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Discussion => Security => Topic started by: ruby123 on August 05, 2013, 02:56 pm

Title: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: ruby123 on August 05, 2013, 02:56 pm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

(Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

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.

"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.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

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.

Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD."

A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.

But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to "recreate" an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.

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.

"PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION"

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."

The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

"It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

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.

A QUESTION OF CONSTITUTIONALITY

"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."

Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer, said any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin "would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional."

Lustberg and others said the government's use of the SOD program skirts established court procedures by which judges privately examine sensitive information, such as an informant's identity or classified evidence, to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense.

"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?"

Some lawyers say there can be legitimate reasons for not revealing sources. Robert Spelke, a former prosecutor who spent seven years as a senior DEA lawyer, said some sources are classified. But he also said there are few reasons why unclassified evidence should be concealed at trial.

"It's a balancing act, and they've doing it this way for years," Spelke said. "Do I think it's a good way to do it? No, because now that I'm a defense lawyer, I see how difficult it is to challenge."

CONCEALING A TIP

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.

"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.

A senior DEA official said he was not aware of the case but said the agent should not have misled the prosecutor. How often such misdirection occurs is unknown, even to the government; the DEA official said the agency does not track what happens with tips after the SOD sends them to agents in the field.

The SOD's role providing information to agents isn't itself a secret. It is briefly mentioned by the DEA in budget documents, albeit without any reference to how that information is used or represented when cases go to court.

The DEA has long publicly touted the SOD's role in multi-jurisdictional and international investigations, connecting agents in separate cities who may be unwittingly investigating the same target and making sure undercover agents don't accidentally try to arrest each other.

SOD'S BIG SUCCESSES

The unit also played a major role in a 2008 DEA sting in Thailand against Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout; he was sentenced in 2011 to 25 years in prison on charges of conspiring to sell weapons to the Colombian rebel group FARC. The SOD also recently coordinated Project Synergy, a crackdown against manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers of synthetic designer drugs that spanned 35 states and resulted in 227 arrests.

Since its inception, the SOD's mandate has expanded to include narco-terrorism, organized crime and gangs. A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit's annual budget. A recent LinkedIn posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.

Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE.

The DICE database contains about 1 billion records, the senior DEA officials said. The majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. Records are kept for about a year and then purged, the DEA officials said.

About 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have access to the DICE database, records show. They can query it to try to link otherwise disparate clues. Recently, one of the DEA officials said, DICE linked a man who tried to smuggle $100,000 over the U.S. southwest border to a major drug case on the East Coast.

"We use it to connect the dots," the official said.

"AN AMAZING TOOL"

Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst.

"They do a pretty good job of screening, but it can be a struggle to know for sure whether the person on a wiretap is American," the senior law enforcement official said.

Tips from domestic wiretaps typically occur when agents use information gleaned from a court-ordered wiretap in one case to start a second investigation.

As a practical matter, law enforcement agents said they usually don't worry that SOD's involvement will be exposed in court. That's because most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial and therefore never request to see the evidence against them. 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. But current and former agents said tips have enabled them to catch drug smugglers who might have gotten away.

"It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."

DEA officials said that the SOD process has been reviewed internally. They declined to provide Reuters with a copy of their most recent review.

(Edited by Blake Morrison)
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: ruby123 on August 05, 2013, 03:11 pm
This article appears to support the comment from Snowden, that NSA analysts are compelled to notify the appropriate alphabet soup Federal agency of criminal acts which are discovered via their various programs.
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: comsec on August 05, 2013, 06:35 pm
This is how the DEA magically arrests people at the right time. They use illegally obtained intel and then oops we stopped you while driving oh hey look drugs.

They do this in foreign countries too. If you live in Canada/UK police there will illegally do surveillance like breaking into your house(s) and planting equipment to listen in. They wait for you to go on a trip somewhere and then notify DEA. Your plane has to make a stop in US, or is turned around, or they just kidnap you for extraordinary rendition (happens in Dubai, Turkey, Switzerland, Sweden ect).

Now that illegally obtained evidence that would've been tossed out of court back home is admissible in US courts and you're screwed. In exchange for this service, foreign countries spy on Americans and then exchange intel. UK has an agreement to spy on the US population and NSA spies on the UK population. They exchange info, it's not illegal somehow.

Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: kmfkewm on August 05, 2013, 06:51 pm
This article appears to support the comment from Snowden, that NSA analysts are compelled to notify the appropriate alphabet soup Federal agency of criminal acts which are discovered via their various programs.

Yes this pretty much makes me change my opinion on the NSA. I think this is likely a recent development though, if you watch the Tor talk at Munich Roger Dingledine essentially says the same thing, that in the past he did not think the NSA shared intelligence with police agencies but that now he thinks they do. I guess the NSA has decided they want to play police after all. This is bad news for everybody, NSA can likely break Tor. I think it is time for people to consider waiting for the next generation of technology before they continue illegal things on the internet, imo the police have finally caught up, with the help of the intelligence community.
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: envioso on August 05, 2013, 07:03 pm
This article appears to support the comment from Snowden, that NSA analysts are compelled to notify the appropriate alphabet soup Federal agency of criminal acts which are discovered via their various programs.

Yes this pretty much makes me change my opinion on the NSA. I think this is likely a recent development though, if you watch the Tor talk at Munich Roger Dingledine essentially says the same thing, that in the past he did not think the NSA shared intelligence with police agencies but that now he thinks they do. I guess the NSA has decided they want to play police after all. This is bad news for everybody, NSA can likely break Tor. I think it is time for people to consider waiting for the next generation of technology before they continue illegal things on the internet, imo the police have finally caught up, with the help of the intelligence community.

this is total police state. tyranny in a mask. these are not issue of national security, pure and simple. the only thing we got going for us is our sheer number of users, but in a nation that has 2.2 million in prison, i am not counting on that. this is a 100% mockery of the judicial 'system.' we can no longer call this the land of the free.
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: kmfkewm on August 05, 2013, 07:13 pm
But the secret court said they can in classified meeting! Totally legal !
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: ruby123 on August 05, 2013, 10:59 pm
This article appears to support the comment from Snowden, that NSA analysts are compelled to notify the appropriate alphabet soup Federal agency of criminal acts which are discovered via their various programs.

Yes this pretty much makes me change my opinion on the NSA. I think this is likely a recent development though, if you watch the Tor talk at Munich Roger Dingledine essentially says the same thing, that in the past he did not think the NSA shared intelligence with police agencies but that now he thinks they do. I guess the NSA has decided they want to play police after all. This is bad news for everybody, NSA can likely break Tor. I think it is time for people to consider waiting for the next generation of technology before they continue illegal things on the internet, imo the police have finally caught up, with the help of the intelligence community.

I am not entirely certain that the illegal participation in criminal cases at the State or Federal level is a recent development. Just read the history of the FBI or OSS (NSA) and you will see certain patterns and tactics. From the black bag jobs of Hoover, to the OSS tapping into telegraph wires, the unconstitutional actions are not as uncommon as we may think.I feel recently, with the post 9/11 "share everything" policy, combined and amplified with technological developments, the cooperation at the Federal/State level has grown significantly.
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: envioso on August 06, 2013, 04:07 pm
how come no one else is commenting on this? you guys scurred?
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: comsec on August 06, 2013, 05:54 pm
I guess people always assumed the DEA does shady shit and lies their face off in court anyways. This is exactly the definition of secret police. LE get's intel and evidence from the secret police, then uses it against you and pretends the secret police don't exist/didn't help them. Since there are no trials in the US anymore just plea bargains this is a tidy arrangement for them they will never have to compromise their secret sources and only have to lie once about where they got all the fruit from the poisonous tree.

secret police
secret courts giving them powers
corrupt law enforcement (dea)
no trials for the accused
????
do not profit:(


Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: Anonyguy on August 06, 2013, 07:43 pm
I just joined the forum to comment on this. Hi all.

This revelation means we've effectively been living under a blatantly unconstitutional National Security state since the late 90's and the government just didn't bother to tell us.  Beyond drugs, since they include money laundering intel in this, that means that pretty much anyone doing anything interesting has been fair game too.

What's eerie is how the government spokesmen are reacting - totally calm, like this is some minor, slightly off-target policy as opposed to a revelation that should prompt impeachment or armed rebellion if necessary.  It's not totally surprising, since to act like they got caught doing something really wrong wouldn't help their PR. It's just weird seeing it because I never imagined we'd get a revelation like this. I'm in awe.

Their actions reveal the judicial system is a farce. Think of all the people rotting in prison unjustly, pleading out cases based on charges that should never have existed.

As any American is well aware, if congress doesn't fix this, the people are authorized to fix it:

"Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e., securing inherent and inalienable rights, with powers derived from the consent of the governed], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." --Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:315

At this point any changes that are made by congress may not actually stop the problem since the agencies are clearly OK with violating the spirit of the law and the law itself - systematically - and lying about it for decades.  You'd have to be an ethically void sociopath to think "parallel construction" has any place in our judicial system. If congress doesn't respect the will of the people, we may find ourselves forced to make use of the second amendment.
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: thedopestjunkie on August 06, 2013, 07:56 pm
"Ethically Void Sociopath" sounds like a good description of a fed
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: ruby123 on August 06, 2013, 09:48 pm
(Reuters) - The Justice Department is reviewing a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit that passes tips culled from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a large telephone database to field agents, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday.

Reuters reported Monday that agents who use such tips are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively conceal the DEA unit's involvement from defense lawyers, prosecutors and even judges, a policy many lawyers said could violate a defendant's right to a fair trial. Federal drug agents call the process of changing the true genesis of an arrest "parallel construction," according to a training document.

Although the DEA program may use legal means to collect and distribute the tips, critics say that by hiding the origin of a case, defendants may not know about potentially exculpatory evidence.

"It's my understanding… that the Department of Justice is looking at some of the issues raised in the story," Carney said during his daily briefing at the White House on Monday.

Carney referred reporters to a Justice Department spokesman, who confirmed that a review was under way, but declined further comment.

In an interview with Reuters last month, two senior DEA officials defended the program, saying it has been in place since the late 1990s, has been reviewed by every Attorney General since then, and is perfectly legal. One DEA official said "parallel construction" is used every day by agents and police nationwide and is "a bedrock concept."

The program, run by DEA's Special Operations Division, differs in several respects from National Security Agency activities revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Among these is disclosure to the accused.

Collection of domestic data by the NSA and FBI for espionage and terrorism cases is regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. If prosecutors intend to use FISA or other classified evidence in court, they issue a public notice, and a judge determines whether the defense is entitled to review the evidence. In the DEA's case, a document reviewed by Reuters shows that federal drug agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to conceal the SOD's involvement. Defense attorneys say the practice prevents defendants from even knowing about evidence that might help their cases.

In a statement, the NSA said that it cannot use the telephone database program exposed by Snowden for law enforcement purposes. However, the NSA said that it does coordinate with law enforcement.

"This coordination frequently includes sanitizing classified information so that it can be passed to personnel at lower clearance levels in order to meet their operational requirements," the NSA statement said. "If the Intelligence Community collects information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking that is recognized as being evidence of a crime, the intelligence community can disseminate that information to law enforcement, as appropriate."

While the NSA activities are aimed at terrorists, the SOD program focuses on drug dealers and money launders. That distinction troubles some civil libertarians, who fear secretive measures designed to target terrorists are being used to catch ordinary criminals.

Jerry Cox, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), said defense lawyers "long feared that overbroad national security policies would become the norm for all criminal prosecutions and today we know our concerns were not unfounded."

Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Criminal Law Reform Project, said the SOD procedures violate the fundamental right to a fair trial. "When someone is accused of a crime, the Constitution guarantees the right to examine the government's evidence, including its sources, and confront the witnesses against them," he said. "Our due process rights are at risk when our federal government hides and distorts the sources of evidence used as the basis for arrests and prosecutions."

(Edited by Michael Williams)
Title: Re: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling NSA info.
Post by: ruby123 on August 06, 2013, 09:51 pm
I would like to bring attention to the following segment of the second posted article:

In a statement, the NSA said that it cannot use the telephone database program exposed by Snowden for law enforcement purposes. However, the NSA said that it does coordinate with law enforcement.

"This coordination frequently includes sanitizing classified information so that it can be passed to personnel at lower clearance levels in order to meet their operational requirements," the NSA statement said. "If the Intelligence Community collects information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking that is recognized as being evidence of a crime, the intelligence community can disseminate that information to law enforcement, as appropriate."

While the NSA activities are aimed at terrorists, the SOD program focuses on drug dealers and money launders. That distinction troubles some civil libertarians, who fear secretive measures designed to target terrorists are being used to catch ordinary criminals.