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.'"

Comments

Troubling quote from the article

[TheNastyInThePasty]

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:Troubling quote from the article

[colfer]

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

[icebike]

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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

[EmagGeek]

"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:Troubling quote from the article

[Black Parrot]

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

[TheCarp]

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

[meta-monkey]

How is that "parallel construction?" Your observations established probable cause for the raid. That was linear construction.

And so it begins

[NobleSavage]

Can we use the word police state yet?

Re:And so it begins

[thinkingrodent]

That's two words.

Re:And so it begins

[Endo13]

No. You can only do that once it's too late to matter.

Re:And so it begins

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Another word game

[qbast]

This "recreating the investigative trail" sounds like a fancy way to describe perjury.

Re:Another word game

[hooweek]

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

[achbed]

"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.

Re:move along

[buswolley]

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.

'Recreate'?

[sjames]

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.

Re:Idiots

[Hatta]

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

[meta-monkey]

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...

Re:then it's up to the jury to rule the consitutio

[TheNastyInThePasty]

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.

Joking about serious things?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Joking about serious things?

[arth1]

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?