Why everyone should be worried about the DEA’s spy program
Matthew Feeney, assistant editor for Reason 24/7, on Monday explained why the Drug Enforcement Administration’s surveillance program violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
He argued on RT America that the program robbed defendants of their right to a fair trial.
“I think any constitutional system that is supposed to support civil liberties should allow citizens when they’re charged for a crime to actually view the evidence presented against them,” Feeney said. “But this doesn’t allow for that at all… agents from the DEA are encouraged to in effect just sort of make up or to re-create the evidence against people being charged with crimes, and that should worry people.”
Documents obtained by Reuters showed the Special Operations Division (SOD) within the DEA was amassing data on Americans with help from the NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS and Department of Homeland Security.
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.
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 massive database has been used by local authorities across the nation to secretly launch criminal investigations. In a process dubbed “parallel construction,” the local authorities were instructed to lie about where their evidence originated.
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.
“The DEA increasingly qualifies as a rogue agency – one that Congress needs to immediately investigate,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “This latest scandal may well be just the tip of the iceberg.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/05/watch-why-you-should-be-very-worried-about-the-deas-spy-program/
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/05/about-the-reuters-dea-special-operations-division-story/
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2013/8/5/135642/3420/crimepolicy/DEA-s-Special-Operations-Division-in-Media-Crosshairs