OFF THE WIRE
Wiretapping and reading private emails helps the Feds rake in the cash.......
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has, since 2001, doubled the amount of assets it confiscates from people via civil asset forfeiture, according to Ray Downs of WSFA.
The reason for this dramatic expansion is not that the agency became
twice as savvy at violating the 5th amendment. It is due to the fact
that since 2001, the War on Terror has ushered in a new era of domestic
spying programs in the United States; programs like the National
Security Agency’s (NSA) ability to read innocent people’s emails, text
messages, and phone conversations without a warrant. With the power to
spy on Americans and seize money at will, the Feds have developed an
efficient system of 21st century highway robbery.
Civil Asset Forfeiture is the practice of seizing cash, bank
accounts, vehicles, electronics, buildings, land — any piece of property
that is suspected of being tied to the drug trade. Federal law does
not even require that the suspect is charged with a crime in order to
perform a seizure. Property is simply forfeited — stolen — and the
owner must wage a costly and lengthy legal battle in court just to get
it back. The seized assets go towards the budgets of the offending
agencies, when the robbed owner doesn’t have enough cash reserves to
fight in court to prove his innocence.
The DEA has a financial interest in maximizing their seizures. A
top-secret unit in the DEA, called the Special Operations Division
(SOD), helps the agency bring home the loot it seeks by working with
domestic spying agencies to procure tips about where cash and property
might be that would be an easy target for the taking. The SOD is
partnered with the NSA, CIA, IRS, FBI, and DHS and maintains databases
filled with crime tips that would not hold up in a court of law.
The SOD’s alliance with the NSA is particularly worrying because of
the troves of data that the NSA stores on every American. As exposed by
Glenn Greenwald, the NSA collects nearly every piece of data it
possibly can on innocent internet users in the United States. The
agency “sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history”
Greenwald wrote on the Guardian.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden explained the unchecked, unethical
power held by the NSA. “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could
“wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even
the president, if I had a personal email.”
The SOD compiles the data fed to them by the NSA spying program,
including wiretaps, intelligence intercepts, search warrants, and
informant tips, and uses them to secretly launch investigations. The
only problem is the fact that the tips are all top-secret and unusable
in court. Law enforcement agencies are not even allowed to acknowledge
the existence of SOD, which was only recently been publicly exposed by Reuters.
Enforcers are trained to lie and recreate a “parallel construction”
of the investigation. Not even the judges and prosecutors know about
the secret investigations of the defendants. The process is apparently
legal and happens on a daily basis.
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 to Reuters.
“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it
clean,” said Finn Selander, a former DEA agent who now advocates ending
the Drug War.
“While the techniques described are universally bad, they carry
special concern in forfeiture cases–where intelligence tips of a driver
carrying cash (for legitimate or illegitimate reasons) compels officers
to create parallel constructions to obfuscate from the courts and the
public the real reasons why drivers are pulled over: so the department
can score forfeiture proceeds,” said Scott Meiner of Americans for Forfeiture Reform.
“Informed police departments can use SOD tips to pull over cars that
they know have cash (whether it is legitimate or illegitimate) and then
apply a K9 sniff (with seeming random innocuity) and find the cash that
they knew existed. A positive sniff (which is an inevitably positive
sniff given what we know of cuing errors) validates the purported
connection to drugs and thus justifies the forfeiture to the courts.”
“You can’t game the system,” said former federal prosecutor Henry E.
Hockeimer Jr., criticizing the SOD secret investigations in Reuters.
“You can’t create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national
security cases. If you don’t draw the line here, where do you draw it?”
Seizing assets is a multi-billion dollar racket for the federal
government. The DEA alone confiscated $0.8 billion in 2010, wrote WSFA.
It will take a monumental effort to unravel the corruption embedded in
the system with regards to the Feds’ unchecked spying capabilities and
their unchecked piracy capabilities.