DEA Program "More Troubling" Than NSA 432
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting on a secret effort by the Drug Enforcement Agency to collect data from wiretaps, informants, and other sources. Considered most troubling is a systematic campaign to hide this program from the courts, denying defendants their right to know how evidence against them was obtained. This agenda targets U.S. citizens directly, as it is mainly focused on drug trafficking. From the article: '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. 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.'"
Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Informative)
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. After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."
Country without a consitution says what?
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds like a way of having to get one of those bothersome warrants.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a way of having to get one of those bothersome warrants.
Even better, if the original collection mechanism was illegal, you can avoid having the evidence excluded as 'fruit of the poisonous tree' by producing a "parallel construction", that isn't illegal, for how you came to possess it! Such convenience.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like a way of [not] having to get one of those bothersome warrants.
Even better, if the original collection mechanism was illegal, you can avoid having the evidence excluded as 'fruit of the poisonous tree' by producing a "parallel construction", that isn't illegal, for how you came to possess it! Such convenience.
Which, interestingly, is how military intelligence hides their sources. Supposedly during WWII the Allies never took action on information derived from ULTRA, unless they could find other evidence once they knew the fact. That way the Germans could always conclude that the Allies figured things out by normal means, rather than having an ear in their HQs.
Makes you wonder who the DEA is getting advice from.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
"Makes you wonder who the DEA is getting advice from."
In a conspiracy-theorist's perfect world, the CIA would be dishing dirt on competing drug-runners in order to boost their own margins. I don't think that I dare hope for a setup that cute, though.
Re: (Score:3)
> I don't think that I dare hope for a setup that cute, though.
What do you think the entire DEA is for ?
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:4, Insightful)
> I don't think that I dare hope for a setup that cute, though.
What do you think the entire DEA is for ?
All the DEA does is cut down the competition so the price rises and the CIA can get more money for their off book black ops. You don't really think those drugs get smuggled without help, now, do you?
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Looks like I left a 'not' out of that sentence.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Even more troubling: '"Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."... Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using "parallel construction" may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.'
So it's been accepted practice for decades, with or without the NSA, and yet only drug defense lawyers have ever heard of it. A lot of questions reporters could ask: can defense attorneys get the whole meta-data drop for the phone numbers involved? Can civil case parties get any of this stuff?
The defense data dump would seem to be especially on point, since it would allow the defendant to point fingers in other directions.
Choice parts at the end of the article: 'If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement... Current and former federal agents said SOD tips aren't always helpful - one estimated their accuracy at 60 percent.... "It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."' That last comment is the absolutely most corrupt.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Informative)
The 'war on drugs' has either introduced or popularized many of the more...unpleasant...police practices, so it isn't 100% surprising that people who litigate drug cases, one side or the other, probably have a lot of unpleasant cocktail party stories.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
At a previous place I lived, the neighbors across the alley had cars pulling up 18 hours a day. Garage door up, guy comes out to window goes back inside comes back out, makes another exchange with driver and driver pulls away. Garage door down. All day, every day.
It got so bad one day that I couldn't get out and a guy flipped me off. So I called the cops.
I told them and they said to report it to the complex security guard. I told them that it doesn't work because he's their cousin and the board has been trying to get rid of these people for years (because they suspect the sons go around breaking everything but can't prove it) but legally can't because they know every renter's law up one side and down the other and threaten to sue.
The cops said, "There isn't anything we can do." I said, sure there is. Send some plainclothes guys to the end of the street. Watch the suspicious transaction. Follow the car out of the complex and pull them over. Search the car for drugs. Once you find the drugs, get a warrant to search the house. Make sure you don't tell the complex security at any time or they'll be notified.
Sure enough, a couple days later I see a Mercury at the end of the street with 2 obvious plainclothes in it. Clueless druggies roll up and purchase anyway. The next morning, there's a raid and the sons are arrested. Within a month the parents move out and we get a nice, new neighbor.
Now, based on this thread, we engaged in "parallel construction". I just saw suspicious activity and we manufactured the rest (but it was all legit). (I didn't realize I was so clever.)
So it's not the parallel construction that's the problem. It's the massive dragnet to find the information to begin with.
Also, what happens when someone tries to frame someone else by texting them from different people's phones and asking them where to find drugs. Will the cops "plant" drugs because they've already expended the effort?
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that "parallel construction?" Your observations established probable cause for the raid. That was linear construction.
Also (Score:3)
Police and private citizens have different rules. So if the police break in your house, without a warrant, and find evidence of a crime, well sorry that evidence, and anything resulting from it, can't be used. They didn't follow the law. Likewise if the police pay (or force, or ask, or whatever) someone to break in to your house and that person finds evidence of a crime, it again can't be used. While the person wasn't a cop, he acted as their agent.
However, if someone breaks in to their house all on their o
Re: (Score:3)
It's not. Parallel construction would have been an undercover cop from a differ
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
The cops said, "There isn't anything we can do." I said, sure there is. [ ... explains to Cops how to do their fucking job ...]
This is even sadder than the time a junior programmer, just out of college, asked me, "how do I debug a program".
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:4, Insightful)
...and shortly thereafter all the "druggies" found new suppliers, the can was kicked down to some other neighborhood, addiction rates didn't change, since they never really do more than the yearly fluctuations.
All because the real problem wasn't them, it was the government and police who created the situation where opening up a storefront in a residential garage looked like a good and profitable idea.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Did these "druggies" actually hurt anybody? I mean besides flipping you off and blocking you in your driveway. It seems that you just didn't like them, and they happened to be a minor inconvenience (not unlike someone playing loud music or just being an asshole), and what they were doing happened to be illegal and you took advantage of that.
I would say in an ideal world we would end the war on drugs, rather than manufacturing reasons to make criminals out of people that aren't hurting anyone (except maybe themselves), and in the process funneling money to brutal drug cartels.
I don't think you were wrong to call the cops on them. I wouldn't want a bunch of drug deals going down where I lived either, but I think the real problem is that because it's illegal, it attracts a criminal element, and not the other way around.
Re: (Score:2)
You are probably right.
Simply mentioning that the information was overheard by a undercover officer in a bar is sufficient probable cause for any police agency to take a closer look.
Probably even posting here in slashdot provides enough for someone to start looking deeper, and issuing an letter demanding that DICE fork over the IP address of the AC who posted post number (#44479039).
Re: Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Any physicist can tell you that "being invisible" is no defence against a sniper's bullet.
The problem here is, the entire "Parallel construction" is being used to hide the fact that the tree was poisoned. In fact, there is no reason to have parellel construction otherwise, since it actually adds nothing to the case: If you had enough evidence to pull him over and search him, then you don't need to wait for him to "drive erratically". If you didn't, then it doesn't give you any.
There is no other purpose here than to hide the poisoning of the tree so that it cannot be defended against.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:4, Insightful)
It is however true that you can get a better plea deal by threatening to go to trial, especially if the prosecutor has to work it's ass off to get a conviction. It's a gambit, but if your lawyer feels they have a weak case, they may not be willing to spend hours and hours of their time to get a meaningless (to them) conviction. The legal system's always been a circus where if you show them you're hard to get they'll be a lot more wary. The alternative is they'll destroy your life without remorse.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
You ALWAYS go to fucking TRIAL! Always! These trumped up prosecutions would stop if everyone exercised their right to a TRIAL!
My wife was accused of criminal negligence with regards to an accident involving a retarded minor. She was facing 6 years in PMITV prison!
Well, three days before jury selection was scheduled to start -- they offered a new plea deal, this time with a misdemeanor charge and 1 year of probation. Called their fucking bluffs!
PS: If I had the money for a trial, we would have said no and got the charges dropped completely
Didn't you just demonstrate exactly why many people *don't* go to trial (including yourself?) The government holds all the cards - not only can they can hold a max sentence prosecution over your head making the stakes too high to gamble, but they *also* can play dirty with the evidence and stack the deck in their favor making it more likely that they will win. And since they are prosecuting with your tax dollars, they get unlimited funds to spend on the prosecution.
It's easy to say "Everyone should go to trial!" but when it's your (or your wife's) butt on the line, it's not so easy to face years of prison time -- as you so clearly demonstrated with your story. You didn't call their bluff - they called yours - they sweetened the pot on the plea deal because they wanted you to admit to the crime so they get yet another successful prosecution - and you did exactly what they wanted.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't call their bluff - they called yours - they sweetened the pot on the plea deal because they wanted you to admit to the crime so they get yet another successful prosecution ...
Which is *all* prosecutors really care about - winning not truth. Only winning convictions helps their careers. Sad but, from my experience, true.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell did I just read?
The reason you should Just Say NO to crack cocaine.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Constructing a case against someone that you *cough* accidentally discovered was doing something wrong via an illegal wiretap or massive surveillance is almost an everyday occurrence in this country. Everyone from the tin-star country sheriff to the biggest police department does it.
This is why license plate scanners, mass email sifting, etc ad-nauseum is so insidious EVEN for people who do nothing wrong, except drive down the wrong street at the wrong time, or post on the wrong threads (like this one) on a public forum.
You can be made do look guilty enough to be detained, your reputation for ever ruined, or actual arrested and prosecuted and convicted by un-questioning juries who simply want to go home.
The wisest thing is for any defense attorney to do is to ask direct questions as to why this particular car was stopped on this particular day, or why that particular hoodie was a target of stop and risk. That forces the police and prosecutors to either fabricate a lie, or reveal these retro-investigations.
Will it have any immediate effect? I sincerely doubt it. But you catch them at it once, and you can taint a lot of cases.
One wonders if license plate scanners aren't really a huge scam to provide a vaguely dependable program for acquiring a pretense of probable cause. Looking for stolen vehicles, but only in the areas where drug sales or prostitutes are plentiful.
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
"The wisest thing is for any defense attorney to do is to ask direct questions as to why this particular car was stopped on this particular day"
"The driver $misc_innocuous_driving_offense, so I stopped him. When I approached the car, I thought I smelled marijuana, so I called a drug sniffing dog, which indicated there were drugs in the car"
This line of "construction" is accepted 100% of the time in 100% of the courts in the US.
Re: (Score:3)
Police are experts at fabricating lies
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Troubling quote from the article (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say that every problem I have with the government could be described as "government excess". In pretty much every case it's "while I like that you're doing X, I'd like it more if you did it a bit less". While the seemingly-inevitable entitlement collapse will bring lots of unpleasant civil unrest, there's at least a chance that the funding for all the three letter agencies will be cut to the point they're forced to focus on the stuff that actually helps. Of course, I guess it's more likely that everything else will be cut and only the police state will remain funded to suppress insurrection, but hey, a man can hope.
then it's up to the jury to rule the consitution w (Score:3)
then it's up to the jury to rule the constitutional way
Re:then it's up to the jury to rule the consitutio (Score:5, Insightful)
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Backed into a truncheon? Ut oh, sounds like attempted assault on an officer now. Better call three more cops to bea....er restrain the uh.... slippery bastard. Dude should stop fighting, every time they pick him up he manages to wrestle free and throw himself against the ground, better put him on suicide watch too...wouldn't want him to hurt himself (or be believed)
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And then attacked the officers fist with your jaw.
Joking about serious things? (Score:5, Insightful)
The U.S. government is EXTREMELY CORRUPT. This is no time for joking.
In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed. The U.S. government has invaded more countries than any other country in the history of the world. The U.S. government has more than 760 military bases worldwide [alternet.org]. Taxpayers pay, but aren't allowed to know where there money goes.
Read the story about the US government's purchases of over one billion rounds of anti-personnel ammunition. [naturalnews.com] Quote: "The ammunition is to be use domestically, not by the military."
Do you think it won't get worse?
Re:Joking about serious things? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you think it won't get worse?
I saw the first drone fly over my head the other day.
If that isn't a wake-up-call, what is?
Re:Joking about serious things? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes.
Aircraft with human pilots are generally large and expensive units. Pilots are also very expensive too. These expense issues are what keeps multiple planes from flying around at all times spying on us.
Re:Joking about serious things? (Score:5, Insightful)
In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy either, but these sorts of exaggerations are just ridiculous. Is the US government really more violent than the Roman Empire or the government of Genghis Khan? In the middle ages you were 35 times as likely to die as a result of violence from another human being (murder, war, etc) than today.
The US may be a violent (or maybe even the most violent) nation by today's standards, but it is certainly not anywhere close to being the most violent that ever existed. This is a gross overstatement.
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In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy either, but these sorts of exaggerations are just ridiculous. Is the US government really more violent than the Roman Empire or the government of Genghis Khan? In the middle ages you were 35 times as likely to die as a result of violence from another human being (murder, war, etc) than today.
The US may be a violent (or maybe even the most violent) nation by today's standards, but it is certainly not anywhere close to being the most violent that ever existed. This is a gross overstatement.
Ask people in Afghanistan if they feel safe from Americans.
Re:Joking about serious things? (Score:4, Interesting)
Where I disagree is in that we don't know the full extent of US violence. Obviously we see the impact of wars that are declared, like Iraq and Afghanistan. How about the undeclared wars? You know, the CIA funded operations that cause the deaths of millions in the Middle East and Europe in revolutions for example? How about the corporate death squads that roamed (and maybe still roam) in South American and Africa?
If you believe only what they give you in propaganda, I'm with you. We are really not bad compared to Hitler.
When you look at the Bush family funding Hitler, Carnegie, Melon and Rockefeller providing all the eugenics scientists to Hitler and funding them things start to look much worse. I won't even touch those same families funding Mao and Stalin mind you, which would indirectly implicate the US as responsible for a whole lot more deaths than anyone in history. The Bush connection is well documented, so don't bother crying "conspiracy theory". The rest I agree is theory, but there is enough documentation that we should at least investigate.
It's a box that may sicken us when it's opened.
Re: (Score:3)
to quote form Stephen Pinker:
torture was practiced by the United States during the Bush administration, and human trafficking still takes place in many countries. There is an enormous difference between a clandestine, illegal, and universally decried practice in a few parts of the world and an open, institutionalized, and universally approved practice everywhere in the world. Human trafficking, as terrible as it is, cannot be compared to the African slave trade (see pp. 157–188), nor can the recent harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects to extract information, as indefensible as it was, be compared to millennia of sadistic torture all over the world for punishment and entertainment (see pp. 130-132 and 144–149). In understanding the history of violence, one has to make distinctions among levels of horror.
We are living in a relative paradise compared to what human society was like in the past. I am not saying we shouldn't strive to continue to improve. I fully anticipate future human society to make us look like savages by comparison. When we say things like "The US is the most violent government in history" we fail to acknowledge the progress made by humanity thus far.
Re:Joking about serious things? (Score:4, Interesting)
In general things either have to be really bad in concrete ways where death is a risk worth taking, or enough rich people have to bankroll things. Neither is going to be the case here any time soon.
Big buck from prohibition (Score:5, Insightful)
And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And so it begins (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
No. You can only do that once it's too late to matter.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really a classic police state yet, which is top down.
This is something new, where we have shards of government becoming autonomous and headless and immune from oversight. The idea of checks and balances is failing. The DEA and the NSA are now their own organizations with their own agenda, their own budgets, their own corrupt private contractors, their own interests to serve. They exist for that, and not to serve the public.
Re:And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really a classic police state yet, which is top down.
The record holder in perjury before congress so far is not some NSA official but Eric Holder, the Attorney General, responsible for prosecuting things like high-level perjury.
If that's not top down, I don't know what is.
Re:And so it begins (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
As for Obama, he surely inherited some of the problems, but — instead of alleviating them — made them worse. For the most obvious example, Obama is killing [theguardian.com] the people Bush used to try to capture... Is the Nobel Peace Prize winner really that blood-thirsty? No, he is not. But, to be able to close Guantanamo eventually, he has to stop putting new people there... And his supporters, so worked-up about people being locked-up in Gitmo, are happily ignoring his killing of the same alleged terrorists. If he thought, he could get away with simply executing all of the current detainees — so as to close the "illegal" prison down, he would've done that too...
Re: (Score:3)
Was it really Nixon, who presided over the original Prohibition?
The original Prohibition was repealed in 1933, as I'm sure you know. The GP was referring to Nixon's "War on Drugs". In reality I wouldn't place the blame squarely on Tricky Dick. He was just the first to use, or popularize, the term. He's also one of our most hateable presidents. But yes, the war on drugs started before Nixon and has been continued long after he resigned.
Re: (Score:3)
He didn't say original prohibition. He said drug prohibition. That was Nixon. Well, not really - the drugs were already illegal. He just declared war (well, not really - only congress can do that [argument for another day]).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Nixon coined the phrase "War on Drugs."
The substances were prohibited long before. During his time, though is when we started to see the use of no-knock warrants, which has been the signature tool in drug enforcement.
American Law Enforcement: Putting the boot to your door (warranted or not, correct door or not) since the early '70s.
Another word game (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another word game (Score:5, Insightful)
This "recreating the investigative trail" sounds like a fancy way to describe perjury.
I just don't see how it's acceptable for the government to use this "parallel construction" and not recognize the implications. Basically, you can spy on people / utilize information swept up from other (likely dubious) government actions as long as you can fabricate reasonable cause after the fact? How is the entire investigation not completely tainted by this fact? Not only that, but now you get to get rhetorical ammunition that "spying works" since it can lead to convictions outside of the intended purpose while simultaneously reducing the information available to regular citizens and the attorneys that defend them since it's literally their job to cover it up after the fact with a false trail.
Re:Another word game (Score:5, Insightful)
"Parallel construction" is apparently the technical term for laundering the fruit of the poisonous tree. If the way the original tip was gathered was illegal, then ALL subsequent evidence gathered is inadmissible. Period. By laundering the source of the investigation (to hide the illegal tip), the FBI, DA's office, local and state cops are all committing both perjury and possible contempt of court.
Good luck getting the judges to do anything about it though. The only way this will be stopped is if the FBI is sued by a drug dealer or trafficker. And they have a GREAT history of winning in court.
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This "recreating the investigative trail" sounds like a fancy way to describe perjury.
The term is 'testilying', citizen.
the program is not a secret (Score:3)
RTFA, it says the DEA submits requests for money for the program in budget documents and its a well known program for coordinating inter-state and international investigations
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Do the budget documents describe the abuse? If not, then this is basically secret.
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RTFA, it says the DEA submits requests for money for the program in budget documents and its a well known program for coordinating inter-state and international investigations
And yet in the article we find this:
"It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."
Seems pretty clear that there were aspects of the program that they really wanted to keep deeply hidden, which is pretty much the definition of secret.
Hiding how it started? (Score:2)
Maybe they're so keen to keep the source hidden because it's the NSA and all of their programs?
Speaking of the NSA, anyone else notice a number of stories over the past few days ( here and elsewhere ) that seem designed to throw attention anywhere but the NSA's crap?
Re:Hiding how it started? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Had I read for just a minute longer, I'd have found this. So it would seem I was correct.
move along (Score:5, Insightful)
nothing to see here... only criminals are affected, you are not a criminal, Citizen, are you?
Re:move along (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wait until you say something that pisses off the DIP, Dictator in Power.
Then they will look for any and everything you do to find a reason to take you down. Didn't pay all your license fees, you took a deduction you didn't justify, you claimed something that wasn't right on a government form, or maybe you didn't reply to a government request. You are a criminal.
Worse yet, they have unlimited funds to take you down, if their SWAT team doesn't find a reason to do it first.
Boom!
Re:move along (Score:4, Interesting)
The year was 2006. I was driving along the feeder of an interstate highway I-45 northbound in Houston, TX, near Alemeda, going 55 mph and slowing, having just exited a 65 mph highway (going ~68).
I saw the truck in front of me slam on his brakes. There was a cop car parked on the side of the road at the light, the cop was standing outside his car, pointing a speed scanner at cars.
The speed limit was 45.
I swerved into the next lane (the middle lane) to avoid crunching into the truck (who'd gone from ~60 mph to maybe 30 in an instant).
Next thing I know, the cop is *skipping* sideways, facing me, right into my lane in 3 big skips, his burly arms outstretched, pointed at me in a "STOP" motion.
I'm telling you, he was only ~25 feet away when he started these antics and within a second or two, I was nearly upon him.
I *SLAMMED* on my brakes and quickly jerked the wheel to the open left lane. In my periphreal vision, I saw the cop dodge out of the lane, cuz he was scared, too. I immediately applied the brakes hard and stopped ~20 feet from the red light white stop line.
The cop *RUSHED* over to my window and banged it FURIOUSLY with his black club. In shock, it took me about 10 seconds to manage to roll down the window.
"YOU ALMOST KILLED ME!!! YOU PUT MY LIFE IN GREAT PERSONAL RISK!!!" the cop frantically barked at me in his thick, husky voice. "GET OUT OF THE CAR, PUT YOUR HANDs BehIND YOUR BACK!"
I did this. He put handcuffs on me, arms behind my back and said I was under arrest for driving erratically, wrecklessly, and endangering the life of a peace officer. He ended up writing me a total of SEVEN offenses: 1) expired tax sticker, 2) going 55 in a 45, 3) no proper turn signal [trying to avoid hitting the truck], 4) improper lane change [trying to avoid hitting the officer!], 5) failure to yield to an officer [felony, lowest], 6) endangering an officer of the law [since he literally skipped over right in front of me!], and 7) reckless driving.
I knew enough to not say a word. He kept asking me over and over to tell him why I tried to hit him, and I just kept my mouth shut. He got really violent and was screaming at me WHY DID I TRY TO KILL HIM!?! I thought if I uttered any word he could testify something like "This criminal tried to run me over and when I asked him, 'why?' he brazenly said I was mistaken and had put my own life at risk." You know?
When backup arrived 5 minutes later, both of them started in on me, saying things like they were going to leave me on the sidewalk in the 105 F 100% humidity summer heat to rot if I didn't confess. I then started mouthing toward the backup's cop car (incase of a dash cam) "I demand an attorney, I demand an attorney, I demand an attorney."
Freaks dragged me down to the station, processed me, I got bail set at $1,000 and I was out in like 12 hours. Court was the next month. The DA came up to my attorney and said something like, "Yeah... we want to settle this out of court for just speeding, reckless driving, and the expired sticker." Attorney advised me not to, so we went to the judge.
The judge sort of smirked when the cop explained his side of things nad my attorney explained my side of things. The attorney showed them the deal they tried to just get us to agree to, and showed the dash cam that showed the guy clearly skipping into oncoming traffic and me nearly hitting him, cuz he brazenly came so close so fast.
The judge threw out all of them except the sticker, then added that the sticker would be thrown out, too, plus no court fees. Woohoo! All I ended up paying was a few hundred (~$500) for the attorney.
But look, the attorney said and I think that if I had mouthed off to the cop, or really said anything, like "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! ARE YOU CRAZY?!" that i could have been beaten up and had the book thrown at me. The two felonies had punishments of up to 5 years each and the misdermeanors would have totalled a potential 15 months each. Thats like 7 years.
All because an asshole cop decided to play god and skip in front of two oncoming cars on a slow Summer Thursday at around 2 PM.
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Buy a dash cam and you could have saved money on the attorney. When the rookie cop goes through his list ask him if he wants to add any more to the list, then remark that he's on your cam as well as his so his job will be on the line and he'll end up a mall cop, and then follow through with it. There are excellent officers but bad cops like that make them ALL look bad.
Re: (Score:3)
Buy a dash cam and you could have saved money on the attorney. When the rookie cop goes through his list ask him if he wants to add any more to the list, then remark that he's on your cam as well as his so his job will be on the line and he'll end up a mall cop, and then follow through with it. There are excellent officers but bad cops like that make them ALL look bad.
Except civilian dashcams aren't 'evidence' in most juristictions (no chain of evidence), they arrest people who videotape police actions, and besides, when they impound the car, that dashcam and its recorder will be found to be inoperative due to 'unknown persons' attempting to remove and wipe the record.
Do you really think the cops put dashcams in their cars for your benefit? They put them there to record everything so they have more charges to throw against you. Obviously GP's arresting officer never c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you hadn't been tailgating ("the practice of driving on a road too close to a frontward vehicle, at a distance which does not guarantee that stopping to avoid collision is possible [wikipedia.org]"), you wouldn't have had to swerve.
Re:move along (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, I believed you up until here.
If you know anything about driving heavy vehicles you know that they dont just drop 45 KPH in an instant. Trucks are naturally slow to stop to avoid the rear wheels going faster than the front wheels (commonly called drifting and with a vehicle that is 8 metres long, drifting is very, very, fucking bad) and a good truck driver will avoid braking sharply to protect his load.
So a car will be able to brake faster than a truck.
After that is out of the way, in my country you would have broken the law by travelling so close to the vehicle in front that you were unable to stop without hitting the other vehicle when they braked in an emergency (Legal wording here [austlii.edu.au]). Keeping a minimum safe distance is not just law here in Australia, it's a good defensive driving technique anywhere. For the average vehicle, 2-3 seconds is the minimum safe distance, for a truck it's longer (6 seconds min) as they take longer to stop and it keeps you out of a trucks absolutely massive blind spot.
So yes, this is your fault and could have been avoided by following the proper defensive driving technique of maintaining a safe distance.
You haven't managed to prove a police state, you've just inadvertently revealed that you're a bad driver.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've broken a few laws, like traffic and copyright. But those aren't criminal laws.
Bully for you, but you're probably wrong. You've probably been guilty of criminal violations without even realizing it.
Meanwhile, both the current and previous president have admitted to violating criminal drug laws. This seems to be accepted as part of growing up at any time during the last 40 or 50 years. I'd accept it as such too, if it wasn't for the bizarre and extreme hypocrisy of continuing to prosecute people for the same laws that they broke.
Re:move along (Score:4, Insightful)
The year was 2002, in June.
I was currently attending the University of Arizona, where I permanently lived for the better part of 2 years, but at this moment I was visiting my family in a suburb of south Houston (Pearland).
I decided to go to my old church. Surprise, they had moved in the last year that I had been there. In the age before Google Maps, mapquest often got directions horribly wrong, particularly for newly moved businesses. When I tried finding my church, I realized the directions were wrong and made a U-Turn when there were no other cars on a 4 lane street about 2 blocks from the intersection.
Then I started seeing all these cop cars. They were just everywhere. Then one of them turned on his lights and pulled me over. He said I had illegally made a U-Turn and asked to see my drivers' license. I gave it to him and he gave me a ticket. I was upset, but o well, right? I already knew we lived in a tyranical system since 9/11/2001 just about 9 months previously (I was pretty much one of the first Truthers; I hosted loosechange911.com for Dylan Avery from 2004-2006, for instance).
When I got home, I realized, oh my gosh, my Arizona drivers license is missing. Working on a hunch, I called the police station of the small town of ~1,500 i had gotten the ticket.
"Oh! Mister [redacted]! Officer Martinez said that he accidentally took your license. He says just come on by anytime tomorrow [Monday] and get it."
OK, so I was a 20 year-old naive kid. I drove by myself to the police station to, you know, get my license. This drive took about 30 minutes.
In the parking lot of the police station / courthouse / jail of the tiny town, I had JUST turned off the ignition of my Xterra when ...
--Knock knock knoc-- on my window.
Startled, I *jumped* and saw Officer Martinez knocking on my car window. He had been waiting for me and had rushed outside. I thought, man, he must really want to give me my driver's license!
"GET OUT OF THE CAR, PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK! YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!"
Um, what?! My consciousness went into near panic. WHAT COULD I HAVE POSSIBLY DONE?! I was a good Christian-ish boy (really a scientific spiritualist who didn't believe in Jesus, but you get the point), who had never done drugs, or even gotten drunk or even tasted alcohol (I was still 21). I had never done ANYTHING except a few MP3 downloads illegal.
I got out.
"[my full name] You are under arrest for driving with a suspended Texas drivers license."
I turned to Officer Martinez and said, "Well, it's great for you to tell me to drive here. Very convenient. And of course my Texas license expired, I've been living in Arizona for the last two years."
"Take it to the judge!" he bellowed, and marched me inside for processing.
An eternity later (my first time in jail), I was marched in front of the DA and the judge. I had been allowed to make one phone call. I knew my parents' were in California on a vacation so I called my brother but he didn't answer so I left a message about my situation, and that's all they'd let me do. I was not allowed to contact an attorney, they said they'd provide one...later.
I explained myself to a seemingly nice judge in his mid-70s, who really seemed to listen to my side of the story and give me the benefit of the doubt:
1. I was a full-time student in Arizona, where I lived and worked continuously.
2. I was visiting my birth city in Texas and had only been there 5 days and was leaving in about another week.
3. I had a Texas license, but it expired one year ago and I didn't renew becuase, well, I had a perfectly valid Arizona license that didn't expire until 2036, so why renew my texas, right?
The judge seemed very confused. He called over the District Attorney and repeated verbatim what I had said. He then asked the DA, outright:
"If he has a perfectly valid Arizona license and no warrants for his arrest, how can we hold him for an invalid Texas license? The Arizona DM
Idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
If they'd legalize drugs the bottom would fall out of the market and all the drug-funded gangs and their wars would fade away. (Or look for something else illegal to sell.)
Tax dope as high as you can without creating a black market, and use the revenue for prevention and rehab programs. And use all the money that's currently going to the DEA and prison-industrial complex for something useful.
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Informative)
They're not idiots. Lots of very powerful and well connected people profit from drug prohibition. They don't want the bottom to fall out of the market, and they don't want drug-funded gangs to go away. What they are doing is intentional.
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Without drug users, who will fill the private prisons? How will the warden feed his kids without your tax dollars? Won't you please, please think of the warden's children?
Without the drug profits fueling the hyper-violent narco state to our south, from what blood-drenched hellhole will our tomato pickers and day laborers flee? And citizens can't do those jobs, because they would want "wages" and "better working conditions," and you can't deport them near so easily when they get uppity.
Oh well. Gotta keep spending those tax dollars though. After all, the children and everything...
The banks make money laundering the money (Score:3)
And the banks own the capitol. Check-out HSBC deferred prosecution.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately all too many people on drugs have no interest in rehab. Not to mention the economics are not so easy. i.e How much revenue per addict do you need to generate per treatment?
And extreme prevention measures, in the form of making drugs illegal / forcing high prices, hasn't been much of a winner.
So yes, we can easily end a lot of drug related crime. Except for petty crime by people too messed up to hold a job, but no too messed up to steal from friends, neighbors, family to support their lifest
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Informative)
Do you think anyone who has ever used drugs needs rehab?
Even people who only indulge a few times a year?
Most drug consumption is not your hard core addict, but normal people have a joint after work, or a couple lines at the club on their birthday. These people don't need help or rehab, they are functioning members of society and prosecuting them hurts us all. Taxing them on the other hand would help pay for the treatments of the hard luck cases.
Thefts by drug users are due to their inability to get work(thanks drug testing!) and the high price of drugs. Look at what Switzerland did with heroin to see that your theory is likely wrong.
Re: (Score:3)
Drugs will never be legal until the entire system is changed to take the profit away from prohibition. Look at who benefits. Police departments get bigger budgets to militarise even more (for example, Maricopa County, AZ is the most famous one). Businesses are making money selling that military grade gear to 'law enforcement' organisations and individuals. Politicians keep office selling the fear of drug addicts to the voters. The list goes on and on and on. Follow the money, it's the only way y
Re: (Score:3)
Nope. Drugs will never be legal until the entire system is changed to take the profit away from prohibition. Look at who benefits. Police departments get bigger budgets to militarise even more (for example, Maricopa County, AZ is the most famous one). Businesses are making money selling that military grade gear to 'law enforcement' organisations and individuals. Politicians keep office selling the fear of drug addicts to the voters. The list goes on and on and on. Follow the money, it's the only way you'll understand it all.
Fortunately, grass roots can beat money in a representative system almost every time. But as long as the people voting for representatives and pressuring them to pass laws think that people need to be protected from themselves, you'll never get enough folks supporting the end of prohibition. Some places don't even need representatives - the people can vote for ending prohibition themselves (California, for example), but, that's been tried, and the "people will harm themselves if we do this" marketing gimm
'Recreate'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Recreating the investigative trail sounds a LOT like fabrication.
We have DEA agents who swear to "tell the truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth" knowingly omitting an important part of the truth.
thoughts on hiding information (Score:2)
[not dealing with the morality or politics of this, but simply as it relates to hiding information that you use]
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon has some good examples of how anyone can conceal information they've discovered. When the Allies in WW II wanted to protect the secret that they could decrypt the German's Enigma traffic, they had to take steps beyond simply not using the information (e.g.: not telling anyone that Coventry was going to be bombed). If you want to use information, without letting any
And still (Score:2)
Thank God for Obama (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a good thing we have Obama in the white house, because this sort of thing would NEVER happen with a Democrat in power /sarcasm
cover your tracks (Score:2)
Re:cover your tracks (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent has gotten low scores, but it happens more often than you would think. I personally know someone the FBI tried to plant drugs on because they had not found any on his friends (whom they had already arrested). He saw it in the police car before he got in and refused to do so until they swept it up.
They just have to pretend to smell marijuana, coerce the drug dog into faking a "hit" or claim there was an anonymous tip [youtube.com] and they can go ape-shit on your house. Granted, I would be willing to be that a majority of the time they are right. But there is a reason why low-income communities hate cops.
If you want trust 100% of the time, you have to be fair 100% of the time
This just in: police lie. News at 11. (Score:4, Insightful)
What people don't seem to understand is that police lie. ALL. THE. TIME. They lie selfishly, indiscriminately and callously. They lie overly and omittingly. They lie to suspects, witnesses, passers-by, judges, and juries. They lie in public and under oath. They lie to deceive, coerce and intimidate.
And they get away with it. ALL. THE. TIME.
Go watch the ubiquitous Don't Talk to the Police video. I know you've already watched it. Watch it again. Especially the part where the police officer explicitly states that he and all police officers are "professional liars."
Mistrial? (Score:4, Insightful)
I admit, IANAL, but doesn't this give grounds for any convicted drug felon to try for a retroactive mistrial?
What happened to probable cause? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find most troubling from the article is this:
"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.
(Bold emphasis mine.) The casual way that a law enforcement agent advocated violating laws relating to probable cause is astonishing. Subconciously I know that they do this but to actually come out in print and admit it is really sad.
Targets Americans? (Score:5, Funny)
Good.
Maybe now you'll be as upset as we foreigners are about the NSA surveilling us.
Fuck "more troubling" (Score:3)
The fact that ANY of these "letter agencies" are doing it in the first place is more than "troubling".
After that, it's just a matter of death by degrees.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"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. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"That's outrageous," said Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association. "It strikes me as indefensible."
"You can't game the system," said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. "You can't create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don't draw the line here, where do you draw it?"
I suspected (or knew) most of what Snodden leaked. I did not knew the DEA was lying at trials and withholding evidence from pretrial discovery. That's different from taps, which everyone knows they can do with a warrant.
Re: (Score:2)
Is Hockeimer Jr implying that he's OK with gaming the system if it's a national security case?
Re: (Score:2)
Is Hockeimer Jr implying that he's OK with gaming the system if it's a national security case?
We might overlook that transgression, but claiming he didn't know this was going on on a massive scale suggests utter incompetence or willful ignorance.
Obligatory Casablanka quote (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Like we didn't already know this was going on...
Sure we did.
But we now know that the DEA probably gets its info from the NSA, and hands it down further to your local sheriff.
Worst case, is the sheriff gets cornered on the witness stand and fesses up that the defendant's name came up in
a DEA investigation.
That leaves a dead end, because nobody is going to get very far demanding discovery against the DEA, and no one will be any the wiser about the fact that your name came up from an email harvest by the NSA.
In other words, if you think you are only two lay
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
But we now know that the DEA probably gets its info from the NSA, and hands it down further to your local sheriff.
Not probably; definitely. From TFA:
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Smell that? It isn't reefer. That's American Justice.
Oh that sweet pungent smell of gunpowder and American Justice. How I miss you. NOT.
Re: (Score:3)
Your husband is arrested, but at the trial it is revealed that there were cameras in your house which reveals that not only were you cheating on your husband multiple times with multiple men, but one of those other men also beat you up, and that your husband is innocent.
It's perfectly legal to put cameras in your own home. They have, for example, been used to catch nannies who were abusing the children, and the courts have ruled that those cameras are perfectly legal and admissible evidence.
What if there were cameras pointed at Zimmerman when he attacked and murdered Trayvon in cold blood.
Then that could have been used as evidence. I'm not even opposed to things like cameras in convenience stores, whose video can be used to find and prosecute criminals. All I object to is large networks of cameras, which can be used (especially with emerging software technologies) to tra