DEA no accountability

Earlier this year, I highlighted the fact that unconstitutional surveillance was in many ways birthed by the pointless, misguided and utterly failed, “War on Drugs.” Here’s an excerpt from that post, titled, How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11:

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

In light of this, it should surprise no one that the DEA continues to use unconstitutional, “classified” methods when targeting suspects. Since the collection of this evidence would be questioned in a courtroom, the DEA suggests using a procedure known as “parallel construction” to avoid any controversy in the public record. This is how it works.

From Muckrock:

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