Reuters: US directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

[Winehole23]

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."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

[Winehole23]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-nsa-idUSBRE9740AI20130805

[symple19]

smh. Drugs need to be (at the very least) decriminalized so the DEA can be eliminated. What an awful agency (being used by an awful government)

[boutons_deux]

Surveillance scandal rips through hacker communityThe good ol' days of chummy games of "Spot the Fed" at Defcon are finished as hackers and security entrepreneurs plan next steps in the wake of government spying revelations.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57597093-83/surveillance-scandal-rips-through-hacker-community/?tag=nl.e703&s_cid=e703&ttag=e703&ftag=CAD090e536

[boutons_deux]

IRS Manual Contained DEA’s Use Of Secret Intel Evidence (http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/08/irs-manual-contained-deas-use-of-secret-intel-evidence/)

Yes, they broke the law. The program by the DEA to transmit illegal intelligence then help federal agents cover it up by “altering the investigative trail” was detailed in an IRS manual. (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE9761AZ20130807) The program itself is under review for the Department of Justice, now we know IRS agents were being instructed for at least two years on how to use illegal intelligence information for investigations.

Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.


To cover up the likely illegal intelligence the DEA was supplying IRS agents were instructed as to how to come up with another way they could have learned that information.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency…

As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Remember that whole argument about everything “being legal”? That may be over. Even under the new Patriot Act Era paradigm this is outright illegal. If nothing else it jeopardizes hundreds maybe thousands of criminal cases due to fraudulent statements and records provided by the government as to how the investigation occurred.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/08/irs-manual-contained-deas-use-of-secret-intel-evidence/

[boutons_deux]

N.S.A. Said to Search Content of Messages to and From U.S.


The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

It also adds another element to the unfolding debate, provoked by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about whether the agency has infringed on Americans’ privacy as it scoops up e-mails and phone data in its quest to ferret out foreign intelligence.

Government officials say the cross-border surveillance was authorized by a 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, in which Congress approved eavesdropping on domestic soil without warrants as long as the “target” was a noncitizen abroad. Voice communications are not included in that surveillance, the senior official said.

Asked to comment, Judith A. Emmel, an N.S.A. spokeswoman, did not directly address surveillance of cross-border communications. But she said the agency’s activities were lawful and intended to gather intelligence not about Americans but about “foreign powers and their agents, foreign organizations, foreign persons or international terrorists.”

“In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, N.S.A. collects only what it is explicitly authorized to collect,” she said. “Moreover, the agency’s activities are deployed only in response to requirements for information to protect the country and its interests.”

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules (http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/727943-exhibit-a.html), leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency “seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20 (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant), but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked “Top Secret” amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.
To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?from=homepage

[SA210]

Hope/Change