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FBI and DEA Under Review For Misuse of NSA Mass Surveillance Data
Patrick O'Neill writes: The FBI and DEA were among the agencies fed information from an NSA surveillance program described as "staggering" by one judge who helped strike the program down. Now the two agencies are under review by the Justice Department for the use of parallel construction as well as looking into the specifics and results of cases originating from NSA tips.
(Here's some more on the practice of parallel construction in this context.)
After investigating themselves, no wrongdoing will be found.
I never find wrongdoing when I investigate myself. At least not anything that needs to be discussed in public, just a little internal housekeeping, you know, minor discipline issues, nothing to make a federal case over.
One thing you can be certain of: This will lead to exactly 0 prosecutions, no matter how much abuse is found.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The basic problem here is that "parallel construction" equals "lying under oath". Once judges start accepting outright lies, it rots the (already slightly decayed) system right down to the core.
It's like when they're trying to indoctrinate you to be a terrorist, and they make you perform some unspeakably abominable act as your initiation. After that, you won't question your decision to join this iffy organization, because that would mean that you did this unforgivable thing, not for the greater good, but just because a bunch of assholes told you to. Which makes you yourself not only an asshole but also an idiot.
So these judges will not only accept lies as testimony, they will defend the practice to the death, to anyone who raises the very obvious point that you shouldn't base your system of justice on blatant lies. Otherwise they're assholes and idiots, and nobody wants to admit that they're an idiot asshole.
Parallel construction is effectively perjury at a huge scale.
What it's doing is giving them access to information they either aren't supposed to have, or are unwilling to admit to having. And then they come up with a carefully crafted lie about how they might have found this information from another source.
This bit of creative writing has the effect of denying you the ability to see the evidence against you, and know where it comes from.
It allows them to operate with impunity, while essentially denying you a fair trial ... because the bullshit story they make up about how they heard from a guy who heard it form a guy is exactly that: bullshit.
It's government agencies who are bypassing decades of court decisions about proper procedures and rules of evidence, and using secret laws and bold-faced lies to be able to trump up whatever charges they have, with information obtained through questionable means, and the lying to suppress the real source of the information to cheat the system and deny you the ability to know how they really got it.
This is as bad as any Soviet era secret police ever was, precisely because it bypasses all legal safeguards, and totally ignores the law as it pertains to knowing the evidence against you and how it is obtained.
Any police agency doing this is, in my opinion, committing a crime. There's no other way to see this other than these organizations lying to courts, and providing local police with a fucking manual to also lie to the courts.
Give us your fucking papers, comrade.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There was a great episode of the old Penn & Teller show "Bullshit!" that dealt with this. They hired a bunch of random people as security monitors, gave them access to surveillance cameras, and told them not to use the cameras to spy on people's private lives (only on the fake security perimeter). Sure enough, 90% of them used the cameras to spy on people's personal shit.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
this story is forgotten, swept under the rug, no longer referenced.
Just as suddenly as it appeared in the news, it disappears from the news and our short memories caused by modern low attention-span media causes us to forget.
Then the parallel construction and misuse of data will continue.
Just like everyone has forgotten about the persecution of real reporters that began in 08 and was heavily reported on for a short time. We still have mainstream news that's a result of what happened back then, but no mention of that fact.
Just like everyone forgets about the global cooling scare that was a big deal in the 70's and still covered in the 80's.
Just like everyone forgets about the various legal entities that have found "the smoking gun" and plan to go after the administration or some other powerful organization, never to hear anything more about it past the initial breaking news stories.
This one will fall off the earth too.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Never, because they work for the doj, who in turn work for politicians.
My personal feeling is that parallel construction should be prosecuted as a felony. It's perjury, abuse of the juridicial process and contempt of court, and in a fundamental way (not some playing loose along the edges). Send someone to trial over this, and watch the abuse stop.
They call it parallel construction because they want to give the impression that the two evidence chains do not intersect.
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There was more separation between intelligence and law enforcement in the US prior to 9/11. The cops shouldn't be doing some of the sneaky stuff (or asking someone else to do it), so there were laws in place forbidding much data sharing.
Looking into how an attack like 9/11 could be prevented in the future, it was found that more cooperation between agencies might have prevented it. The intelligence agencies had parts of the puzzle and the FBI had other parts. Nobody had enough to see the whole picture. The idea, the proposed benefit, was that something like 9/11 could be potentially be prevented by the FBI, CIA, and NSA sharing information. It stands to reason that they might be able to be more effective without the legal prohibition on sharing information, BUT we're now seeing why they SHOULD be clearly separated. It might make their job harder, but it's worth it.
Is anybody going to jail over this? Then fuck it.
You listed two programs exclusively used by intelligence agencies.
You then listed the two 1940s era programs which directly (and openly) CAUSED Congress to pass the law saying that NSA cannot collect information on US persons. That's precisely the Act that was amended after 9/11 to reduce the restrictions on the NSA (FISA).
You also list Main Core, which little more than a vague rumor that someone is collecting a bunch of data for some reason - we don't have nearly enough facts to even start discussing that.
Are you under the impression that the PATRIOT ACT and FISA Act amendments did NOT occur, that that is not how Congress responded to 9/11?
That's certainly true, few people were expecting that type of attack, or had any reason to suspect such an attack might occur, AS FAR AS WE KNOW. (We don't know what all information the spooks had.) They were thinking of terrorist acts as being old-fashioned hijacking.
ALSO, we know that the CIA had names of people suspected to have links with Al Quaeda (the hijackers), the NSA had indications that a Al Quaeda was planning something big in the near future.* The FBI had some other relevant info.
So it's POSSIBLE that someone (or some software) looking at all the information could come up with the following thought:
Al Quaeda is planning something big, and these two guys seem to be Al Quaeda operatives, so maybe we should check in on them and see what they're doing this week."
They wouldn't need to suspect exactly what happened- suspected terrorists both buying plane tickets screams "hijacking" (the old fashioned kind). It would have been possible to do a "random search" on these two suspects and discover the box cutters.
Having said that, I'll repeat I don't think it's worth it. The NSA and CIA should be clearly and fully separated from domestic law enforcement. Of course that requires the balls to call terrorism "terrorism" and have it handled by the appropriate agency.
Bush was briefed on terrorist threats before 9/11. I believe he'd been told that there were indications that they involved airliners. That sort of warning is really all the spooks can do.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yes, I am well aware that this government has been going down a slow march to totalitarianism for several decades now. It was the early 90s when they started militarizing the police and eroding away our rights.
Do you know there was a time when police with a warrant would, in nearly every single case, knock on the door and wait for someone to answer, then, talk to them. Now they just yell "police" while they bust n the door and throw in a flashbang over just about anything at all.
This has all been a long time coming, and nothing is good about it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"