IRS manual detailed how they hid any reference to tips supplied by the DEA's Special Operations Division
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 defence 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.
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.
An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news 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.
Monday's Reuters report cited internal government documents that show that law enforcement agents have been trained to conceal how such investigations truly begin - to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up the original source of the information.
DEA officials said the practice is legal and has been in near-daily use since the 1990s. They have said that its purpose is to protect sources and methods, not to withhold evidence.
Defense attorneys and some former judges and prosecutors say that systematically hiding potential evidence from defendants violates the U.S. Constitution. According to documents and interviews, agents use a procedure they call "parallel construction" to recreate the investigative trail, stating in affidavits or in court, for example, that an investigation began with a traffic infraction rather than an SOD tip.
The IRS document offers further detail on the parallel construction program.
"Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects," the IRS document says. "SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations."
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/uk-dea-irs-idUKBRE9761B620130807
IRS manual on special ops multi-agency spying:
http://cryptome.org/2013/08/irs-special-ops-spy.htm
E-mails show collusion between IRS and FEC to target conservatives:
Evidence recently uncovered suggests that there is another layer to the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups. E-mails obtained by National Review Online indicate collusion between the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission.
The IRS scandal involves the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division of the IRS openly targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization status between 2010 and 2012. Those groups faced additional audits and scrutiny by the agency. The audits cost the organizations tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of employee hours, and ultimately delayed the groups from receiving tax-exempt status.
Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George has been conducting an investigation into the IRS being used as a tool to target groups over the course of two election cycles, and has determined that the IRS was using inappropriate criteria to identify tax-exempt applications for review by a team of specialists, including applications from organizations with “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” or “9/12” in their name.
Democrats had been defending the IRS by asserting that it was not simply conservative groups being targeted; however, George stated that his investigation found that there was no evidence the IRS has targeted liberal groups.
In a letter to Democrats, George wrote, “We found no indication in any of these materials that ‘Progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention.”
George clarified that while 30 percent of the groups with the word “progressive” in their name received additional attention, 100 percent of the groups with “tea party,” or “patriot,” or “9/12” in their names received extra scrutiny.
But the e-mails obtained by National Review indicate that the IRS was not the only organization involved in the systematic and deliberate targeting of conservative groups.
According to National Review, IRS official Lois Lerner exchanged e-mails with an attorney at the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel on two separate occasions wherein Lerner influenced the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization.
The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American Future Fund, before recommending that the commission prosecute it for violations of campaign-finance law.
Lerner had been employed by the FEC from 1986 to 1995, and had developed a reputation for aggressively investigating conservative groups while there.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/16231-e-mails-show-collusion-between-irs-and-fec-to-target-conservatives
IRS agent: Tax agency is still targeting Tea Party groups:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/irs-agent-tax-agency-is-still-targeting-tea-party-groups/article/2534044
Has the gov't lied on snooping? Let's go to the videotape:
http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/nsa-claims#collection
On proof, lies and expecting the worst from the surveillance state:
http://privacysos.org/node/1139
Only citizen action can win back our privacy and defeat the modern leviathan of corporate-government data collection:
If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook Inc. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our email to Google Inc, Microsoft Corp or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc and Sprint Corp; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter Inc, Facebook, LinkedIn Corp or whatever other site is hosting them.
The primary business model of the internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government's intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.
Computers and networks inherently produce data, and our constant interactions with them allow corporations to collect an enormous amount of intensely personal data about us as we go about our daily lives. Sometimes we produce this data inadvertently simply by using our phones, credit cards, computers and other devices. Sometimes we give corporations this data directly on Google, Facebook, Apple Inc's iCloud and so on, in exchange for whatever free or cheap service we receive from the internet in return.
There are two types of laws in the US, each designed to constrain a different type of power: constitutional law, which places limitations on government, and regulatory law, which constrains corporations. Historically, these two areas have largely remained separate, but today each group has learned how to use the other's laws to bypass their own restrictions. The government uses corporations to get around its limits, and corporations use the government to get around their limits.
This partnership manifestsitself in various ways. The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.
Here's an example: it would be reasonable for our government to debate the circumstances under which corporations can collect and use our data, and to provide for protections against misuse. But if the government is using that very data for its own surveillance purposes, it has an incentive to oppose any laws to limit data collection. And because corporations see no need to give consumers any choice in this matter – because it would only reduce their profits – the market isn't going to protect consumers, either.
Our elected officials are often supported, endorsed and funded by these corporations as well, setting up an incestuous relationship between corporations, lawmakers and the intelligence community.
The losers are us, the people, who are left with no one to stand up for our interests. Our elected government, which is supposed to be responsible to us, is not. And corporations, which in a market economy are supposed to be responsive to our needs, are not. What we have now is death to privacy – and that's very dangerous to democracy and liberty.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-31/the-public-private-surveillance-partnership.html