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.'"
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: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: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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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: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: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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.