Prosecutors Halt Vast, Likely Illegal DEA Wiretap Operation (usatoday.com) 69
schwit1 writes: Prosecutors in a Los Angeles suburb say they have dramatically scaled back a vast and legally questionable eavesdropping operation, built by federal drug agents, that once accounted for nearly a fifth of all U.S. wiretaps. The wiretapping, authorized by prosecutors and a single state-court judge in Riverside County, alarmed privacy advocates and even some U.S. Justice Department lawyers, who warned that it was likely illegal. An investigation last year by The Desert Sun and USA TODAY found that the operation almost certainly violated federal wiretapping laws, while using millions of secretly intercepted calls and texts to make hundreds of arrests nationwide. Riverside's district attorney, Mike Hestrin, acknowledged being concerned by the scope of that surveillance, and said he enacted "significant" reforms last summer to rein it in. Wiretap figures his office released this week offer the first evidence that the enormous eavesdropping program has wound down to more routine levels.
Re: Republicans don't give a damn about the law (Score:1)
Republicans since Eisenhower have had no respect for the law. Just look at Nixon that created the EPA. Even Nixon admitted that was executive overreach.
Re:Republicans don't give a damn about the law (Score:5, Insightful)
Paul Zellerbach, who instituted the wiretapping is a Republican.
But Mike Hestrin, who ousted him and is currently cleaning up his legacy, including the move to slash the wiretapping, is also a Republican.
So it looks to me like at least some Republicans give some sort of damn about the law.
(Not that I have any love of Republicans. Both major parties attract psychopaths - just different types.)
Republicans are often the only... (Score:2)
...politicians who are able to show any sense about criminal justice issues.
This isn't because they're any better on the issue. It's because they have the freedom to actually use their heads. Democrats are, in general, too terrified of being Willie Horton-ed to do anything but try and prove their tough on crime. Give the police anything they want, whore for the district attorneys and the prison guards, appoint prosecutors to the bench, etc., etc., etc. That's why Bill Clinton signed the (terrible) 1994
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I was thinking at first you were just a Democrat basher. But there is some truth here. Democrats do appear to be very skittish around appearing to be "soft on crime" as that's the most common accusation they face from opponents. So the puff up and try to look tough. However many of the really hard core anti-crime bills are introduced by Republicans first with Democrats falling in line later. Often when you get a Republican doing the right thing and reining in police power it's a middle of the road mode
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You can't tell anything at all about a person based upon the party they register with. Especially true with political office since they're often required to pick just one party if they want any chance of winning in their region or district.
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I'll wait patiently (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone responsible to even see a trial.
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https://technet.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
Re:I'll wait patiently (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I thought wiretapping is a crime (Score:2)
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More likely a lot of people will get retrials.
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Ramp Up Your Rhetoric Game (Score:3, Funny)
Outmaneuvering many thousands of drug peddlers is a feat of epic proportions. Those maniacs may well murder more sweet innocent citizens than all of the lunatics in the terror organizations in all nations combined. Selling or using illegal recreational pharmaceuticals fatally poisons billions... nay, TRILLIONS, of people annually! Those maimed or led to ruination is so many orders or magnitude higher it's beyond comprehension! /s
Re: NOT SO GOOD (Score:2, Insightful)
If the problem is illegal drugs then you have a pretty easy solution: legalize them.
Problem solved. And as an added bonus, you get a nice tax boost.
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Problem solved. And as an added bonus, you get a nice tax boost.
More like one problem solved, a new one created. By most reasonable metrics the new problems are smaller than the old one, so it's a net gain for society; but still hardly "problem solved".
Re: NOT SO GOOD (Score:2)
Taxing medicine twice is among the more evil things one can imagine.
Re:NOT SO GOOD (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.livescience.com/360... [livescience.com]
250k a year world wide. Hardly millions. How many simply because it is a black market and you have violence and poorly manufactured chemicals?
Wake the fuck up.
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This! This! But you forgot the most important part; authorities should be allowed to do anything if it ultimately protects the children! ;-)
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If they *say* it protects the children. Any actual benefit to any actual children is strictly optional.
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Don't try to get smart here, as a former president said: "either you are with the children or you are against the children!" (or something like that ;-)
"...to more routine levels." (Score:3)
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It's acceptable to your wife that you routinely sleep with your mistress? Got it.
(Had to reword that 4 times for the joke to come across.)
in other words.. (Score:1)
they got enough "evidence" to construct [wikipedia.org] the cases they were looking for (i.e. enough to make the agents in charge 'look good').. and of course, they only stopped once they themselves got caught... and it took them months, to do that.
The DEA has always led the attack on our rights (Score:4)
The DEA can go fuck themselves, as far as I'm concerned. Since their inception, they've been some of the worst abusers of the US population to date. They're huge proponents of such treats as early dawn no-knock raids, parallel construction (institutionalized perjury), the use of Stingray type devices, and the list goes on.
As soon as we end this neo-prohibitionist bullshit and the jackbooted thugs that get off on it, we can have a better shot of rebuilding our country.
Re:The DEA has always led the attack on our rights (Score:5, Insightful)
You can add property seizures without due process to the list, too.
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Asset forfeiture is very federal.
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/i... [fbi.gov]
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I seem to recall they were also the same rights-loving assholes that locked a guy in a cell for 3 days without food or water and he wasn't even charged with a crime!
Re:The DEA has always led the attack on our rights (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't hold my breath. Cannabis was outlawed in many/most states from the mid-1930's until recently - and is still today outlawed in most states. That's 85 years. Federally it was (ludicrously) categorized as a Schedule 1 Substance by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which is still in effect 46 years later. Category 1 is the same category as highly dangerous and addictive opioids and stimulants, as well as powerful psychedelics.
The Prohibition of alcohol only lasted 13 years.
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I wouldn't hold my breath.
That's where you are going wrong. Next time hold your breath for at least a few seconds.
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The Prohibition of alcohol only lasted 13 years.
That's because marijuana prohibition was and is explicitly racist by implementation.
Go read the reasons why it was instituted.
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That doesn't mean that racism wasn't a justification for the ban. Explicitly making a law so that Dow Chemical can replace one fiber with a synthetic isn't sexy and doesn't get traction with the American public. Appealing to the American public's baser instincts does give, whatever you want to do, traction.
Look at Trump.
>compete with the medical industry
Pot isn't a panacea. It's an anti-emetic and anti-psychotic (the same mechanism governs both, just different locations in the brain) and an analgesic.
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Cannabis was outlawed in many/most states from the mid-1930's until recently - and is still today outlawed in most states. That's 85 years.
US Supreme Court rules gay marriage is legal nationwide [bbc.com]
Change can happen very quickly. If Americans decide to go for Sanders/Hillary, it very probably will (via the SC).
Parallel construction is the the DEA's game. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You forget that the CIA makes millions smuggling drugs for the cartels to fund their black ops that congress will not pay for. Where do you think Noreaga got all his drug money and connections?
If drugs weren't illegal where would the CIA get it's slush funds from? Trafficking slaves?
Minority view (Score:1)
I guess I'm in the minority that see government agencies who break our laws, as far worse than individual criminals. Sure drug dealers are bad, but secret goverment surveillance on millions of US citizens is far worse.
Who is protecting US citizens from our goverment? It should not be OK for goverment officials to break laws, then simply "dial back" when caught red handed, with no fear of public trials like other citizens who use illegal wire taps. I thought we just had once Constitution and one set of la
Ignorance of the law is no excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
They say ignorance of the law is no excuse. When can we expect the prosecutions of those who broke the law to begin? Or all the retrials for convictions based on illegal evidence?
SCOTUS overturned that, haven't you heard? (Score:1)
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/12/15/3603686/supreme-court-if-youre-a-cop-mistakes-about-the-law-wont-stop-your-drug-bust/ [thinkprogress.org]
And that was an 8-1 ruling, so nothing Obama or the next President does to the Court is going to change the new law that ignorance of the law IS an excuse if you are responsible for enforcing the law.
Just Say "No"...to the DEA! (Score:3)
So 42 years of the DEA, and we're still fighting "The War on Drugs". War is hell, I guess. While we're fighting, we're coming to the realization that maybe marijuana really isn't a danger, that it isn't worth the effort to chase down and prosecute stoners and weed farmers. Is what the DEA is doing to our civil liberties, here and in other countries, really better than the alternative of just letting people do drugs? It doesn't sound like the DEA is stopping anybody who really wants to smoke or shoot up. Here in S.E. Massachusetts we have rampant opioid overdose problems, and that situation exists in a lot of places in the U.S. Maybe, just maybe, it is a demand problem instead of a supply problem?
If we took a fraction of the money that goes to the DEA and actually spent it on something useful, like decriminalizing and properly treating addiction as the medical condition it really is , demand would drop, street prices would drop, and the incentive to perpetrate criminal activities associated with the drug trade would dry up. People would be healthier, not living in prisons on the taxpayers dime, and we wouldn't have to pay taxes to a TLA to butt rape our constitutional freedoms anymore.
More routine levels? (Score:2)
Honestly. If they were breaking the law this long, how is ANYTHING coming out of this operation NOT "fruit of the poisonous tree"?
And it didn't even stop crime! (Score:2)
The worst thing about this egregious program, and for that matter,all the big "tap them all!" programs, is that this one didn't even dent crime.
Riverside, the most monitored place in the US outside of a prison cell, had no less crime than anywhere else in the LA area. So it did NOTHING.
Fuckers. You take away our privacy in the name of protecting us but you fail to actually even do that, and yet we're left without our privacy and nobody holds you accountable for lying and failing to do your apparently job.
They need to name a new law (Score:3)
OK, we've got "Murphy's Law" and a dozen more like it. We need to come up with a name now for a law that says something like, "Every time you hand power over to the cops, they will promise to use it responsibly, then not merely violate the trust you put in them, but pull its pants down and gang-rape it 'til it bleeds".
There has never once, not ever, been a time when this has not been true. Legalize drugs...all drugs...and fire about half of every police force and letter agency right on the spot.
Who's going to jail for this (Score:2)
Who's going to jail? Are the people arrested getting out of jail? What steps will they take to prevent this? What law will be amended so that it is absolutely clear this is not tolerated?