“This is, literally, the
militarization of the police.”
Notes from the Police State - The Navy’s primary law enforcement agency has been conducting illegal surveillance operations against countless civilian computers for the past several years, a federal appeals court found last week.
Documents obtained by the Courthouse News Service reveal a 2010 case in which a Naval Criminal Investigative Service Agent in Georgia used an advanced surveillance software program known as “RoundUp” to scan every civilian computer in Washington state for child pornography.
NCIS Agent Steve Logan was able to locate one suspect, Washington-resident Michael Dreyer, and immediately turned the information over to police, who subpoenaed Dreyer’s internet service provider with the FBI. Dreyer was charged in federal court after the officers, and Homeland Security at a later date, used the illegally-obtained data to acquire a search warrant for his house reports Infowars News.
After Dreyer’s lawyers questioned the search warrant’s legitimacy, Navy representatives claimed that the initial surveillance operation was justified due to Washington state’s heavy “saturation” of Navy personnel and Dreyer’s prior military service.
A panel of the Ninth District Court of Appeals in San Francisco disagreed, stating that the search never targeted specific military bases or personnel but instead searched millions of computers not associated with the military.
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“To accept that position would mean that NCIS agents could, for example, routinely stop suspected drunk drivers in downtown Seattle on the off-chance that a driver is a member of the military, and then turn over all information collected about civilians to the Seattle Police Department for prosecution,” wrote Judge Marsha Berzon.
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While possession of child pornography is undoubtedly the most vile of offenses, the government’s use of dragnet surveillance against millions of Americans not suspected of a crime still remains unconstitutional.
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“This is, literally, the militarization of the police,” defense attorney Erik Levin told the San Francisco Chronicle. “They have enough funding that they can go out and stray from the core mission of national security and get into local law enforcement.”
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"Corruptus in Extremis"
Feds direct agents to cover up program
used to investigate Americans
(Reuters News) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial.
If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records.
The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"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."
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| This is what happens when people blindly accept authority. |
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