DEA Outdoes NSA in Illegal Spying

It now appears the DEA has their own version of the NSA spy apparatus, but it operates in secrecy and without any review, either Congressional or Judicial, and it is geared to drug crimes which involves US Citizens.  It is even more illegal than the NSA, if that's possible.  The ACLU is not amused.

NEW YORK - The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is using secret surveillance tactics - including wiretaps and examining telephone records - to make arrests while concealing the source of the evidence from judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, according to a story published today by Reuters. In cases where this intelligence is used to make an arrest, the DEA trains law enforcement to recreate the investigative trail in order to conceal the origins of the evidence.
"The DEA is violating our fundamental right to a fair trial," said Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Criminal Law Reform Project. "When someone is accused of a crime, the Constitution guarantees the right to examine the government's evidence, including its sources, and confront the witnesses against them. Our due process rights are at risk when our federal government hides and distorts the sources of evidence used as the basis for arrests and prosecutions."
"When law enforcement agents and prosecutors conceal the role of intelligence surveillance in criminal investigations, they violate the constitutional rights of the accused and insulate controversial intelligence programs from judicial review," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. "Effectively, these intelligence programs are placed beyond the reach of the Constitution, where they develop and expand without any court ever weighing in on their lawfulness. This is inappropriate, dangerous, and contrary to the rule of law."

Josephine County Still Reeling

The City Council in Grants Pass, OR has voted to fund 20 beds in the Josephine County jail by paying $1 million to the county. 

Tired of seeing people arrested on criminal charges walk free for lack of jail space, the city of Grants Pass is paying nearly $1 million for its own beds in the county jail.
And to make sure the bad guys know it, the city will be posting signs around town saying lawbreakers can expect to be prosecuted.

The voters in the county have repeatedly voted down property tax increases to fund law enforcement, forcing some communities to organize armed citizen patrols to make up for lack of law enforcement, a move that the County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson says “I hold my breath, every day, for everything”.  He is not thrilled that citizens are arming themselves for protection, but he can't provide coverage with the funding he has.

With the fiscal year that started on July 1, the Josephine County Sheriff’s Office now has exactly one deputy left available for general calls in a county of 83,000 people — down from a high of 22 at full staffing a few years ago. Citizen applications to carry a concealed weapon, meanwhile, rose 49 percent last year, according to county records.

At grocery stores in Grants Pass, stopping and citing shoplifters — sometimes with whole carts of beer or food in tow — have become part of the daily law enforcement routine.

Keith O. Heck, a county commissioner, said he fears that the county could break apart into balkanized camps of self-government, each on its own lookout, if a fix to the problem is not found soon.

“Freedom demands structure,” he said. “If you don’t have some structure to that freedom, there’s nothing that is free — everything just becomes a crapshoot and it’s just who’s got the biggest dice.”

At the Grants Pass Liquor Store, it all comes down to whether customers feel safe, said Jack Ingvaldson, the owner. Lately, he said, some do not.

“We have homeless people sitting in the alleyway — they drink, urinate, defecate, fornicate — whatever they can get away with,” he said. And a ticket or citation from a police officer? They laugh and stay put. “They don’t care — they know there’s nowhere to put them,” he said.

 My thought is that the 20 beds will be filled quickly, it's not enough to stop the bleeding, only slow it down a little.

 

Terrorism and Principle

One big fact verified in the latest Pew Poll released Monday is that while a majority of people polled think that the NSA phone dragnet is "acceptable", the composition of that majority has varied wildly in the last 7 years, with 75% of Republicans gung-ho for NSA surveilance in 2006, but falling to 52% in 2013, after the Guardian released the NSA story.  Similarly only 37% of Democrats thought that was good in 2006 but now 64% think it's just fine.  The overall acceptance was 51% in 2006 and now it is 56%.

So much for consistency of principle.  The results appear to me to reflect extreme polarization in our politics and the hardening of party allegiance, not to mention the fear the word terrorism evokes.

We at least now have the opportunity to have a national discussion on the issue.  President Obama is not immune to flip-flop either.  In 2005 during arguments on reauthorizing the act, he stated on the Senate floor...

And if someone wants to know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document - through library books they've read and phone calls they've made - this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. No judge will hear their plea, no jury will hear their case.
This is just plain wrong.

 Well I guess that was then and this is now, we still have no right to know if we're being investigated, nor right to appeal, and while President Obama is doing what he decried 8 years ago, one thing hasn't changed. 

It is still just plain wrong.

Security and the Constitution

Our voracious security establishment seems to have convinced our legislators that we can have the constitution or security, but not both.  Both Democrats and Republicans are opting to dump the Constitution, turning our day to day life over to the intelligence overlords who'll keep us safe.  Sign Jeff Merkley's petition if you disagree with that.  Counterpunch has a good analysis of the situation, well worth reading.

Constitutions are often needed to guard against political excess, the conscience of a state when its representatives have ceased to have any.  The responses from the Washington elite suggest the anaesthetised state they have fallen into – liberties need to be shredded to protect liberties; legality demands bouts of illegality and so forth.  Nothing to be surprised about, claimed Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga).  “This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this” (Forbes, Jun 6).
Even more striking of the amoral numbness of such surveillance activities is Chambliss’ remark that “we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information, and its simply what we call ‘meta data’.”  Give it a cryptic, functional label, and people are bound to go along with it.  That’s if they even know about it.
Senator Diane Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has again made it clear that the mass surveillance of public chatter and communications is entirely appropriate.  The Republic is besieged by enemies external and internal.  “As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the last seven years.” The message: This is normal.  Stop being so wet about it.

Nixonesque Presidency?

Are we tired of the burdens of Liberty and the Constitution?  Jonathan Turley thinks so, and he wrote a strong polemic on the subject that was picked up in the Washington's Blog today.  I'm not buying all the stuff about Obama being the worst of the lot, after all I think George W Bush was worse, but all in all that would be damning with faint praise for Obama.

Here is one highlight from the article that hits home to me.

Nixon was known for his attacks on whistle-blowers. He used the Espionage Act of 1917 to bring a rare criminal case against Ellsberg. Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law. Obama has brought twice as many such prosecutions as all prior presidents combined [and see this]. While refusing to prosecute anyone for actual torture, the Obama administration has prosecuted former CIA employee John Kiriakou for disclosing the torture program.

 I disagree with the premise that "Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law."  He was impeached for involvement in the Watergate break-in, and in my view much of the rest of the assertions in the article about Nixon are an attempt to rewrite history.  George W Bush and Reagan did a lot of the same stuff.

I do agree however that our government (Congress and the Administration alike) has largely abandoned the inconvenient restrictions contained in the Constitution when they would thwart the goals of extremists in both bodies of government.  Come to think of it, I think the Supreme Court did the same in the "Citizen's United" ruling.

All the actors are capitalizing on fear, and using that fear to trample on our civil rights, as well as engage in barbaric excesses of torture and incarceration at Guantanamo.

George Orwell had it right that the rulers need a state of constant war to get everyone to accept breaching our constitution.