TrollfaceDeux
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Justice for Zimmerman
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
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TrollfaceDeux
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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TrollfaceDeux
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Loser Araysar
Chief Russia Reporter. Stock Pals CEO. Head of AI.
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remember when that idiot Chaos told us we had nothing to worry about from the NSA?
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...e_state_tango/
8/11/13 Print: ?TheNSA-DEA policestatetango? Print - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...te_tango/print1/4
(Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...e_state_tango/
SATURDAY, AUG 10, 2013 4:30 PM UTC
The NSA-DEA police state tango
This week's DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our
justice system
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
So the paranoid hippie pot dealer
you knew in college was right all
along: The feds really were after
him. In the latest post-Snowden
bombshell about the extent and
consequences of government
spy ing, we learned from Reuters
reporters this week that a secret
branch of the DEA called the
Special Operations Division - so
secret that nearly every thing
about it is classified, including
the size of its budget and the
location of its office - has been
using the immense pools of data
collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI
and other intelligence agencies to
go after American citizens for
ordinary drug crimes. Law
enforcement agencies,
meanwhile, have been coached to
conceal the existence of the
program and the source of the
information by creating what's
called a "parallel construction," a
fake or misleading trail of
evidence. So no one in the court sy stem - not the defendant or the defense attorney , not even the prosecutor or
the judge - can ever trace the case back to its true origins.
On one hand, we all knew more revelations were coming, and the idea that the government would go after drug
suspects with the same dubious extrajudicial methods used to pursue terrorism suspects is a classic and not
terribly surprising example of mission creep. Both groups have been held up as bogeymen for y ears, in order to
scare the public into accepting ever nastier and more repressive laws. This gives government officials another
chance to talk to us in their stern grown-up voices about how this isn't civics class, and sometimes they have to
bend the rules to catch Really Bad People.
On the other hand, this is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that
has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law8/11/13 Print: ?TheNSA-DEA policestatetango? Print - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...te_tango/print2/4
professor who spent 18 y ears as a federal judge and cannot be accused of being a radical, told Reuters she finds
the DEA story more troubling than any thing in Edward Snowden's NSA leaks. It's the first clear evidence that the
"special rules" and disregard for constitutional law that have characterized the hunt for so-called terrorists have
crept into the domestic criminal justice sy stem on a significant scale. "It sounds like they are phony ing up
investigations," she said. Maybe this is how a police state comes to America: Not with a bang, but with a parallel
construction.
At this point, there are a lot more questions than answers about what Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney
Hanni Fakhoury has dubbed the DEA's "intelligence laundering" operation. Here are three big ones: How far
does all this go? Where does it stop? And why doesn't the general public seem to give a damn? That last question
partly reflects the fact that the NSA has evidently been tracking everybody 's cell phone calls and emails, and
that sounds scary . It's easy for many middle-class Americans to convince themselves that they have nothing to
fear from the DEA, even if it has morphed into a dark secret-police force we're barely aware of. As revolutionary
and noted hypocrite Thomas Jefferson once observed, the spread of ty ranny only requires our silence.
Millions of people have been sent to prison on drug-war convictions over the last 20 y ears. Most of those people
have been poor and black. We will never know how many of those cases resulted from secret evidence collected
by spy agencies, but it might not be a small number. One of the Reuters articles that broke this story quotes DEA
officials as say ing that the "parallel construction" tactic had been used by the agency "virtually every day since
the 1990s." Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of the recent bestseller "The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," sent me an email from her family vacation to say that these
revelations "certainly lead one reasonably to wonder how many people - especially poor people of color, who
have been the primary targets in the drug war - have been spied on by the DEA in the name of national
security ."
From the outset, there have been moral, philosophical and technological connections between the war on drugs
and the war on terror. Both campaigns involve the unprecedented expansion of executive power and the use of
high-tech paramilitary policing. Both involve "adjusting" our supposedly cherished constitutional rights and
privileges in the name of protecting us from evil. Both involve targets that are easy to demonize and marginalize,
and both embody troubling questions about race, class and power. Most important of all, both conflicts are
immensely expensive and shockingly self-destructive. If these parallel wars had been designed to fail - designed
to create a state of permanent crisis, empower and enrich a caste of warrior-bureaucrats and undercut
constitutional democracy - they could hardly have been designed more perfectly .
In the recent documentary "How to Make Money Selling Drugs," David Simon of "The Wire" and "Treme"
describes the United States as a society that "hunts down and incarcerates poor people." Michelle Alexander's
book depicts the mass imprisonment of African Americans as a new sy stem of racial control that is more
efficient than the old one precisely because it is veiled by official colorblindness. As investigative journalist
Jeremy Scahill and others have documented, the borderless global war against al-Qaida has only widened and
deepened mistrust of America all over the Arab and Muslim world, by too often resembling an indiscriminate
campaign of murder and torture against civilians. Anwar al-Awlaki was a moderate Virginia imam who once
gave a speech at the Pentagon, and was driven to the other side by his perception that the U.S. was waging war
on Islam.
Now we can see that these two arms of the national-security octopus are intertwined as well. As John Shiffman,
David Ingram and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported in a series of articles over the past week, the DEA's Special
Operations Division - originally created in 1994 to battle Latin American drug cartels - routinely funnels
"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." We're talking about8/11/13 Print: ?TheNSA-DEA policestatetango? Print - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...te_tango/print3/4
data collected by all the clandestine but theoretically legal means that Edward Snowden's leaks have told us
about, data gathered in the name of combating terrorism that ends up being used for entirely different purposes.
These are ordinary drug prosecutions with no links to terrorism or other national security issues, but in which
the information that led to the original arrest is treated as a state secret.
Documents uncovered by Reuters specifically instruct federal agents and local police to "omit the SOD's
involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony ."
Instead, cops and agents are told to "recreate the investigative trail" to make it look like regular police work.
This is "parallel construction," a marvelous and terrify ing bureaucratic neologism that in plain English appears
to mean ly ing. For instance, it might mean claiming that a traffic stop that led to a drug bust stemmed from a
broken taillight or an illegal left turn, rather than an NSA intercept, an overseas wiretap or a CIA informant.
Fakhoury 's recent post on the EFF's DeepLinks blog explores various way s that these deliberate deceptions
appear to violate the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and undercut the crucial role of legal scrutiny entrusted to
the courts. They prevent judges from assessing the constitutionality of government surveillance (since they
never even find out about it), and deprive criminal defendants of the venerable common-law right to examine
and challenge the evidence against them. He also makes the broader point that the NSA's enormous trove of
surveillance data has provoked an "unquenchable thirst for access" among other law enforcement agencies,
whose leaders imagine all the wonderful things they could do with it.
All this underscores, of course, that while drug-war prosecutions are supposed to be just like other kinds of
criminal cases, in practice they have a special status and are treated differently . But one may still ask, given that
this administration and the last one (and quite likely the one before that) have repeatedly misled the public
about the existence, extent and scope of surveillance programs, whether there is any reason to believe that the
pipeline of secret data and the manipulation of the justice sy stem is limited to drug cases. Should we be
confident that NSA intercepts and foreign-intelligence wiretaps and "parallel construction" will never be used to
build criminal cases against hackers, leakers, Occupy activists, investigative journalists, unfriendly pundits and
any other dissidents on the left or the right whom the government decides to persecute?
"We have no assurances about any of that," Fakhoury told me by phone from his San Francisco office. "As
information about these programs has unfolded and we keep learning more, we also see that at every step along
the way the government has justified the program through fancy word games and legal language that does not
mean what it appears to mean. Right now the government hasn't done any thing to give anyone faith or trust that
the limits they claim are actually in place."
In theory , the DEA disclosures could and should have outraged Americans across the political spectrum,
especially when added to all the other bad things we've learned about our government this y ear. Except that
blind partisan loyalty now trumps every thing in national politics, and almost nothing about our country 's slide
toward soft police state still shocks anybody . Conservatives only care about civil liberties when they affect rich
and/or rural white folks, and support any degree of ty ranny when it comes to conducting the drug war and
locking up poor people. As Bruce A. Dixon of Black Agenda Report notes, liberals of all races would have howled
about this stuff under Bush-Cheney , but with a black Democrat in the White House they make excuses or pretend
it isn't happening.
Maybe we're all just dazed by the tide of NSA revelations, distracted by celebrity sex scandals and the idiotic
infighting of Washington, and insulated by the techno-workaholic bubble of ordinary life, in which America still
seems like a calm and normal place. If I had to break it down, I would guess that half the population clings to the
optimistic belief that reasonable people are in charge and things will work out for the best, while the other half
has become entirely cynical. I mean, who still thinks that drug dealers have rights? That's so 20th century ! The
rest of us gave up those delusions when we got iPhones.
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...e_state_tango/
8/11/13 Print: ?TheNSA-DEA policestatetango? Print - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...te_tango/print1/4
(Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...e_state_tango/
SATURDAY, AUG 10, 2013 4:30 PM UTC
The NSA-DEA police state tango
This week's DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our
justice system
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
So the paranoid hippie pot dealer
you knew in college was right all
along: The feds really were after
him. In the latest post-Snowden
bombshell about the extent and
consequences of government
spy ing, we learned from Reuters
reporters this week that a secret
branch of the DEA called the
Special Operations Division - so
secret that nearly every thing
about it is classified, including
the size of its budget and the
location of its office - has been
using the immense pools of data
collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI
and other intelligence agencies to
go after American citizens for
ordinary drug crimes. Law
enforcement agencies,
meanwhile, have been coached to
conceal the existence of the
program and the source of the
information by creating what's
called a "parallel construction," a
fake or misleading trail of
evidence. So no one in the court sy stem - not the defendant or the defense attorney , not even the prosecutor or
the judge - can ever trace the case back to its true origins.
On one hand, we all knew more revelations were coming, and the idea that the government would go after drug
suspects with the same dubious extrajudicial methods used to pursue terrorism suspects is a classic and not
terribly surprising example of mission creep. Both groups have been held up as bogeymen for y ears, in order to
scare the public into accepting ever nastier and more repressive laws. This gives government officials another
chance to talk to us in their stern grown-up voices about how this isn't civics class, and sometimes they have to
bend the rules to catch Really Bad People.
On the other hand, this is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that
has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law8/11/13 Print: ?TheNSA-DEA policestatetango? Print - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...te_tango/print2/4
professor who spent 18 y ears as a federal judge and cannot be accused of being a radical, told Reuters she finds
the DEA story more troubling than any thing in Edward Snowden's NSA leaks. It's the first clear evidence that the
"special rules" and disregard for constitutional law that have characterized the hunt for so-called terrorists have
crept into the domestic criminal justice sy stem on a significant scale. "It sounds like they are phony ing up
investigations," she said. Maybe this is how a police state comes to America: Not with a bang, but with a parallel
construction.
At this point, there are a lot more questions than answers about what Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney
Hanni Fakhoury has dubbed the DEA's "intelligence laundering" operation. Here are three big ones: How far
does all this go? Where does it stop? And why doesn't the general public seem to give a damn? That last question
partly reflects the fact that the NSA has evidently been tracking everybody 's cell phone calls and emails, and
that sounds scary . It's easy for many middle-class Americans to convince themselves that they have nothing to
fear from the DEA, even if it has morphed into a dark secret-police force we're barely aware of. As revolutionary
and noted hypocrite Thomas Jefferson once observed, the spread of ty ranny only requires our silence.
Millions of people have been sent to prison on drug-war convictions over the last 20 y ears. Most of those people
have been poor and black. We will never know how many of those cases resulted from secret evidence collected
by spy agencies, but it might not be a small number. One of the Reuters articles that broke this story quotes DEA
officials as say ing that the "parallel construction" tactic had been used by the agency "virtually every day since
the 1990s." Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of the recent bestseller "The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," sent me an email from her family vacation to say that these
revelations "certainly lead one reasonably to wonder how many people - especially poor people of color, who
have been the primary targets in the drug war - have been spied on by the DEA in the name of national
security ."
From the outset, there have been moral, philosophical and technological connections between the war on drugs
and the war on terror. Both campaigns involve the unprecedented expansion of executive power and the use of
high-tech paramilitary policing. Both involve "adjusting" our supposedly cherished constitutional rights and
privileges in the name of protecting us from evil. Both involve targets that are easy to demonize and marginalize,
and both embody troubling questions about race, class and power. Most important of all, both conflicts are
immensely expensive and shockingly self-destructive. If these parallel wars had been designed to fail - designed
to create a state of permanent crisis, empower and enrich a caste of warrior-bureaucrats and undercut
constitutional democracy - they could hardly have been designed more perfectly .
In the recent documentary "How to Make Money Selling Drugs," David Simon of "The Wire" and "Treme"
describes the United States as a society that "hunts down and incarcerates poor people." Michelle Alexander's
book depicts the mass imprisonment of African Americans as a new sy stem of racial control that is more
efficient than the old one precisely because it is veiled by official colorblindness. As investigative journalist
Jeremy Scahill and others have documented, the borderless global war against al-Qaida has only widened and
deepened mistrust of America all over the Arab and Muslim world, by too often resembling an indiscriminate
campaign of murder and torture against civilians. Anwar al-Awlaki was a moderate Virginia imam who once
gave a speech at the Pentagon, and was driven to the other side by his perception that the U.S. was waging war
on Islam.
Now we can see that these two arms of the national-security octopus are intertwined as well. As John Shiffman,
David Ingram and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported in a series of articles over the past week, the DEA's Special
Operations Division - originally created in 1994 to battle Latin American drug cartels - routinely funnels
"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." We're talking about8/11/13 Print: ?TheNSA-DEA policestatetango? Print - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...te_tango/print3/4
data collected by all the clandestine but theoretically legal means that Edward Snowden's leaks have told us
about, data gathered in the name of combating terrorism that ends up being used for entirely different purposes.
These are ordinary drug prosecutions with no links to terrorism or other national security issues, but in which
the information that led to the original arrest is treated as a state secret.
Documents uncovered by Reuters specifically instruct federal agents and local police to "omit the SOD's
involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony ."
Instead, cops and agents are told to "recreate the investigative trail" to make it look like regular police work.
This is "parallel construction," a marvelous and terrify ing bureaucratic neologism that in plain English appears
to mean ly ing. For instance, it might mean claiming that a traffic stop that led to a drug bust stemmed from a
broken taillight or an illegal left turn, rather than an NSA intercept, an overseas wiretap or a CIA informant.
Fakhoury 's recent post on the EFF's DeepLinks blog explores various way s that these deliberate deceptions
appear to violate the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and undercut the crucial role of legal scrutiny entrusted to
the courts. They prevent judges from assessing the constitutionality of government surveillance (since they
never even find out about it), and deprive criminal defendants of the venerable common-law right to examine
and challenge the evidence against them. He also makes the broader point that the NSA's enormous trove of
surveillance data has provoked an "unquenchable thirst for access" among other law enforcement agencies,
whose leaders imagine all the wonderful things they could do with it.
All this underscores, of course, that while drug-war prosecutions are supposed to be just like other kinds of
criminal cases, in practice they have a special status and are treated differently . But one may still ask, given that
this administration and the last one (and quite likely the one before that) have repeatedly misled the public
about the existence, extent and scope of surveillance programs, whether there is any reason to believe that the
pipeline of secret data and the manipulation of the justice sy stem is limited to drug cases. Should we be
confident that NSA intercepts and foreign-intelligence wiretaps and "parallel construction" will never be used to
build criminal cases against hackers, leakers, Occupy activists, investigative journalists, unfriendly pundits and
any other dissidents on the left or the right whom the government decides to persecute?
"We have no assurances about any of that," Fakhoury told me by phone from his San Francisco office. "As
information about these programs has unfolded and we keep learning more, we also see that at every step along
the way the government has justified the program through fancy word games and legal language that does not
mean what it appears to mean. Right now the government hasn't done any thing to give anyone faith or trust that
the limits they claim are actually in place."
In theory , the DEA disclosures could and should have outraged Americans across the political spectrum,
especially when added to all the other bad things we've learned about our government this y ear. Except that
blind partisan loyalty now trumps every thing in national politics, and almost nothing about our country 's slide
toward soft police state still shocks anybody . Conservatives only care about civil liberties when they affect rich
and/or rural white folks, and support any degree of ty ranny when it comes to conducting the drug war and
locking up poor people. As Bruce A. Dixon of Black Agenda Report notes, liberals of all races would have howled
about this stuff under Bush-Cheney , but with a black Democrat in the White House they make excuses or pretend
it isn't happening.
Maybe we're all just dazed by the tide of NSA revelations, distracted by celebrity sex scandals and the idiotic
infighting of Washington, and insulated by the techno-workaholic bubble of ordinary life, in which America still
seems like a calm and normal place. If I had to break it down, I would guess that half the population clings to the
optimistic belief that reasonable people are in charge and things will work out for the best, while the other half
has become entirely cynical. I mean, who still thinks that drug dealers have rights? That's so 20th century ! The
rest of us gave up those delusions when we got iPhones.
TrollfaceDeux
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
- 19,577
- 3,743
Loser Araysar
Chief Russia Reporter. Stock Pals CEO. Head of AI.
- 80,144
- 160,350
TrollfaceDeux
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
- 19,577
- 3,743
TrollfaceDeux
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
- 19,577
- 3,743
Loser Araysar
Chief Russia Reporter. Stock Pals CEO. Head of AI.
- 80,144
- 160,350
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/12/i_lo...g_russian_men/
While all men like a challenge, the average American man tends to stop pursuit once you indicate that you are repulsed by his presence. Russians, on the other hand, aren't going to let a little thing like your disinterest keep them from being your boyfriend. I've had male suitors who kept calling for years after I stopped picking up the phone. I've heard of guys crawling through windows and appearing naked in bedrooms. I had female friends who had no idea they were apparently someone's girlfriend. The American teachers at my language school had a phrase to describe dating Russian men. It was "No Means Yes, and Yes Means Anal."
While all men like a challenge, the average American man tends to stop pursuit once you indicate that you are repulsed by his presence. Russians, on the other hand, aren't going to let a little thing like your disinterest keep them from being your boyfriend. I've had male suitors who kept calling for years after I stopped picking up the phone. I've heard of guys crawling through windows and appearing naked in bedrooms. I had female friends who had no idea they were apparently someone's girlfriend. The American teachers at my language school had a phrase to describe dating Russian men. It was "No Means Yes, and Yes Means Anal."
TrollfaceDeux
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
- 19,577
- 3,743
- Status