Slashdot Mirror
DEA Program "More Troubling" Than NSA
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.'"
Can we use the word police state yet?
This "recreating the investigative trail" sounds like a fancy way to describe perjury.
Actually. We are all criminals. I mean, how many laws are there? Yes, I've said this before. You can't live without breaking laws, there are too many laws. Equality before the law really just means, "on whom is the law enforced?" The poor and the brown...and those that speak uneasy truths.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
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.
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.
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...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"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.
The jury has no idea that anything unconstitutional has happened. Not even the defendent, prosecutor, nor the judge are told that law enforcement was given a tip by the SOD. It's a complete coverup.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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. 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. Quote: "The ammunition is to be use domestically, not by the military."
Do you think it won't get worse?
How is that "parallel construction?" Your observations established probable cause for the raid. That was linear construction.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.