Secrecy in law enforcement is contagious precisely because it makes things so much easier. Kafka's "Trial" was a nightmare for the accused, but think how convenient it is for the authorities to not publicize charges or sentencing and to do everything on their most expedient schedule. As soon as it was decided that accusations of "terrorism" could be treated this way, the seed was sown. The programs and procedures developed by the "anti-terrorist" agencies will be readily used and copied by any other branches of law enforcement that have the ability to do so; this case is a prime example. So, if you thought Orwell was scary, say hello to Kafka now.
This is <i>exactly</i> the nightmare scenario we were fearing - and lo and behold, it has already happened: using mass spying data of the NSA to launch fishing expeditions against Americans, and find them guilty of crimes.<p>You could say "yeah but that data can't be used in Court!". But they can very <i>trivially</i> skirt around that. They don't have to use <i>that data</i>. They just need to use some of that data to show a judge "probable cause" - and BAM: now they have a warrant to <i>legally</i> get access to anyone's data, and <i>that data</i> they can use.<p>But in practice such process by the authorities makes the "limit" of a warrant essentially useless. The warrant just becomes an extra beaurocratic step that they have to take, but doesn't represent a limit on who they can investigate and how anymore.
<i>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."</i><p>Jesus fucking Christ. They were lying to prosecutors to get charges pressed against people.
<p><pre><code> First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%2E%2E%2E" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%2E%2E%2E</a>
Just a couple of days ago somebody on HN speculated this was happening, and I dismissed it as paranoia. Surely nobody is going to risk revealing the existence of a universal surveillance program over a few drug convictions, right? Twenty-eight of you agreed with me. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134821" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134821</a><p>I give up. Apparently no speculation is out of bounds any more. If someone says it's all due to Nazi reptoids, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This is a far bigger story than PRISM or XKEYSCORE. Both described databases compiled through known processes (FAA orders and fiber taps) and used for terrorism and foreign intelligence investigations -- not domestic criminal investigations.<p>The Reuters report today shows significant abuse of intelligence intercepts that should make all of us angry.<p>The NSA has been allowed to assemble its vast intelligence-gathering apparatus on the theory that terrorists and foreign spies do not have Fourth Amendment rights, and the executive's power to conduct surveillance is at its height when non-Americans are the focus. Now we've learned that the Feds have engaged in a bait and switch maneuver: databases are collected on the "terror spies" pretext, and then they're used for domestic criminal prosecutions. This is very dangerous.<p>It also shows that the Supreme Court justices who blessed the NSA's FAA intercepts in February 2013 were fare too optimistic. They said if the Feds used NSA intercepts to bring domestic criminal prosecutions, they "would be required to make a disclosure":
<a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-1025_ihdj.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-1025_ihdj.pdf</a><p>FYI here's my article from last month on how the DEA's Special Operations Division, cited in today's Reuters piece, does e-mail wiretaps:
<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how-the-u.s-forces-net-firms-to-cooperate-on-surveillance/" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how-the-u.s-fo...</a>
Greenwald now discussing it live here: <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.democracynow.org/</a><p>Edit 1: Has ended, will post a link when in archive.<p>Edit 2: The interview starts at 18:00 and a direct link to the MP4 file is <a href="http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-0805.mp4" rel="nofollow">http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-0805.mp4</a><p>Edit 3: Starting 43:15 pertains to DEA SOD
After hearing all of this stuff, I feel like the television show The Wire was either way ahead of its time or had really great law enforcement consultants. I'm leaning toward the latter.
A government that hides its actions is a government that is overstepping its bounds and needs to be slapped around a bit. I think we're decades behind in the slapping around department.<p>Make everyone a criminal and spy on everyone so you can control them and scared them to death. What a wonderful way to run the "land of the free"<p>I bet most people thought the spying was for terrorists.
In light of the "Three Felonies a day" phenomenon, and given the sweeping nature of the surveillance, it seems likely that the number of cases that are prosecuted represents only a small fraction of the number of potential cases that could possibly be taken to trial.<p>This gives the criminal justice system considerable latitude to select and prioritise certain cases over others.<p>How are these decisions made?<p>Can we be sure that political considerations and/or racial / sexual / gender biases, (conscious or unconscious) do not play a role in the decision making process?
<i>"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."</i><p>This implicit double standard plays a role in allowing this kind of thing to happen. I wonder when we'll start reëvaluating it?
Imagine if you were listening in to communications on US citizens as part of an NSA program and you came across what appeared to be the distinct planning of a murder - one that had nothing to do with National Security now or in the future. What do you do? This is part of the interesting range of unexpected consequences when you stretch boundaries.
> <i>"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."</i><p>This is interesting, as it's basically an admission that Aaron Swartz-style prosecutorial bullying is not limited to just computer-related cases.
Here's hoping that everyone who was convicted via this method gets their sentences overturned, because that's about the only way this will stop.
So suppose this is true:<p><i>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.</i><p>How do you square that with the claim that the NSA is tracking only metadata? I'd say you need the phone call contents to know where to stop a particular truck.
Ties directly into this:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154302" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154302</a>
Mind blowing lack of sense of right and wrong from govt agents who think laundering the trail of their investigation is the right thing to do. We really are living in post-constitutional USA.
Wow. Hadn't heard of this 'parallel construction' stuff before, and will have to reserve judgment for now... but telling agents and investigators that they can't so much as mention the provenance of the info to the prosecutors or the court is rather beyond the pale.
<i>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.</i><p>I live near a section of a federal highway that is well known to be used for transporting drugs from New York to Vermont. For the past few years, I've been struck by the number of arrests that always seemed to start with a traffic stop. Given the daily traffic volume of 60-25K vehicles per day, I had always wondered how the relatively few officers covering a wide area could be so effective.
Let's not get too carried away. Secrecy in law enforcement can be a valuable tool: it allows things like protection and development of informants, lawful surveillance, undercover operations, etc.<p>Prosecutors have never been required to turn over ALL evidence -- only exculpatory evidence (and that does not include evidence that might be useful in jury nullification, only evidence that would tend to prove the accused innocent of the charges). Withholding evidence of guilt from the defence is common: it is done to protect sources and ongoing investigations or even to shorten a trial. If you have more than enough to convict, why trot everything out?<p>The described "parallel" investigation is another common technique. If you have a source of evidence you need to protect, then you develop different evidence and instead use that to secure the conviction. Provided the evidence used is real and is sufficient to prove guilt, no laws or moral codes have been transgressed.<p>Law enforcement and prosecutors use inadmissible evidence all the time to pursue an investigation. The point of an investigation is to secure sufficient admissible evidence to successfully convict (prove guilt of) the perpetrator. But the rules don't say you can't use all the information at your disposal -- only that some of it might not be useful for you at trial. (Full disclosure: there are, and should be, rules governing what law enforcement and other state and federal agencies can do in collecting evidence. But disclosure of all information, evidence, and techniques to the defendant is definitely not one of them.)<p>An interesting corollary is the so-called "fruit of the poisonous tree" problem. If a critical piece of evidence is deemed inadmissible, it might take with it a bunch of other evidence that was generated based upon it. Courts frequently permit the prosecution to re-introduce some of the evidence if it can be shown that it could have (not "was", "could have") been developed without access to the inadmissible piece. This is precisely the parallel development narrative described, and it is a very common tool.<p>I agree that this particular system seems well beyond the pale, but lets not pretend that suddenly getting rid of secrecy in law enforcement and removing prosecutorial discretion is a no-brainer solution. Lets also not pretend that this isn't a clear extension of standard practice (albeit a pretty major and troubling extension we might want to trim back a bit).
There needs to be a phrase for that moment when the wholesale discarding of the law is so accepted within a government agency that it ends up embedded in a tutorial Powerpoint slide, which eventually gets leaked to the press and (hopefully) implodes the whole practice.<p>"PPTerrorism"? "PowerPointillism?"<p>Or maybe a wonderful German composite word.
<a href="http://www.archives.gov" rel="nofollow">http://www.archives.gov</a><p>lynx -dump <a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_tra...</a> |sed '/The right of the people to be secure/,/be seized./s/ \[ Redacted \]/'
Off-topic, but still interesting in context of social networks as a leakage vector:<p><i>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.</i>
I was excited to see this story being broken by Reuters instead of the Guardian. The US press have been sleeping on the job, but this article gives me hope. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that the Guardian have been openly bragging about the amount of traffic they've gotten from covering the NSA scandal.
I've thought about writing a program that would randomly send search queries to Google, Facebook, etc for specific keywords like pressure cooker, drug, bomb, etc. Just overwhelm them with traffic.
The data-mining aspect could be troubling depending on the details, but the parallel construction isn't. They're not planting the drugs on the suspects when they stop stop them. But the hysteria here is thick so one can't even begin to have a reasonable discourse in this comment thread. The paranoid one-sidedness of the discussion is mind boggling.<p>Look at these downvotes for disagreements. There's nothing I've said that warrants the downvotes.