The FBI Allowed Informants to Commit 5,658 Crimes in 2011 Alone

Using a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, USA Today has obtained a copy of the FBI’s 2011 Report and has unearthed some very troubling facts. For starters, the FBI granted its informants permission to break the law 5,658 in one year, which amounts to a shocking 15 times a day. While I think we all understand that some of this activity is necessary in law enforcement, this seems to be a pretty lofty number for an agency supposedly so concerned with the rule of law.

More importantly, I think we might all feel a little bit better about the whole thing if the FBI actually nabbed a single person responsible for let’s say the destruction of the U.S. economy, war crimes, IRS targeting, Benghazi or spying and lying to Congress? Nope, no big bankers are in jail, nor any high-profile politicians or defense contractors. None of them. So the FBI is allowing folks to break the law at least 15 times a day to catch who exactly? Aaron Swartz?

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.

The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.

Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.

USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI’s 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau’s sources were known to have committed without the government’s permission.

Now here is where it gets really scary…

Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year. The FBI was responsible for only about 10% of the criminal cases prosecuted in federal court in 2011, and federal prosecutions are, in turn, vastly outnumbered by criminal cases filed by state and local authorities, who often rely on their own networks of sources.

So what percentage of all criminal activity committed in the U.S. is actually sanctioned by law enforcement in one way or another? We need to ask ourselves this question.

Justice Department rules put tight limits on when and how those informants can engage in what the agency calls “otherwise illegal activity.” Agents are not allowed to authorize violent crimes under any circumstances; the most serious crimes must first be approved by federal prosecutors. Still, the department’s Inspector General concluded in 2005 that the FBI routinely failed to follow many of those rules.

The rules require the FBI — but not other law enforcement agencies — to report the total number of crimes authorized by its agents each year. USA TODAY asked the FBI for all of the reports it had prepared since 2006, but FBI officials said they could locate only one, which they released after redacting nearly all of the details.

Maybe one day, after 10 million crimes are sanctioned, the FBI might actually catch someone that matters. Some powerful, rather than just picking on the weak and the poor.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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2 thoughts on “The FBI Allowed Informants to Commit 5,658 Crimes in 2011 Alone”

  1. Feds are Suspects in New Malware That Attacks Tor Anonymity

    Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.

    The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.

    “It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsrklevich. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”

    If Tsrklevich and other researchers are right, the code is likely the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007.

    Court documents and FBI files released under the FOIA have described the CIPAV as software the FBI can deliver through a browser exploit to gathers information from the target’s machine and send it to an FBI server in Virginia. The FBI has been using the CIPAV since 2002 against hackers, online sexual predator, extortionists and others, primarily to identify suspects who are disguising their location using proxy servers or anonymity services, like Tor.

    The code has been used sparingly in the past, which kept it from leaking out and being analyzed or added to anti-virus databases.

    http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/freedom-hosting/

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  2. Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

    (Reuters) – 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.”

    THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

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