DEA Gets Unchecked Access To Call Records; Taught To Lie About Where They Got Them

from the your-due-process-is-no-match-for-our-Drug-War dept

Shortly after the Snowden leaks began exposing the NSA's massive collection efforts, the New York Times uncovered the DEA's direct access to AT&T telecom switches (via non-government employee "analysts" working for AT&T), from which it and other law enforcement agencies were able to gather phone call and location data.

Unlike the NSA's bulk records programs (which are limited to holding five years worth of data), the Hemisphere database stretches back to 1987 and advertises instant access to "10 years of records." And unlike the NSA's program, there's not even the slightest bit of oversight. All law enforcement needs to run a search of the Hemisphere database is an administrative subpoena -- a piece of paper roughly equivalent to calling up Hemisphere analysts and asking them to run a few numbers. Administrative subpoenas are only subject to the oversight of the agency issuing them.

It's highly unlikely these administrative subpoenas are stored (where they could be accessed as public records) considering the constant emphasis placed on parallel construction in the documents obtained by Dustin Slaughter of MuckRock -- documents it took the DEA ten months to turn over.

Unlike the documents obtained by the New York Times (possibly inadvertently), these do contain a few redactions, including some apparent success stories compiled at the end of the presentation. But like the earlier documents, the documents show that the DEA and law enforcement have unchecked access to a database that agents and officers are never allowed to talk about -- not even inside a courtroom.

It is expected that all Hemisphere requests will be paralleled with a subpoena for CDRs from the official carrier for evidentiary purposes.

It's spelled out more explicitly on a later slide, listed under "Official Reporting."

DO NOT mention Hemisphere in any official reports or court documents.

Judging from the request date, it would appear that this version of the Hemisphere presentation possibly precedes the New York Times' version. However, this one does not name the cooperating telco, although that appears to be a deliberate choice of the person writing the presentation, rather than due to redaction. At one point the document declares Hemisphere can access records "regardless of carrier," but later clarifies that it will only gather info that crosses certain telecom switches -- most likely AT&T's. Additional subpoenas will be needed to gather info from other carriers, as well as to obtain subscriber information linked to searched numbers. This small limitation plays right into the DEA's insistence that Hemisphere be "walled off" from defendants, court systems and the public.

If exigent circumstances make parallel construction difficult, Hemisphere analysts (non-government liaisons within the telco) will "continue to work with the investigator throughout the entire prosecution process in order to ensure the integrity of Hemisphere and the case at hand." Analysts are allowed to advise investigators on report writing, presentations to prosecutors and issues occurring during the trial phase. The word "integrity" seems out of place when it describes non-government employees assisting government agencies in hiding the origin of evidence from other government agencies.

Cross-referencing what's been redacted in this one with the unredacted document published earlier, it appears as though the DEA is trying to (belatedly) hide the fact that its Hemisphere can also search IMSI and IMEI data (for wireless connections). Although this document states (after a long redaction) that Hemisphere does not collect subscriber information, that's only partially true. As of July 2012, subscriber information for AT&T customers can be obtained from the database. This information may have been redacted or it may be that this presentation pre-dates this added ability.

What this shows is that the DEA has access to loads of information and a policy of "parallel construction in all things." Tons of other government agencies, including the NSA, FBI and CIA are funneling information to the DEA and instructing it to hide the origin. The DEA then demands law enforcement agencies around the nation to do the same thing. This stacks the deck against defendants, who are "walled off" from the chain of evidence, preventing them from challenging sources, methods or the integrity of the evidence itself.

Filed Under: call records, dea, drug war, embedded employees, hemisphere, lies, parallel construction

NSA Is Recording Every Phone Call... In The Bahamas?!?

from the dammit,-we-said-terrorists,-not-tourists! dept

So, back in March, the Washington Post published a report about the NSA's MYSTIC program, where it was recording all phone calls from an unnamed country. The Washington Post chose not to reveal that country, leading many folks to assume that it was going to be a country like Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq. Would you believe... that it was actually the Bahamas? Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have the long and detailed story over at The Intercept, revealing the SOMALGET program, a part of MYSTIC, which recorded every phone call from the Bahamas, not for terrorism, but to be able to hand over information about illegal drugs to the DEA.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country's cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the "full-take audio" of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.

Other countries being targeted under MYSTIC, as revealed by the Intercept: Mexico, the Philippines and Kenya. There is also one other, unnamed, country that the US is recording all calls for, but even The Intercept won't reveal that one (noting: "specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence"). Either way, this has resulted in plenty of people pointing out that "tourists" and "terrorists" are not the same thing -- while noting that tourism is 60% of GDP in the Bahamas, with 85% of those tourists come from the US. Others have pointed out that, perhaps, the use of the Bahamas was just a convenient testbed where most people wouldn't notice, and where the information could easily be useful for the NSA's partners at the DEA. Though, on that front, Julian Sanchez points out that one of the reasons the NSA got in trouble back in the 1970s with the Church Committee, was because the government used the NSA to evade limits on domestic wiretaps for illegal drugs.

As the report notes, the purpose of SOMALGET seems to have nothing to do with stopping terrorism, but is entirely about helping the DEA in its drug war efforts. And, of course, that also explains how the US was able to set this up. Basically, the DEA has a good relationship with the government in the Bahamas, and when it needed to set up phone taps, it appears that the Bahamas more or less let them bring in their own contractors to set up the phone taps. And, rather than just set it up to tap some individuals, the NSA swooped in and helped those "contractors" tap the entire phone network because... "collect it all." Note how the "cover name" for the MYSTIC access provider is blacked out here: The report further highlights that the DEA is one of the world's largest intelligence agencies, and often has greater access in a variety of countries, because those countries don't view it as "an intelligence agency" but rather as a drug fighting force. That has helped the NSA piggyback on the DEA for access in multiple countries.

Also, of interest, is the fact that, while the Bahamas is considered a popular place for money laundering and financial institutions to hide taxes, the NSA doesn't seem even remotely interested in that kind of law breaking. Because why bother taking on real crimes when you can focus on busting pot dealers: Somehow, this kind of stuff doesn't make me feel any safer, as the NSA and its defenders insist. It makes me feel the opposite.

Filed Under: all calls, bahamas, dea, drug war, kenya, mexico, mystic, nsa, parallel construction, philippines, recordings, surveillance

Parallel Construction Revealed: How The DEA Is Trained To Launder Classified Surveillance Info

from the americans-don't-like-it dept

Last summer, Reuters revealed how the NSA and other surveillance organizations would share info with the DEA and other law enforcement agencies, but then tell them to reconstruct the evidence via a process called "parallel construction," so that the surveillance would not then be discussed in court. This is highly questionable, and probably illegal, as a defendant has the right to know all of the evidence being used against him or her, and should also be told how that evidence was gathered, to make sure the collection was legal. But what's being done with parallel construction, is that the intelligence community is able to give "hints" to law enforcement, allowing them to come up with various pretenses for an investigation, avoiding ever having to reveal that the NSA or others used potentially illegal surveillance efforts. One example given in that Reuters report was how DEA agents would suddenly be given a tip like this: "Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle." The DEA would then have the local police come up with some pretense to stop the truck... and then when evidence is found they can claim it was a random traffic stop, when the reality is anything but that.

After the Reuters report, C.J. Ciaramella used Muckrock to request all DEA training material and official policies concerning "parallel construction" and recently received nearly 300 pages of documents, much of it redacted, but still which reveals that this is common practice at the DEA and widely known. Much of it is in the form of PowerPoint presentations, complete with speaker notes, which say things like how careful DEA agents need to be around classified information because "it can screw up your investigation." Another slide notes "the devil's in the details" and explains:

Our friends in the military and intelligence community never have to prove anything to the general public. They can act upon classified information without ever divulging their sources or methods to anyway [sic] outside their community. If they find Bin Laden's satellite phone and then pin point his location, they don't have to go to a court to get permission to put a missile up his nose.

We are bound, however, by different rules.

Our investigations must be transparent. We must be able to take our information to court and prove to a jury that our bad guy did the bad things we say he did. No hiding here. However, we are also bound to protect certain pieces of information so as to protect the sources and methods.

To use it....we must properly protect it.

There are also training materials that discuss how parallel construction works, as well as the fact that in "the new post-9/11" era, a "national consensus" has been formed making it easier for the intelligence community and law enforcement to share information. It even refers to the federal courts as the intelligence community's "nemesis."

A lot of the documentation deals with how to deal with having classified information, and the focus seems to be on keeping that information away from anyone involved in the case. There is -- I kid you not -- a special group of prosecutors called "the Taint Review Team" -- to be called in when things get... well... tainted. In one part of the presentation, they talk about all sorts of ways to try to get a judge to avoid revealing classified information to defendants, and then have a plan "if all else fails" which includes redoing the indictment or dropping the case. That same presentation shows that there should be a "see no evil" plan -- which explains why DEA agents are often just told "go to this truck stop and look for this truck" without knowing any more. That way they "saw no evil" with evil being defined as questionably obtained intelligence. It appears that much of the DEA's arguments here rely on the Supreme Court's ruling in 1938 in Scher v. United States, in which a law enforcement agent was told some things by a source, and used that information to find and arrest the defendant handling whiskey (during Prohibition). The court said that how the agent found out about the information doesn't matter, so long as the agent saw illegal acts himself. And thus, the Supreme Court "enabled" the idea of parallel construction. That case pops up repeatedly throughout the documents, basically telling DEA agents: expect information to come from intelligence sources, but do your best to never find out why they know this stuff.

Another presentation asks "what is the problem with combining IC (Intelligence Community) collection efforts & LEA (Law Enforcement Agency) investigations in US courtrooms?" and then explains that it presents constitutional problems... and that "Americans don't like it!" The note on that one points out that "even though we seek to protect our citizens, generally, we can only use techniques to achieve that objective, which are acceptable to our citizens." But that's not what they're actually doing or teaching. Instead, they're teaching how to keep doing the constitutionally questionable things that Americans don't like... and then hiding it from the courts, the American public and even the law enforcement folks themselves, in order to create a sort of plausible deniability that launders the fact that potentially illegal and unconstitutional surveillance was used to create the basis of the legal case.

There's some more information in the documents, but it all basically points to the same basic thing: the less that law enforcement folks know, the better. If the law enforcement knows too much, call in the "Taint Review Team" to see what they can do to clean up, and see what you can use to get the judge to exclude classified evidence. All in all, it adds up to a nice little plan to allow the NSA to illegally spy on people, tell law enforcement just enough to target people, without ever revealing how they were caught via unconstitutional means.

Filed Under: dea, evidence, nsa, parallel construction, see no evil, surveillance