The Washington Post blog The Switch reports that the NSA is now giving your data, which they are collecting on you, to the DEA. This raises some very serious concerns, not only about the invasion of privacy, but of the fair application of rule of law. It seems that the DEA can use the data they get from the NSA to create a phony legal trail to claim that they had probable cause to investigate you. But this is a construction due to the fact that they can’t allow the real information that originally came from the NSA to see the light of day. Thus we get an artificial construction that they can use to drag you into court.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has been the recipient of multiple tips from the NSA. DEA officials in a highly secret office called the Special Operations Division are assigned to handle these incoming tips, according to Reuters. Tips from the NSA are added to a DEA database that includes “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records.” This is problematic because it appears to break down the barrier between foreign counterterrorism investigations and ordinary domestic criminal investigations.
Because the SOD’s work is classified, DEA cases that began as NSA leads can’t be seen to have originated from a NSA source.
So what does the DEA do? It makes up the story of how the agency really came to the case in a process known as “parallel construction.”
Kudos to the Washington Post for covering this story. Every American needs to understand just how corrupt and dangerous this government is becoming under the Obama administration and how their freedoms are being taken from them.