The prosecution omitting exculpatory evidence is illegal but omitting information under oath is not.
When you are under oath, you are expected to answer the question before you. You are not required or even expected to guess or to elaborate. I've heard from many attorneys I've been a client of that you need to make opposing counsel "work for it". If they ask a broad question, answer narrowly. If you're asked, "Have you ever done anything wrong?", it's not your duty to list everything wrong you've ever done in your life going back to the time you tripped Timmy in third grade at recess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perjury
Further, statements that are facts cannot be considered perjury, even if they might arguably constitute an omission
No offense, but it's very obvious you have no or very limited experience in court proceedings. Please quit while you are ahead.
As long as one can find a form of words, then all is fine and dandy. Even if that means redefining words to mean something new. I despise this game of words.
They are misleading prosecutors: "In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept."
First 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-John Adams
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.
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
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-fo...
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
Edit 3: Starting 43:15 pertains to DEA SOD
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.
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
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.
The USA is a tyranny, there is nothing you can do about these things.
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.
Any suggested reading?
I note the above digression in this thread -- which incidentally is higher upvoted than the present thread -- wherein people marvel at how similar the recent abuses are to the plot of the TV show "The Wire".
Tune in next week! Until then, tune out.
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?
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.
This implicit double standard plays a role in allowing this kind of thing to happen. I wonder when we'll start reëvaluating it?
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).
OTOH, it may be mental (illness?) for people to blindly follow authority.
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)
So how do we do unit tests for laws?
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.
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.
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
It's horseshit.
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/...
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/d...
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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?
http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/23/portugals-drug-experie...
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?
There are also legal drugs that have similar effects to things like Adderall. A lot of people don't know about them or use them because they haven't been researched as much and come in powder form.
At the very least I think that you shouldn't be put in prison for carrying pills without a prescription.
You might find this Vice article interesting. It talks about how Oxycotin is essentially legal heroin.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-big-pharma-hooked-ameri...
I say we should take it slow when it comes to legalization. Perhaps start with things that are found in nature. Marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, being legally able to harvest the opium from poppy seed plants, etc.
This already happens. Diamorphine (heroin) is commonly used as a painkiller in hospitals. If you've ever been seriously injured and wound up in hospital with a tube going into your arm attached to a button which gives you a dose of painkiller, limited to something like 3 presses an hour, then you've probably taken heroin, likely in large amounts. The nurse may well have called it "morphine" to avoid scaring you.
Famously, "Heroin" was originally a trademark of the Bayer company.
EDIT: apparently this is only true in the UK. This might be why we don't have the fancy modern opiates here, oxycontin etc.
Glenn Greenwald has a great paper about drug decriminalization in Portugal. Lots of shocking graphs and statistics. The digital version is legally available online for free.
http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal...
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwa...
Unfortunately that's about the only resource I can think of when it comes to drug legalization/decriminalization in an actual real world environment. I'm hoping to see some papers in the next couple years about marijuana legalization in Washington and Colorado.
This is only semi-related, but Vangard has a really fascinating documentary on prescription drug abuse/doctor shopping in Florida you might find interesting. It's called the Oxycontin Express. Basically people go down to Florida, get a whole bunch of prescriptions for Oxycontin and then resell the pills in Kentucky and other States at a ridiculous profit. Here's a link to an online copy of it.
Marijuana is effectively legal in the Netherlands. (Technically illegal, but "tolerated")
One thing I don't understand is what happens to the supply line the decriminalisation case. Obviously trafficking is still illegal but is still happening. I guess there's still the same amount of money running back to the drug cartels.
The english Wikipedia article unfortunately doesn't talk about that program but only about "... and in 1992, police moved in to clear up the park..." which did clean the park but did nothing to solve the problem - the addicts and associated crime just crossed the river.
The only real fix for the issue was to destroy the market by just handing out the drug freely.
Drug prohibition has never really been about solving the problems society faces with drugs. In the early days when cocaine and heroin were first made illegal, the argument was overtly racist. Black cocaine users would be more accurate with a gun, would go into a frenzied state where they attack white women, and would be difficult to stop even when shot in the chest. Philipino immigrants were bringing their bad opium habits with them, and heroin was marketed by a German company. Marijuana was said to cause white women to want to have sex with black men, and good white boys were being corrupted by Mexicans who gave them marijuana.
In this day and age the war on drugs is not overtly racist (but it just happens to disproportionately affect black communities -- coincidence, really!), but we now have a host of new reasons for it. Drugs are an easy way to terrify a population that grew up with war on drugs propaganda, and politicians looking for a few more votes can easily play up their "tough on crime" stance with drugs. Deploying soldiers to arrest suspected drug dealers is the norm, and police forces wanted to build a paramilitary wing can always turn to drug crime as a justification for it. Pharmaceutical companies love the war on drugs because it inflates the demand for prescription medications; a prominent example is methamphetamine, the supposed scourge that also happens to be prescribed as a treatment for narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD (you can bet that the pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine is cleaner and purer than the stuff you buy at a truck stop). Alcohol and tobacco companies lobby in favor of the war on drugs (ironically), for obvious reasons.
So really, to understand the war on drugs you just need to change your perspective. Do not think in terms of solving the problems associated with drugs, because that is little more than a facade. Think in terms of money and power, which are the real purpose of the war on drugs and the reason we will not see the DEA disbanded any time soon.
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.
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).
"PPTerrorism"? "PowerPointillism?"
Or maybe a wonderful German composite word.
lynx -dump http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_tra... |sed '/The right of the people to be secure/,/be seized./s/ \[ Redacted \]/'
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.
Or they'll just open a new datacenter.
Look at these downvotes for disagreements. There'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?
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/...
Maybe you are getting downvotes because you seem to be endorsing illegal activities by the federal authorities? It is a crime to fail to divulge the source of evidence, or worse, outright lie about it, is it not?
The collection of data may be illegal, and that is worth investigating. The collection of information of data of innocent people, people with no probable cause they are committing crimes or without a warrant, is not OK.
Aye, there's the rub. The collection of the trawl data invariably will uncover some crimes being committed by people who are not suspected of committing crimes. In other words, search and seizure without probable cause. Now it appears this illegally begotten evidence is being used to point federal law enforcement at targets. Do you really not see a problem with this?
I don't think it is, and I hope most Americans agree.
<edit> replacing drug dealer with terrorist doesn't change my view on the matter</edit>
>I see a problem with collecting information without probable cause or a warrant.
>I do not see the problem with convicting individuals who are committing crimes regardless of how that information was collected...
The second case is not possible without making an exception to the first, which then leads to the selective application of fundamental rights and that is paradoxical.
Mass surveilance will undoubtedly unearth crimes that would not otherwise come under suspicion in a free society. By definition, the surveilance will also target those who have commmited no crimes. The question is whether that risk is worth it. The Fourth amendment says no. Making exceptions for certain classes of people (even if probable criminals) is just a slippery slope.
You effectively contradict yourself: you can't say "no", reward them for doing it, and expect it to stop.
So effectively, your first sentence carries no weight, because you don't believe in enforcing it... you believe in rewarding law enforcement for doing the exact opposite.
You have every right to do that (and nobody should downvote you for that), if you argue in favor of a much more repressive legal regime than the one we currently have in all Western democracies. But instead, you just insult people ("hysteria", "paranoid") who might not agree with arguments you don't even bother to present.
As for your downvotes, dont agree with downvoting someone just because you disagree with them.
Really, contrarian viewpoints are hardly an endangered animal here.
When it comes to downvoting rights, Hacker News has the rough equivalent of a poll tax or voter ID law. ;)
[1]: Not yet. Depending on the reaction to my post, "not yet" might change into "can". Or might change into, "yeah, never".
This is evidence that FBI, DEA, and other agencies, at multiple levels of government, are colluding with dragnet surveillance operations. How much worse would you say it should get before it's not "paranoid?"