Written by two attorneys.
"This is an astonishing development in the U.S., a nation that, until recently, carefully restricted the power of its domestic spying agencies by forcing them to submit narrow requests for spying authority to a court, which would issue a warrant if the government showed probable cause to believe that the surveillance target was engaged in some sort of wrongdoing. At this point, it’s clear those limits are gone. The United States is now a mass surveillance state.
In last week’s press conference, President Obama reassured the nation that “America isn’t interested in spying on ordinary people.” In other words, do not worry, because the information will only be used for narrow counterterrorism or broader foreign intelligence purposes. But the latest revelations show that these assurances too are a lie. Under current U.S. surveillance law, the NSA may share with domestic law enforcement information obtained both through authorized surveillance, and information unlawfully but unintentionally collected, if it contains evidence of a crime. This rule was worrisome when the NSA was only conducting targeted surveillance of foreign powers. It is terrifying now that the NSA scans virtually all American cross-border communications. And this is especially true in light of the recent reports showing that any number of other three-letter agencies are howling for access to NSA data for use in investigations of Americans’ drug use, tax evasion, and even copyright infringement. Usually, these agencies would need at least warrants based on probable cause that an individual was committing a crime before they could obtain the contents of our communications, and would need to certify to a public court that email or phone records are relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation before it could collect such traffic data. But if they get their hands on NSA data, all these bothersome civil liberties protections simply vanish.
Which brings us to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). As we noted previously, the DEA has a secret division called the Special Operations Division or SOD. The SOD receives intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records from its partner agencies, of which the NSA is just one, to distribute to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The SOD gets information from the NSA and shares it with, among other agencies, the IRS.
And this is where things get truly ugly. When agents receive SOD information and rely on it to trigger investigations, they are directed to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.” IRS agents receiving SOD data, which presumably can include information from the NSA, have been similarly instructed. They are instructed, in other words, to create a fake investigative file, and to lie. To lie, in particular, to defense lawyers and to judges, about the source of the evidence used in criminal prosecutions."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifergranick/2013/08/14/nsa-dea-irs-lie-about-fact-that-americans-are-routinely-spied-on-by-our-government-time-for-a-special-prosecutor-2/
| 
