The DEA Is Spying on Us and Showing Other Agencies How to
Cover It Up
In a secret intelligence project seen as "more
troubling" than the NSA's far-reaching data-mining operations, the DEA has
been passing along to other law-enforcement agencies "information from
intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of
telephone records"—and instructing the agencies to lie about where they
got it.
Documents leaked to Reuters show DEA agents instructing
other federal agents in "parallel" construction"—its term for
recreating (and fabricating) an investigative trail to conceal the involvement
of the DEA's intelligence operations. The intelligence gathered, and the
investigations in which it's used, are rarely national-security cases. Experts
interviewed by Reuters were shocked:
"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 information comes from the DEA's Special Operations
Division, a two-decade-old unit created in partnership with several other
federal agencies to thwart South American drug cartels. SOD tips other agencies
off—the example given by one federal agent who'd received tips was "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"—and then helps those
agencies construct trial-ready investigative chains.
The criminal defense lawyers with whom Reuters spoke agreed:
This is unconstitutional. ""You can't game the system," a former
prosecutor said. "You can't create this subterfuge."
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