During an interview with CNN this past week, a retired FBI counter-terrorism agent let it slip that the U.S. government is recording all cell phone conversations.
The interview concerned the FBI’s investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow, Katherine Russell, and what, if anything, she knew about the Boston Marathon bombings. The CNN panel speculated on the FBI’s efforts to determine if Russell were a part of the conspiracy....
The CNN host, Erin Burnett, thinking that the feds could gain access to Russell’s old voice mails but couldn’t actually listen to her old phone calls, observed, “there’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them.”
The former agent, Tim Clemente, disagreed:
No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.Burnett knew immediately that Clemente was referring to Russell’s old phone calls and asked incredulously, ” So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.”
Clemente answered, “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
...We have little time to turn this around. The enormous, unlawful power that the central government is accumulating is a real threat to the constitutional freedoms entrusted to us by our Founders.
◼ Congress Pressing Holder Over Use of NSA Info For Drug Busts- YID WITH LID
Three weeks ago Reuters revealed that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has created a special unit which illegally uses data from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to launch criminal investigations of Americans. Most of these investigations have little or nothing to do with the national security which was the rationale for obtaining the source information in the first place.
To hide the program they are teaching agents how to hide 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.This collection and use of personal data is much worse than the NSA scandal revealed in June. In that case while the ends (national security) may not have justified the means, but in this latest revelation there is no justification for either. It is an simply an "illegal search" for a criminal case. The DEA must know their methodology is tainted, why else would they be training their agents to cover it up?
"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."...
...The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security.
