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.
You crackpot tinfoil hat-wearing kooks imagine all sorts of bizarro world stuff: the Bildeburgers, Skull and Bones, One-world elite conspiracies straight from the imagination of Dan Brown. I mean, how crazy do you have to be to think that every prosecutor in the US is conspiring with the DEA and the NSA, and that this has been going on for years without anyone noticing? You know what else? If you don't want to go to jail for drug smuggling, don't smuggle drugs!
What's that? The gov't admits it? I see. Well you know, nobody made the drug smugglers use a cell phone. There has never been any privacy expectation for business records! That's between the phone company and the gov't. These programs are lawful and they have been approved by every single congressman. They all agree unanimously. Don't like it? Get a different phone company!
The gov't needs this to protect our children from terrerrerrorism. Do you know how many terror attacks there would have been if they weren't working to keep us safe? No! Because they can't tell you; that would compromise the operations! The truth is that the vast majority of gov't agents are honest hard working people trying to keep your children safe. They should be celebrated as heroes. These disclosures only serve to harm the Motherland^H^H^H Homeland security. Now we'll have to just spend more taxes for new secret programs to replace the ones revealed by treacherous commie spies! /s
I'd give you an upvote, but I've been so nice to you already. Do you really deserve it, they way you've treated me? I'm just a copper after all. I wouldn't know one end of an ID from the other. You'll have to take it up with our supervisor.
It's a poke in the eye directed at those statists and others who for years have been beating up on anyone who publicly acknowledged the possibility of any gov't conspiracy; usually by making comparisons to absurd examples, then sometimes claiming such things are normal or just, and or making false or illogical justifications.
There are real conspiracy theorists out there who are batsh*t crazy, it is quite difficult to tell which ones are actually reasonable. The illogical fallacious arguments are spewed from both sides of the debate.
Also, its possible to be a statist who is disgusted with the government's behavior; its not black and white as the libertarians would try to convince everyone is the case (the NSA is spying us...and we have to pay taxes!). Ya, some of us are pragmatic.
So without a better alternative, we are free to shake our finger at the gov without advocating violent revolution or even deep systematic change. The devil you know...
Of course, living in China gives me quite a different perspective on it all. The US could definitely do much worse, and it is important to stop going in that direction.
>There are real conspiracy theorists out there who are batsh_t crazy,
Yeah, but that doesn't mean they all are.
> it is quite difficult to tell which ones are actually reasonable.
Isn't that the truth. I used to work with a fellow who was absolutely paranoid about gov't surveillance. Some people might think he was a lunatic off his medication if you got him started talking about it. He was an Air Force avionics tech in the 1970's. Everything he ever told me about gov't surveillance has turned out to be true.
> The illogical fallacious arguments are spewed from both sides of the debate.
That happens at the extents of every political faction. Look at the debate surrounding Abortion/Gay Marriage/Drugs/Welfare
>Also, its possible to be a statist who is disgusted with the government's behavior;
I never considered that. I should have though. I can see no reason why someone who would identify as a Statist would be any different than a person from any other political faction. We're all people.
> its not black and white as the libertarians would try to convince everyone is the case (the NSA is spying us...and we have to pay taxes!). Ya, some of us are pragmatic.
I'd be a Libertarian if I thought it could work. And be fair, there are a lot of different folks in that particular faction too. IMO, those Johnny-come-lately post Koch Bros. Libertarians don't really count.
>So without a better alternative, we are free to shake our finger at the gov without advocating violent revolution or even deep systematic change. The devil you know...
I'm not sure what you're getting at.
>Of course, living in China gives me quite a different perspective on it all.
It does give one a different perspective. I lived there in '08 & '09 (though not full time).
>The US could definitely do much worse, and it is important to stop going in that direction.
I have a feeling it could be a _lot_ worse in the US, but that's no reason to accept the status quo. IMO acceptance of the status quo practically guarantees a pretty terrible outcome.
Are you sure? I'm happy to be corrected if I am missing something. I'll admit I don't know the origin of this convention; but I don't understand how the caret code for "End Transmission Block" makes more sense than the one for "Backspace".
The Backspace key had the same scan code as Control-H, so ^H is what you would see when you typed Backspace on a misconfigured TTY (instead of it deleting the previous character).
Control-W is what you use to delete the previous word (Edit: word, not character), so ^W is what you would have seen on TTYs/Editors that didn't support that command.
Control-W for ‘delete word’ entered Unix in BSD 4.x, along with changing to ^U for line erase (Bell Labs used ^X), ^R for refresh (consensus has reverted to ^L), and ^T for status (which Linux annoyingly still doesn't have). These came from Tenex / TOPS-20, which also had a fancy command completion scheme whose vestiges can be seen in ftp(1) as well as Cicso gear.
Job control (with ^Z and ^Y) entered at the same time. At least Linux/SysV saw the usefulness of that....
Ah, excellent! Good to know that it is more ubiquitous than I suspected.
(The lack of ^T on Linux really annoys me too. What is worse is that it isn't just a matter of the line discipline sending SIGINFO for ^T... because Linux doesn't have SIGINFO at all. Means you can't even really hack up a pty wrapper program that emulates it, unless you are willing to have everything use a different signal in lieu of SIGINFO...)
Secrecy in law enforcement is problematic, but the secrecy here is less pervasive than you imply. The crimes people are being charged with here are public. The trials are public. Critically, the evidence is all public, and the chain of custody of all evidence in these cases appears to be public as well.
Instead, what's alleged here is that the DEA is provided with enough information from intercepts to "always be in the right place at the right time".
This kind of evidence --- legit evidence traceable to illegit sources --- would be excluded if it involved torture, but apparently the jurisprudence hasn't caught up to its use in unlawful surveillance.
There's something a bit unsettling about the future when you discover that drug offenders have lately been tracked down and charged by the same means used for terrorists. But let's talk about the present. Would you find the scenario below possible in this context and, if so, somewhat worrying:
1. There's nothing that special about drug crimes. It's reasonable to suspect other enforcement agencies are plugged into the NSA databases as well.
2. Let's say that, through complete surveillance of his communications, the Anti-X agency discovers that John Smith has probably committed crime X. However, there is no other way to obtain evidence on the matter.
3. As many people in this country, John Smith also happens to be a drug offender. Anti-X arranges for the DEA to be at precisely the right spot and time where the offense occurs.
4. John Smith is now in jail for interrogation, and there's a search warrant for his home to (also) look for the evidence that Anti-X was missing before.
I agree completely, there have been many articles written on how Americans break laws all the time without knowing it (No, I'm not saying that buying/selling/doing drugs falls into this umbrella) and the government cannot possibly prosecute everyone from every crime. This allows the government to pick and choose who they prosecute. Lets imagine the following scenario which is very similar to the one above.
1. Person P smokes marijuana by themselves, doesn't sell, doesn't buy large amounts, "Personal Use"
2. 3-letter-agency ABC is pretty sure person P smokes through some text/call/email/web browsing/etc but has bigger fish to fry
3. Person P is an outspoken critic of government G (or just a supporter of something government G is not a fan of)
4. Government G runs a search on person P through their database and find that ABC is 85% sure this person smokes marijuana
5. Government G tips off local police that they might just want to stop person P's car on X date
6. Person P is now either imprisoned which will greatly hamper their efforts or scared into shutting up and keeping their head down
Now let smoking marijuana be swapped out for some other crime, something that "everybody does", like downloading a song/movie/app, or maybe it's even more minor but they decide to "Make an example of you". The example zeteo gave is very good but most people can write it off with "Well he WAS committing a crime" but if the end goal of the first stop (the "Foot in the door") was actually to censor the person then I think people would see more of an issue.
this is what i find wonderful about tptacek hair splitting posts - they lead discussion away from the main issue - illegal surveillance in this case - to minutae details like whether Stasi power to fight drug crimes can be [ab]used to fight other crimes.
I agree, and the prospects for a sturdier pipeline between NSA and the DOJ is I think a good reason to ratchet programs like this way back.
(I'm less disquieted by the idea of DEA being at the right place at the right time; if that was the only implication of this program, I might be less bothered by it.)
I wonder what argument could be made for having any communication whatsoever between the two areas--how often does the DOJ deal with folks outside of the US, for example, thus "justifying" the use of NSA data sources.
Al Capone was arrested, tried, and jailed for tax evasion rather than all of the much more series crimes he committed. This approach to law enforcement has been going on for long time now, sometimes with good outcomes. I think the problem now is that (a) it's gotten much easier, (b) because it's easy it's being used more often for less serious crimes, and (c) it's being used to protect the power of the powerful rather than to protect the populace.
It was mostly because he was clever. He hired people that were loyal to do the killing/etc. So those people commited the crimes, and plead guilty every time they were caught. Al Capone could not be guilty of a crime someone else committed.
technically, the only place where he miscalculated was tax. so they got him for that. they didn't plant false tax evidence on him, as the NSA/FBI did recently with that guy that refused to join PRISM with google and others.
I can see in principle why this isn't really justice. But in the example you gave, I have a hard time siding with John Smith.
Anti-X was able to indict him because they found evidence by using another agency - this seems intuitive and useful because they could not have ordinarily found it. If he genuinely committed the crime, they're not obstructing justice or even his privacy here, they're just being creative.
Strictly speaking, I don't really mind that agencies in the United States can do that, because it opens avenues to evidence they would not otherwise have. What I would mind is if law enforcement decided they could find admissible evidence by deliberately retrieving and opportunistically analyzing inadmissible evidence as a springboard.
I understand that those two can seem really similar, but I honestly believe the latter case is a much more serious violation - it just seems like a much more slippery slope to me.
In principle, I don't care about John Smith[1] and I wouldn't advocate solely for the lawbreaker's sake. I'm advocating for innocent people whose rights are violated. Now, if this scheme were directed against a different class of criminal like theiving bankers or corrupt policemen; I'd feel better about the result, but not much. Along those lines, it is offensive to imagine that our supposed inalienable rights are discarded for something as pedestrian as drug offenses when it is clearly possible for some violent crimes to be stopped[2]. Note that I am not an advocate for that. But IMO it is an added insult that we're here living a version of Orwell's nightmare, having just begun to suffer its abuses, but because of the priorities of gov't don't receive the benefit of pervasive gov't protection.
On the ZOMG! slippery-slope angle, imagine just how abusive and corrupt an individual or small group of gov't agents can be when they are allowed to conceal so much of an investigation. One person, or a small group can completely frame an individual for a crime with relatively little opportunity for the accused to defend themselves.
[1] Personally, I am an advocate from drug legalization, but that's a separate issue.
[2] James Bamford alludes to the notion that NSA folk have had to observe some pretty terrible things in the course of duty. I don't envy them for it.
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."
How do you reconcile this allegation with your statement that "the evidence is all public" and the "chain of custody of all evidence" is public? It appears that what is being described is a secret, shadow set of evidence, that in fact is not made public in any way, shape, or form.
You've misread the Reuters story. These cases start with "tips" based on excludable intelligence, but the DEA then diligently works to build evidence that isn't excludable. The excludable intelligence allows the DEA to "always be at the right place at the right time", but isn't (for instance) used as probably cause to effect searches.
(I still think this kind of evidence gathering should still be excludable, as it no doubt would if the root of the investigation was torture and not foreign intelligence).
He didn't misread the story at all, what on earth are you talking about? The government is hiding the initial evidence. That means it's "not public". You are wrong.
No one but you thinks it's OK to start investigations with "tips" based on excludable evidence. The rest of us literally consider that something we are protected from by the Bill of Rights. Investigations handled according to the excerpts in the article are precisely what we consider to be disgusting and evil.
Most of us do not support the government trying to find loopholes in the Bill of Rights. We want the government to follow the constitution not only technically, but in spirit.
None of this is responsive to any point I made. Not only that, but your comment misrepresents all the points I made, for instance by asserting directly that I support the program. It is thus hard to find anything to respond to in it.
You claimed he misread the story. He did not. The government is using illegal evidence as probable cause and then lying and saying something else is probable cause. That is, the real probable cause, the thing that actually turned them on to these suspects, is made "not public". It doesn't get much more "responsive" than that.
Yes, I see that you claim to not support the program. It's hard to tell with how vigorously you are defending indefensible aspects of the program and seem to support parts of it on legalistic grounds when the issues at stake are legal AND moral. You continue to parse the posted article in an odd way that gives huge benefits of the doubt to the government when it would appear to deserve none.
You don't understand the point I was making, or have seized on a part of the conversation where there's enough ambiguity that it's easy to jump in and generate faux outrage about.
Meanwhile, your comment is yet another instance† of someone not being satisfied that we agree that the program is bad, but instead demanding that we find it bad for exactly the same set of reasons. Again: case in point for why HN is a terrible venue for political discussions.
Incidentally, you might do better than "yes, I see that you claim not to support the program" [em: mine] when in effect admitting that you were not only wrong, but wrong in the entire premise of your response to me.
I'm not sure the point you were making was entirely clear. Having read the article, and your replies, I don't see how the original poster misread the article.
It's entirely possible that I don't understand the situation. Could you rephrase the reason you believe the original poster was wrong? i.e. That the evidence trail is public.
Again: the "evidence" gleaned from tip-offs from unlawful surveillance can't be introduced into court in any fashion; for instance, it can't be the stated cause of a search, which must still be justified from first-principles by some defensible claim of probable cause.
It's a shadow, secret set of facts, but it isn't evidence and can't be used as such.
And, to be clear: I think the program is bad news and don't support it. But my reasons are probably different from those of many other HN readers, and have more to do with precedent (I think if we're going to do extensive foreign SIGINT --- and, sorry, we just are going to do that --- we should at least firewall it off from domestic law enforcement).
The police had every reason to stop you: you failed to signal a turn (or you did not come to a complete stop at a stop sign, or you were speeding, or any number of other violations).
The real problem here is that there are far too many laws, which has led to a situation where the police can find a "legitimate" reason to arrest/search anyone. There is also the matter of victimless crimes (like possession of certain drugs), which can turn minor infractions like speeding into 20-year prison sentences. The massive increase in police budgets and power over the past few decades added fuel to the fire, but we were in trouble from the beginning.
>I think if we're going to do extensive foreign SIGINT --- and, sorry, we just are going to do that --- we should at least firewall it off from domestic law enforcement
A personal question, sorry: legality and constitutionality aside, are you comfortable with ample surveillance of other countries? If so, why? From your posts on HN since the PRISM leaks, you've stressed NSA's mandate to spy on other countries. NSA exists and has this function, yes, but why is it acceptable for the US to spy on all foreigners?
Yes, I am, for a bunch of reasons, not worth going into here. The simplest response to this would be that broad surveillance of US citizens violates our Constitution, but surveillance of foreigners abroad does not.
It appears that you're happy to take the DEA informant at his word when he says "Pull over suspect X on Tuesday at location Y and get probable cause for a search for drugs" But obviously, there is no check on the power of the NSA/DEA/etc. here; and that makes the scheme as unconstitutional as anything that ever was, and ripe for abuse. One need not even don their tinfoil hat and allege made-up conspiracies[1], just consider the effect that selective enforcement with a racial bias would have, and then remember that minorities can't even get equitable treatment for the terms of their mortgages, and that most DEA/NSA types are socially conservative Whitey Whiterson types. Decades of this would give you feedback effects that might make people feel justified in their racial bias, and indeed there are people who argue in favor of racial profiling on the basis of the ratio of black:white &etc. prison inmates.
[1] Like John DeLorean, Angela Garmley, or those few moron terrorist/pizza deliverymen.
Please explain at what point the accused is allowed an opportunity to face & challenge the original accusation of wrongdoing (the secret accusation that was obtained by illegal surveillance).
The state is accusing you of a crime, and you have the right to confront the prosecutor. You can confront any witnesses brought against you. You do not have the right, and never have had the right, to confront every single person in the state who had ever heard about your case. You do not, for instance, get to summon the President or even your state governor to testify in your cases.
Once again: the information generated from this program does not generate evidence. It generates intelligence.
There is an evidentiary issue involved in the program, which is that it might generate exculpatory facts that the defended might want to introduce into evidence, which the defendant should have the right to discover. But that's (a) going to happen very infrequently and (b) isn't close to the biggest problem with the program, which, for the nth time today, I don't support either.
The sophistry isn't needed. If an NSA agent provides intel for use against a person in a criminal proceeding, he should have to explain his methodology, and the details of how the intel was obtained.
Consider this. Ptacek rents a car to travel from A to B. NSA/DEA/SOD tips off DPS officers to search Ptacek's car for drugs. Of course, they find drugs. At trial Ptacek's defense is "What drugs? I don't know anything about any drugs!" All the judge, prosecutor, defense knows is that you were pulled over, and you [consented, or PC was otherwise obtained] and lots of drugs were found.
Now, if the origin of the intel hadn't been concealed, Ptacek's defense atty could subpoena President Obama, sorry, I mean the SOD agent, who could testify as to the source of the intel. It might be discovered that there was no evidence to suggest that Ptacek was aware of the drugs concealed in his rental car. It might even be further discovered that hiding drugs in people's car without their knowledge is one of many ways that drug smugglers move contraband.
You completely miss the point of what it means to have a right to face one's accuser.
> No one but you thinks it's OK to start investigations with "tips" based on excludable evidence.
That's a massive overstatement, as can be seen by noting that there is virtually no controversy over the anonymous tip hotlines that have been used for decades by virtually every police force in the country.
From what I gather in this explanation, if the DEA has unusable evidence, they can still springboard it to finding evidence that would be admissible in court? Is that true?
So, effectively, despite the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, there isn't real, persistent transparency going back more than a step or two in the evidence gathering process. It's more like judging immediate evidence on its own, without questioning the steps that lead up to its (otherwise valid) finding?
Yes. It's a grey area. I happen to think it's on the black end of the spectrum. But it's not literally black; they're not introducing secret evidence, or even using secret evidence as the probable cause basis to effect searches.
It's beside the point to be talking about fruit of the poisonous tree because it would never even come up at a trial - as far as the defense knows, the investigation started with a traffic stop. They don't know the true reason for the stop so they can't challenge its constitutionality.
In fact, secret evidence is used as the probable cause basis to effect searches, but the government is playing a neat trick where instead of admitting it's secret, they're just substituting the secret evidence with some innocuous basis for a traffic stop ("driving erratically", "changing lanes without indicating", etc.) that in reality never would have come up if not for the secret evidence.
Secret information is motivating the search, in the same sense as a bias against African Americans could motivate a similar search, but the actual probable cause that forms the basis for the search --- the from-first-principles reason for the search --- can't be that secret information.
I agree that not informing the accused of the application of secret information is one of the multiple problems with this program, which just to be clear I do not support.
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.
They are stopping vehicles with the only probable cause being an illegally obtained tip and then they are hiding the illegally obtained tip.
The car still must be stopped for some lawful reason (speeding, broken tail light, &c) and the pivot from traffic stop to car search must still be based on some articulable probable cause that isn't secret information; for instance, drugs in plain site, or arrest warrant.
Those sources of 'probable cause' are trivial to credibly fake without consequences when you've got the strong tip (and already lying about the true reason for your suspicion).
The car "drifted" or "failed to signal a lane change" or "failed to maintain a safe following distance" or "moved suspiciously as the patrol-car neared".
The officer "smelled something". The driver was "acting weird", or had "bleary eyes" or "droopy eyelids". A drug dog smelled something (which could just be (a) the dog didn't but the officer says it did; (b) the dog follows a subverbal cue from the officer; (c) the dog reacts to traces planted by the officer.)
Once the actual search succeeds, the flimsiest fabricated "probable cause" that was "parallel-constructed" will pass muster. So the defense that such searches "must still be based" on something legitimate isn't very convincing. Once you've already been coached to cover-up the true source of information, what's one more "white lie" to catch a "really bad guy"?
If that was true, then we'd all be searched at every traffic stop, and there would be no point to the (excellent) ACLU videos on what to do if you're stopped by a police officer.
But in reality, the sources of PC sufficient to search a car aren't all that easy to credibly fake. Can they be faked? Certainly. Trivially? With the possible exception of drug dogs (which bother me a lot more than this program does), no.
That such police subterfuge can't be used for bulk dragnets where "we'd all be searched" is irrelevant: there, it'd be obvious (when the followup search usually fails) that some fishy overreach is happening.
In this particular surveillance-tipped condition, you are asserting there's still some useful check from the necessity of "articulable probable cause". But because of the strong (and legally out-of-band) tip, very few searches are necessary, the searches always succeed in finding contraband, and the only contrary witness to the flimsy smell/dog/eyes/joint-on-the-seat probable-cause rationale is the suspect himself -- whose credibility is shot by the successful find.
That's what makes the phony 'probable cause' tricks trivial in these cases, and your reassurances hollow.
And once the authorities have started down the road of deception of the courts to get a conviction, it's only a small additional step to planting the drugs/guns/porn. "The NSA/DEA-SOD has assured us this is a very bad guy, but all the evidence of that is non-admissible. So let's just 'parallel construct' another incriminating scene from what's handy."
It isn't necessary to credibly fake PC, though it is easy (see link above). An officer could believe they were correct in their suspicion and their actions would have that bias. Combine that with a mindset of "the ends justify the means" and there is little that would stop many officers from an outright lie in order to achieve their goal.
The officer can believe whatever they want, but if they can't document in court the actual probable cause that generated the search, the evidence from that search is excluded. Probable cause is not as simple as "the officer says they believed the motorist was probably guilty".
>Probable cause is not as simple as "the officer says they believed the motorist was probably guilty".
That is naive. The bar for documentation is the officer's own recollection or a written report based upon their recollection. Officers receive training on how to obtain PC, and how to subsequently pivot to full searches. SCOTUS has granted wide latitude WRT such techniques.
State vehicle codes are written to provide law enforcement officers ample opportunity to establish probable cause to initiate a traffic stop when an individual is suspected of having committed, or about to commit, a crime other than the infraction of the vehicle code.
I'm not confused. I'm trying to explain to you that the distinction you make between the two is practically meaningless. Even a dim-witted cop can figure out a way to get in your car for a search; you don't stand a chance against a competent one.
Right. A good counter to this would probably be requiring law enforcement to submit a report of all evidence, admissible and inadmissible, with a report of how it was found.
If that's done, the only obstacle left would be corruption and deliberate lack of fidelity (a big only, but still an improvement).
I find wildly erratic punitive sentencing for accused offenders who choose to go to trial alarming.
But I'm not alarmed that the majority of offenders plea out.
Trials are enormously expensive, and, in a coldly rational statistical sense, most of the accused are in fact guilty --- the fact patterns in many of these cases and the evidence supporting them are very straightforward. That there would be some incentive for the accused to spare the system the expense of litigation doesn't bother me, especially because the more resources get freed up from pointless controversies, the more resources are available to handle meaningful ones.
So, I think we agree that there's a problem, but not what its causes are.
Either way: plea out or not, these cases don't get brought without "untainted" evidence. The problem is that the DOJ's definition of "untainted" is subtly broken. "Fruit of a poisonous tree" is a good Google search to follow up on this.
Whether it goes to trial or not, whether the evidence is untainted or not, the primary problem with the war on drugs is the extrajudicial punishment system that is seizure of property on mere suspicion. Giving the DEA tips is paramount to simply declaring that anybody you dislike is no longer part of American society - and there's very little recourse, just as with the no-fly list.
I'm still not sure how it has come to pass that Americans simply blithely accept all this.
This comment mixes up too many issues (the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, the DEA intelligence program from today, the no-fly list) for me to respond to. Some of these programs are much more problematic than others, and they're not actually all related.
If you wanted to find a quick way to synthesize a dispute where none needed to exist, taking a shotgun to the whole of American criminal justice would be one way to accomplish that.
Huh. I hadn't thought to be accused of manufacturing a dispute, and I note that you seem to have done just fine responding.
I suppose my point was that there is an underlying cause here, of encroaching authoritarianism in American jurisprudence that I find both alarming and surprising, but if you feel threatened by that, then by all means feel free not to take it as delivered to your address.
They're not related. For instance, the problem with civil asset forfeiture is financial incentives; the problem with the war on drugs was a single major public policy error, &c.
If 4 different terror operations were coming from Al Qaeda affiliated cells, we'd say they were all Al Qaeda related. If 4 different drug dealers were busted that were all being supplied by one source, we'd call it a drug ring.
All of the operations mentioned - the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, the DEA intelligence program from today, the TSA - are a ring of government operatives that are terrorizing, robbing and imprisoning Americans.
> in a coldly rational statistical sense, most of the accused are in fact guilty
Without a trial, how do we know that?
If I am accused of something terrible, of which I am innocent, but a plea bargain gets me back to my family in N years instead of Never (or 10*N), I'm likely to lie and plead guilty. We've seen that the government doesn't merely use plea bargaining as a cost reduction tool, but rather as a very large hammer with which to ensure that people get punished in extreme ways.
While there are good police and prosecutors, as a system they are driven to increase convictions rather than to find the _guilty_. Given the chance, they can find something to convict nearly anyone of, and guilty verdicts can be nearly guaranteed against even people who are innocent by heaping up enough charges that either defense is too expensive or the penalty of losing at trial too large.
In a coldly rational sense, the shape of the legal system contributes to the cultural context that informs the future actions of the courts and their apparatus.
True, if primary cause isn't challenged the legal system doesn't consider antecedents as evidence; but the courts only make decisions - they have no input into the consequences of those decisions, other than the making of them.
I am not advocating that people look at the entire justice system through a lens of cold rationalism, but projecting a single observation through that lens.
In many countries you cannot plea out. Everything has to reach court, and I as living in one of these countries think is a good think. This prevents extortion and bullying by prosecutors. Your sentence should not depend on your skills at negotiation and knowledge of judicial processes.
I know for sure Sweden but I think most civil law countries lack the concept of a plea bargain, which means most of world. For example France introduced limited plea bargains first in 2004.
Edit: Seems a bunch of civil law countries have introduce plea bargains the last 15 years, but before that almost none of them had it. This makes it a bit hard to find a concrete list of examples since almost all hits are about the countries introducing it with little discussion about why some countries do not do the same.
The DOJ's definition isn't "subtly" broken. It is completely a willful attempt to circumvent established law and precedent with a very convoluted trail of reasoning. Also not sure if this is really DOJ's definition, or certain branches of law enforcement.
There is a very subtle, insidious problem with this:
The fact is that this is a psyop - an operation used to legitimize the NSA dragnet in the minds of the world. They are "revealing" this issue to show how they are using the NSA data to "catch the baddy" - so therefore this program has value, RIGHT?
Its too late. This has gone too far. The United States of America is no longer united - it is "us" vs. "them"; it is the people vs the government in that the government is literally tracking everything everyone does. You cannot have freedom under those terms. They are mutually exclusive.
America is officially a police state, though it has been unofficially a police state for a long time.
The only observation this comment makes --- that use of foreign intelligence to help make domestic criminal cases helps validate the intelligence programs --- is blatantly wrong.
I think you missed the rather insightful point he was making entirely.
The DEA's use of NSA intercepts "sounds" a whole lot more sensible (catching 'drug dealers') than what may be potentially 1000s of other horrific uses the government is also using this data for.
It absolutely does not sound more sensible for the USG to be focusing the tools of foreign intelligence on its own citizens for drug enforcement. I didn't miss his point; his point is wrong. Using foreign intelligence for criminal justice does the opposite of legitimizing foreign intelligence programs.
I think I've stated my opinions on this matter very clearly. I also think its pretty clear we don't agree on these issues.
You have a solid grasp of what is technically being done, though I think you are less alarmed at what's already taken place than you should be given this.
The NSA is completely out of control and in a position to blackmail anyone, cut off and control the entire worlds communications and subvert anything they want.
The NSA and the USG are simply telling everyone that we should trust them to be the good guy, just because. While the government has already proven they will torture abuse and murder people with impunity.
These two things are incongruous - we can't have a political system that is proven to abuse and one that claims to be the moral good guy.
It's not enough for you that we agree that the program is bad. We have to agree for all the right reasons. This is a perfect illustration of why HN is a terrible place to discuss politics.
Here's why: we have a situation where, for once, we've landed on the same conclusion. We got there for different reasons. Instead of looking at that as a great opportunity to learn something new from our differing perspectives, it's something that somehow manages to piss you off. If political discussion doesn't work here, it's certainly not going to work anywhere else.
I'm not getting my wish that discussions like these simply be banned from the site, but maybe we could take a baby step towards civility by not calling people names.
Second, I actually really enjoy talking about these things with you on HN.
Third, we both get emotional about things we discuss - I recall a thread between us ~2 plus years ago where we were in heated discussion!
And C) - these items are political - but entirely germane to HN as the whole thing is enabled by tech and techies "just following orders" and tech companies "just making more sales".
We are on a very slippery slope; nobody wants to live in danger, but everyone is in danger of government abuse with these programs.
Hey, just in the interest of thwarting a false equivalence: I haven't called you names. You have called me names, on this very thread. I'm not super offended and would still buy you a beer in person, but let's all be clear that we're not supposed to be doing that on HN.
You were never called any names. He said you were an apologist. In reading your postings, your comments do strike me as having an overtone of apology for the surveillance state.
In political matters - the power of government vs. the rights of the individual - most people will fall into one of the two groups as a basic mode of operation for their perceptions and personal philosophy. When governments become tyrannical, as the US government is now proving itself to be, the contrast between the two modes becomes starkly delineated.
Authority vs. Liberty is an ancient human argument that is obviously still being played out. Those of us with an unbreakable attachment to Liberty will see any arguments in favor of the current regime as apologia.
This glosses over the fact that "they", the government, is a hugely multi-faceted entity, the vast majority of which is benign in both purpose and operation.
Not precisely correct this bit: This kind of evidence --- legit evidence traceable to illegit sources --- would be excluded if it involved torture, but apparently the jurisprudence hasn't caught up to its use in unlawful surveillance.
Nominally private communications that are acquired without the benefit of a warrant, are excluded all the time. The notion of 'parallel construction' is antithetical to the presumption of innocence clause. Any conviction where it can be shown that the initial basis for investigation was acquired in this way and the evidence history had been "re-constructed" in order to avoid that taint, would be thrown out by any appellate court in the country.
No doubt there are motions being filed right now for such actions.
The crimes being committed here by the DEA are equivalent to the following:
- Suspect is detained and harshly interrogated, rights violated, possibly tortured.
- Suspect signs confession
- Suspect is given a drug to wipe his/her memory of the torture/abuses.
- Suspect is convicted of crime he/she committed.
The specific law that is being violated is different, but the effect is the same, since one could argue that if the drug the suspect was given wiped away any memory of the mistreatment, it might as well not have occurred.
Wouldn't there be evidence that doesn't ever become public?
The idea was the NSA discovers a bunch of information about someone, then gives the DEA tips on where to look for evidence of lawbreaking. That way evidence is secret, because when the time comes to share evidence, the DEA has only looked in places to find inculpatory evidence. The superset of all evidence discovered remains 'off the record' with the NSA, and out of the hands of the defense.
No. The DEA knows things under this program, but deliberately does not introduce those things as evidence.
(One concern from this article that doesn't ring true to me, but maybe someone else can expand on, is the likelihood that this information is exculpatory).
If the information that they are acting on is closely linked to evidence of entrapment; or the sorts of grooming and radicalising tactics that the FBI has been known to use to create "domestic terrorists" from angry young men.
What rational person would argue that it was impossible for there to be secret exculpatory evidence in intelligence intercepts? That wasn't at all my point.
How does chain of evidence work in this case? If ill-gotten information leads to the discovery of evidence, does that poison the evidence?
Like if I tap a drug dealer's phone illegally, find out he's making a deal tonight at 8p, and "happen" to be there when the deal occurs, can the deal itself be entered into evidence, or no?
It "should" make the evidence excludable, but might not. Again, do some reading --- especially, if you can find them, law school articles --- on "Fruit of a poisonous tree".
Most obvious exception: if the actual introduced evidence comes from a drug deal that is done in plain site, where the accused is arrested with the money from a hand to hand or somesuch --- unlawful surveillance or not, the evidence from that arrest might not be excludable.
I haven't I was pointing out, as I see others already have, that the evidence in the subsequent search is tainted. But it seems there might be some technicalities for why it is not.
This is exactly 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.
You could say "yeah but that data can't be used in Court!". But they can very trivially skirt around that. They don't have to use that data. They just need to use some of that data to show a judge "probable cause" - and BAM: now they have a warrant to legally get access to anyone's data, and that data they can use.
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.
Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst.
The operative word being "generally". Political limitations are worthless. If they have the capability, they will abuse it. We already know they don't care about the constitution and that they have secret interpretations of laws.
Ignorance of the law and imagination can get you pretty far.
Lets be frank here, Political limitations are the only thing stopping government agencies from shooting Laser Microphones half-a-mile away listening to your entire house. (4th Amendment, Illegal Search) You have no idea of the abuses that can be possible with law enforcement equipment, and are probably just scared of a little bit of the possibilities or powers afforded to them.
Keep your wits about you, this can get much much worse before it may get better. And hyperbole now will only harm your argument in the long run.
Reality is, intelligence agencies are under DoD. They aren't supposed to be investigating Americans, period. If they manage to nab information about American People (which includes legal immigrants btw), they are not allowed to forward it to law enforcement.
We know that anything pulled out of the NSA system is recorded and checked by the FISA courts, to ensure that Americans were not part of the targets. (Edward Snowden admitted it himself, although he wanted more than just 5% random checks on this log).
"Lets be frank here, Political limitations are the only thing stopping government agencies from shooting Laser Microphones half-a-mile away listening to your entire house. (4th Amendment, Illegal Search)"
Why go through all the trouble when they can turn our cellphones into listening devices?
"We know that anything pulled out of the NSA system is recorded and checked by the FISA courts, to ensure that Americans were not part of the targets."
That is absolute bullshit! Have you not payed attention to the latest leaks on XKeyscore?
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."
Jesus fucking Christ. They were lying to prosecutors to get charges pressed against people.
They weren't necessarily lying, -just omitting the cause prior to the traffic violation. If the traffic violation as primary cause was never challenged, they wouldn't technically be taking a position on the origin often. They'd simply state the facts: "Vehicle X was driving southbound on I-94 and failed to utilize a turn signal while switching lanes. I pulled car over and noticed x,y,z..."
As a police officer friend of mine told me many years ago "If I want to pull you over, there is nothing you can do to stop me. All I have to do is follow you for one mile and you're going to violate some portion of the traffic code."
I'm not defending this at all, as I think it is outrageous and that the link to harvested NSA data is beyond the pale . I'm just pointing out that this is, as the article mentioned, de rigueur, and when a technically legal starting point is provided, the defense likely almost never challenges that, thus eliminating the need for the prosecution to take a formal stance on the origin. Hopefully this begins to change.
Fruit of the poisonous tree is a legal metaphor in the United States used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally.[1] The logic of the terminology is that if the source of the evidence or evidence itself (the "tree") is tainted, then anything gained from it (the "fruit") is tainted as well...Such evidence is not generally admissible in court.
You cannot conceal the source of evidence that leads you to other evidence.
I think (and hope) you're right that this is a straightforward application of the poisonous tree doctrine, but you should be aware that the doctrine is not quite a clean-cut as you make it out to be. One big exception to it is "inevitable disclosure". If a traffic stop is otherwise lawful, and a normal police officer acting in the lawful confines of their authority would have otherwise discovered e.g. the drug stash in the car (for instance, because it was in plain site in the back seat), the Poisonous Tree doctrine probably doesn't exclude the evidence.
That's the tricky thing about the Reuters DEA revelation. Some drug offenders probably are cavalier about displaying evidence in the cars because the likelihood of their being stopped is low. Here, domestic surveillance is allowing the police to drastically increase the odds that they'll make a fortuitous traffic stop.
What would not work, in my understanding of the story, is for an intelligence intercept to establish the legal basis for stopping and searching a car.
I agree, it really seems like they're trying to come as close to the line as they can without obviously crossing it, and I think it's clear they did cross it.
Also, I don't see any virtue to secrecy in this case; unlike organized Al Qaeda terrorism prevention or foreign hostile adversaries or counterproliferation, the tactics we're using in the "war on drugs" are a public policy matter that benefit from public discussion.
That's the tricky thing about the Reuters DEA revelation. Some drug offenders probably are cavalier about displaying evidence in the cars because the likelihood of their being stopped is low.
Maybe it wouldn't even matter if the drugs were in plain sight? The cop could likely just use the old "I smell marijuana" trick and then he would 'inevitably discover' the drug dealer's stash, no matter where in the car it's hidden.
Edit: So this seems to speak to a bit of what the main link was talking about. This extension of the exclusionary rule doesn't speak to whether or not omission of first cause is lying (under the legal definition), but rather about how if the first cause evidence was obtained illegally, then it cannot be used.
The crux of this issue seems to be that the prosecution is not volunteering information that might trigger the defense to look for Fruit of the Poisonous Tree in the first place (and does that cross the line into illegality, thus preventing evaluation). I would hope it does...
An omission of fact is a lie. Try doing it under oath. You'll go to jail.
Source - "Also known as a continuing misrepresentation, a lie by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. When the seller of a car declares it has been serviced regularly but does not tell that a fault was reported at the last service, the seller lies by omission. It can be compared to dissimulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
I think it's important to realize that what constitutes a lie in a legal framework under oath is often completely different than several of the myriad definitions of lies found in popular culture as well as lies that are civilly actionable in conjunction with sales transactions.
The closest fit from your link (only listed lie I saw that pertained to legal proceedings):
Let's say a DEA agent is testifying and I ask him, "why did you stop the truck?" If he gives me a bunch of malarkey about a unreadable tag or a broken tail light instead of telling me about the NSA intercept, he has committed perjury. Pure and simple.
Whether you fully misrepresent the story (tell a complete lie) or omit a portion of the story (tell a partial lie), they are both still lying. A partial lie is not more noble than a complete one.
An omission of fact is a lie. Try doing it under oath. You'll go to jail.
You can see from my comment history that I am vehemently opposed to recent government actions including this one. The prosecution omitting exculpatory evidence is illegal but omitting information under oath is not.
When you are under oath, you are expected to answer the question before you. You are not required or even expected to guess or to elaborate. I've heard from many attorneys I've been a client of that you need to make opposing counsel "work for it". If they ask a broad question, answer narrowly. If you're asked, "Have you ever done anything wrong?", it's not your duty to list everything wrong you've ever done in your life going back to the time you tripped Timmy in third grade at recess.
You are playing the same slimy word game politicians play to evade responsibility.
As long as one can find a form of words, then all is fine and dandy. Even if that means redefining words to mean something new. I despise this game of words.
They are misleading prosecutors: "In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept."
According to articles that I've read in the past, when the Feds get caught in trial doing something like this, they'll say "Whoops, we screwed up, but we were acting in good faith". Generally, that makes it ok.
At some point people need to wake up enough such that they recognize the equivalence of being surprised and being naive, which is an important reason they've trusted government to its own devices for far too long.
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.
We rightly vilify the Third Reich, but the lesson of history is not that the Nazis were intrinsically evil; it's that any culture has the capacity to normalize and systematize its own unique brand of evil, via a thousand baby steps.
Just because America is not and never will be Nazi Germany, that's no reason to accept or ignore the American flavor of fascism that has been quietly brewing for decades.
The first thing the Nazis started doing when they got power was set up a secret investigative unit. Where they started creating detailed records of all of their enemy targets (starting w/ the communists and the competing political party). This intelligence was then used by the SS/SA to harass, round up and assassinate anyone who was a threat to their power.
The intelligence agencies were the foundation of Nazi fascism. The signs of power abuses were present in these agencies way before the Gestopo became publicly infamous for targeting Jews.
I've very much come to hate Godwin's Law. There are important lessons, perhaps the most important, to draw from that dark time of history, and we won't see them if we insist that the comparisons are only apt if every little thing is exactly the same, or as 100% evil as the Nazis. There should have been far more attention paid to the specific comparisons of the Patriot Act to pre-conditions of Nazi Germany, rather than getting distracted by "BUSH=HITLER LOL".
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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134821
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.
I've had similar experiences about many things I used to think were paranoid becoming provable fact. However the other day the news about the google search for back packs and pressure cookers I thought was completely false and it was.
What I've realized is that the things I thought were paranoid and came true are things that I thought were paranoid because I had "trust" in various organizations not to abuse power, not because the actions seemed out right implausible.
With the backpacks and pressure cookers story, I was skeptical not because I trusted the fbi, but because it seemed implausible given the way the fbi typically acts and strongly against their interests.
So my updated rule is that 'trust' is no longer a valid reason to rule something out as paranoid. This is an ethos that the security world has long held as obvious, that many technical people formerly not particularly interested in security are waking up to.
I thought it wouldn't happen for cynical reasons. I assumed that government agencies would want to guard their powers jealously, and given the potent justification of national security, the NSA could easily do so.
Also, because they're smart people who understand the danger of revealing their programs to too many people.
Maybe I misjudge how many favors bureaucracies are willing to do for one another.
Or perhaps the higher-ups in the NSA are true believers in the drug war. I guess I'm not and I assume people in the NSA wouldn't be either.
That said, I think I've made it abundantly clear that nobody should listen to my speculations.
This program apparently predates the post-9/11 NSA programs, and we don't know that any of the intelligence generated from i.e. the wholesale capture of Verizon's call database under "business records" exemptions in PATRIOT fed the program at all. We still don't know that much about this particular program.
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.
The Reuters report today shows significant abuse of intelligence intercepts that should make all of us angry.
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.
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":
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-1025_ihdj.pdf
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.
Before David Simon created The Wire he was a reporter on the Baltimore Sun, covering the crime desk. He somehow managed to convince the Baltimore PD to embed him in the homicide department for a year. Ed Burns (who co-wrote a lot of the series) used to work as a Baltimore PD detective, and the technical advisor for the first two seasons was a Baltimore police commander.
A lot of the plots on The Wire are based on actual cases and occurrences. In some cases quite loosely, in others not so much. It's a depressingly realistic show.
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.
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"
I bet most people thought the spying was for terrorists.
One of the principal mechanisms used in the USA to maintain its system of oligarchy / tyranny is distraction of the population via "culture war" issues and identity politics.
As long as people vote based on who they'd rather have a beer with, or based on issues like homosexuality and religion, they will not vote based on issues of social justice, economic well being, or against the politics of corruption.
The culture war and identity politics are a classic divide and conquer technique. It's used because it works.
I note the above digression in this thread -- which incidentally is higher upvoted than the present thread -- wherein people marvel at how similar the recent abuses are to the plot of the TV show "The Wire".
>there is nothing you can do about these things.
It's gonna take generations of work to resolve it, but there's absolutely a way out of this. We may never find it, though.
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.
This gives the criminal justice system considerable latitude to select and prioritise certain cases over others.
How are these decisions made?
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?
When it's convenient for the career of the person with their finger on the button.
> 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?
Quite the opposite, we can be sure that they do play a role. When you get to pick and choose your targets, it's a foregone conclusion that the targets you pick will be selected because of some criteria beyond the fact that they are merely in violation of the law.
"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."
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.
Before the leak -- nothing probably. It would have revealed the existence of the program.
Now -- sure! They could just come knocking to the door. This is dark side of the leaks in way. If they know we know, they they can expand the use of the tool. (Or rather I should say this is the dark side of apathy to the information in the leaks, now they now public doesn't care enough).
tomato, tomahto -- your comment does make me wonder just how much the NSA contracts out its surveillance though. Remember, Snowden was working for Booz Allen Hamilton, not the NSA.
Words mean things. They form the basis of our laws.
It is legal for a private spook to be hired by private persons or corporations to spy on others. It is illegal for a spook of any flavor to be hired by the government to spy on USians without a warrant or similar device.
Your last statement is really what all the fuss is about, though -- the government is trying to contravene how most sane people would interpret the Constitution, and legalize such activities.
> "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."
This is interesting, as it's basically an admission that Aaron Swartz-style prosecutorial bullying is not limited to just computer-related cases.
>This is interesting, as it's basically an admission that Aaron Swartz-style prosecutorial bullying is not limited to just computer-related cases.
I guess I always took it for granted that prosecutorial bullying is ever-present. It's interesting to come face-to-face with the reality that it's not part of everybody's worldview that the State is 'out to get you'. (no sarcasm)
I think it is less nefarious than that - it feels more like the problems that arise from fixing bugs in code. We've all encountered this - you fix one bug and it breaks 3 other things, because of unexpected/unintended consequences. Something else was relying on the broken code to work right. Systems thinking is just plain hard...
Unlikely. "Your honor, I should get a new trial because, in addition to the evidence that was apparently quite sufficient to convict me, it turns out they also had an illegal wiretap recording of me arranging the buy."
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.
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.
Because SOD has more investigative inputs than just the NSA, and also because they are not required to track only metadata for foreigners.
More mundane (and perhaps more likely) is that the source data for that kind of tip comes from wiretaps from existing open investigations. You might not get probable cause for a search based on the wiretap data alone, so SOD gets the local cops to alert on the car instead and "start" the follow-up investigation.
Suppose you had enough (meta)data on a particular user, if that user spent a disproportionate amount of time at a specific truck stop, it wouldn't take too long to extract that from your data.
It feels like in a world where people were generally interested in solving the issues with the drug trade the DEA wouldn't need to exist. It's something that should be solvable.
People will take recreational drugs, so obviously the solution is not to create an organisation to fight that. There has to be a safe source for these drugs that plays nicely with society and the political system. Do you have any good recommendations for information regarding places where this has been tried in earnest?
You're welcome. I agree. Since the dawn of time humans have wanted to alter their consciousness.
Glenn Greenwald has a great paper about drug decriminalization in Portugal. Lots of shocking graphs and statistics. The digital version is legally available online for free.
Unfortunately that's about the only resource I can think of when it comes to drug legalization/decriminalization in an actual real world environment. I'm hoping to see some papers in the next couple years about marijuana legalization in Washington and Colorado.
This is only semi-related, but Vangard has a really fascinating documentary on prescription drug abuse/doctor shopping in Florida you might find interesting. It's called the Oxycontin Express. Basically people go down to Florida, get a whole bunch of prescriptions for Oxycontin and then resell the pills in Kentucky and other States at a ridiculous profit. Here's a link to an online copy of it.
"Unfortunately that's about the only resource I can think of when it comes to drug legalization/decriminalization in an actual real world environment."
Marijuana is effectively legal in the Netherlands. (Technically illegal, but "tolerated")
Due to a loophole, for a year you could legally buy psilocybin mushrooms in the UK, in "head shops," on market stalls, online, anywhere, with zero regulation. It was fine. The government eventually banned them out of embarrassment. The public information posters announcing the upcoming ban had a rainbow coloured fractal background. It was pretty funny.
I haven't finished reading the whole thing yet (half way through) but that was exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks again.
One thing I don't understand is what happens to the supply line the decriminalisation case. Obviously trafficking is still illegal but is still happening. I guess there's still the same amount of money running back to the drug cartels.
"It feels like in a world where people were generally interested in solving the issues with the drug trade the DEA wouldn't need to exist."
Drug prohibition has never really been about solving the problems society faces with drugs. In the early days when cocaine and heroin were first made illegal, the argument was overtly racist. Black cocaine users would be more accurate with a gun, would go into a frenzied state where they attack white women, and would be difficult to stop even when shot in the chest. Philipino immigrants were bringing their bad opium habits with them, and heroin was marketed by a German company. Marijuana was said to cause white women to want to have sex with black men, and good white boys were being corrupted by Mexicans who gave them marijuana.
In this day and age the war on drugs is not overtly racist (but it just happens to disproportionately affect black communities -- coincidence, really!), but we now have a host of new reasons for it. Drugs are an easy way to terrify a population that grew up with war on drugs propaganda, and politicians looking for a few more votes can easily play up their "tough on crime" stance with drugs. Deploying soldiers to arrest suspected drug dealers is the norm, and police forces wanted to build a paramilitary wing can always turn to drug crime as a justification for it. Pharmaceutical companies love the war on drugs because it inflates the demand for prescription medications; a prominent example is methamphetamine, the supposed scourge that also happens to be prescribed as a treatment for narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD (you can bet that the pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine is cleaner and purer than the stuff you buy at a truck stop). Alcohol and tobacco companies lobby in favor of the war on drugs (ironically), for obvious reasons.
So really, to understand the war on drugs you just need to change your perspective. Do not think in terms of solving the problems associated with drugs, because that is little more than a facade. Think in terms of money and power, which are the real purpose of the war on drugs and the reason we will not see the DEA disbanded any time soon.
You don't have to go back that far for evidence that the "War on Drugs" is racist. The phrase itself was coined for Nixon's first term, where the southern strategy was first used.
In the 80ies Zurich, Switzerland had a really bad problem with Heroin addicts and the related crimes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platzspitz_park). The problem went away completely and instantly when the state began issuing Heroin to addicted people in a controlled environment. Now that park is back to being one of the nicest places in the city.
The english Wikipedia article unfortunately doesn't talk about that program but only about "... and in 1992, police moved in to clear up the park..." which did clean the park but did nothing to solve the problem - the addicts and associated crime just crossed the river.
The only real fix for the issue was to destroy the market by just handing out the drug freely.
Seriously though, I wonder what will happen to the prescription/drugstore model if full drug legalization ever took place. It's an interesting question - you can get cocaine or heroin walking in off the street, but you need a doctor's prescription for some Xanax or Aderall? Would everything go over the counter? Is that wise?
To be honest, I don't know. This is an interesting problem. I do know that a lot of people get hooked on Oxycotin and then turn to heroin for a variety of reasons. Though if heroin was legal it could be manufactured in a sterile environment where you could probably get like 99% purity or something ridiculous like that. It's relatively easy to get a prescription for whatever you want. Especially in States like Florida that don't check if you're doctor shopping.
There are also legal drugs that have similar effects to things like Adderall. A lot of people don't know about them or use them because they haven't been researched as much and come in powder form.
At the very least I think that you shouldn't be put in prison for carrying pills without a prescription.
You might find this Vice article interesting. It talks about how Oxycotin is essentially legal heroin.
I say we should take it slow when it comes to legalization. Perhaps start with things that are found in nature. Marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, being legally able to harvest the opium from poppy seed plants, etc.
>Though if heroin was legal it could be manufactured in a sterile environment where you could probably get like 99% purity or something ridiculous like that.
This already happens. Diamorphine (heroin) is commonly used as a painkiller in hospitals. If you've ever been seriously injured and wound up in hospital with a tube going into your arm attached to a button which gives you a dose of painkiller, limited to something like 3 presses an hour, then you've probably taken heroin, likely in large amounts. The nurse may well have called it "morphine" to avoid scaring you.
Famously, "Heroin" was originally a trademark of the Bayer company.
EDIT: apparently this is only true in the UK. This might be why we don't have the fancy modern opiates here, oxycontin etc.
You are correct. I forgot about our friends across the pond. I believe I read heroin was supposed to be a less addictive alternative of morphine. I don't know much about opioids, I wonder what the breakdown in pricing is between commercial, hospital heroin versus something Oxycontin. I'm guessing it's probably cheaper to produce hospital heroin and drug companies can't compete with it.
Also consider that the US army burns the enormous afghan poppy harvest every summer while big pharma synthesises its opiate molecules at great expense.
Probably a combination of the sheer volume of the drug trade (you can't catch everyone) coupled with the high demands of the market (busting one cartel would cause a supply "vacuum" that would be quickly filled).
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.
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 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.
Not long before the NSA story broke in June I recall a few quickly forgotten stories about the IRS reading people's emails without warrants, and monitoring transactions and social media to find people cheating on their taxes.
Original headline mentioned the specific allegation that the DEA was using this warrantless information to springboard investigations into previously unsuspected persons.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Off-topic, but still interesting in context of social networks as a leakage vector:
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 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.
There have been some half-serious discussions about this elsewhere. The idea is to start flooding the web with encrypted traffic, which is supposedly enough of a red flag in and of itself for the NSA to consider it worth storing. The back-of-the-napkin math predicts that if you do enough of this, they'll be unable to store all of it.
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.
Look at these downvotes for disagreements. There's nothing I've said that warrants the downvotes.
You're arguing that breaking the fundamental principles of both law enforcement and the right to a fair trial is "not troubling".
You have every right to do that (and nobody should downvote you for that), if you argue in favor of a much more repressive legal regime than the one we currently have in all Western democracies. But instead, you just insult people ("hysteria", "paranoid") who might not agree with arguments you don't even bother to present.
This is evidence that FBI, DEA, and other agencies, at multiple levels of government, are colluding with dragnet surveillance operations. How much worse would you say it should get before it's not "paranoid?"
I did contribute something, the point that drugs are not being planted on people. The parallel construction wouldn't work if the suspects were not actually committing crimes. Nobody wants to talk about it I guess however, too busy getting their fix on today's outrage porn.
"The parallel construction wouldn't work if the suspects were not actually committing crimes."
See "Three Felonies a Day"[1]
Also, note the following quote from the original article:
"most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial"
In fact, something like 90% or more of people accused of crimes in the US never get a trial, because they plead guilty. They plead guilty because prosecutors pile on so many charges that the defendants are afraid to risk life in jail if they happen to lose (in a judicial system that's usually stacked against them). Defending a case in Federal court is also incredibly expensive and traumatic. See the Aaron Swartz case for good examples of all of the above.
The thing is, as these things come out, it turns paranoia into reality. I preferred being paranoid, rather than correct, myself.
Maybe you are getting downvotes because you seem to be endorsing illegal activities by the federal authorities? It is a crime to fail to divulge the source of evidence, or worse, outright lie about it, is it not?
I am not sure it is illegal to obtain information through lying and deceit, as police do this all the time, especially if the information is not used in a trial. If there is enough "clean" evidence to go to trial, I am not sure there is any reason to doubt the validity of the arrest, trial or the conviction of the defendant.
The collection of data may be illegal, and that is worth investigating. The collection of information of data of innocent people, people with no probable cause they are committing crimes or without a warrant, is not OK.
> The collection of information of data of innocent people, people with no probable cause they are committing crimes or without a warrant, is not OK.
Aye, there's the rub. The collection of the trawl data invariably will uncover some crimes being committed by people who are not suspected of committing crimes. In other words, search and seizure without probable cause. Now it appears this illegally begotten evidence is being used to point federal law enforcement at targets. Do you really not see a problem with this?
I see a problem with collecting information without probable cause or a warrant. Though I may not agree with drug laws, I do not see the problem with convicting individuals who are committing crimes regardless of how that information was collected unless the act of collecting the information affects the information (like confessions under duress). For example I am somewhat appalled at FBI deploying malware, but I hope they do not let child pornographers walk free because of the FBI's actions.
>I see a problem with collecting information without probable cause or a warrant.
>I do not see the problem with convicting individuals who are committing crimes regardless of how that information was collected...
The second case is not possible without making an exception to the first, which then leads to the selective application of fundamental rights and that is paradoxical.
Mass surveilance will undoubtedly unearth crimes that would not otherwise come under suspicion in a free society. By definition, the surveilance will also target those who have commmited no crimes. The question is whether that risk is worth it. The Fourth amendment says no. Making exceptions for certain classes of people (even if probable criminals) is just a slippery slope.
I interpreted it as meaning that btipling does not like such information collection but as long as they're doing it, any criminals they catch should still be prosecuted anyway. I think this is a terrible idea, but there seem to be many out there who do not consider the consequences and think that people should be put in prison regardless of any potential police actions that got them there.
Do you not see the problem with allowing them to convict people based on illegal investigations? If they are allowed to use illegal methods and still get a conviction, they will continue to do so. Cases should be thrown out when the investigation was done illegally, as a way to strongly ensure such things do not happen. A guilty person going free is bad, but far worse is a rogue police force with no regard for the law and the good and proper limits placed upon them to prevent abuse.
Well, the problem is that you can't have a "guilty people only" filter on a data trawling system. You have no idea who the guilty people are, that is why you are trawling the data. So, I guess what you have to ask yourself, is if the fourth amendment is worth sacrificing in order to catch drug dealers.
I don't think it is, and I hope most Americans agree.
<edit> replacing drug dealer with terrorist doesn't change my view on the matter</edit>
> I see a problem with collecting information without probable cause or a warrant. Though I may not agree with drug laws, I do not see the problem with convicting individuals who are committing crimes regardless of how that information was collected unless the act of collecting the information affects the information (like confessions under duress).
You effectively contradict yourself: you can't say "no", reward them for doing it, and expect it to stop.
So effectively, your first sentence carries no weight, because you don't believe in enforcing it... you believe in rewarding law enforcement for doing the exact opposite.
I don't even see that as a problem. If we accept the use of upvotes to signal agreement, it is only natural that downvotes will come to signal the opposite.
The problem is that this produces an echo chamber, the things that majority 'agrees' with hits the top, and the things that folks 'disagree' with sink out of site. Upvoting/Downvoting comments shouldnt really be based on 'aggreement' but instead based on 'interesting', upvoting interesting or thought provoking comments regardless of wether you agree or not leads to more interesting conversation...
Using upvotes freely but downvotes sparingly produces something else (which I cannot mention by name without this comment going 'dead'). The willingness to disagree is a large part of what makes HN what it is, and I think that downvotes help foster the sort of atmosphere in which that is possible.
Really, contrarian viewpoints are hardly an endangered animal here.
