Court Says Government Needs Better Excuses If It Wants To Keep Hiding DEA Surveillance Docs

from the even-these-bare-bones-are-barely-there dept

The EFF has won a small battle in a larger war against the US government for its continued withholding of documents related to its Hemisphere program. Files on this custom-built AT&T/DEA surveillance system have already made their way into the hands of the public. Contrary to the government's claims about other methods (warrants, subpoenas) taking too long to obtain phone records, previously-released documents showed AT&T employees worked directly alongside agents in DEA offices to perform instantaneous searches for records.

The EFF is seeking information not included in the Powerpoint presentation already produced by the DEA. It's looking for records on court cases where evidence derived from the program was submitted, communications between the government and AT&T concerning the program, communications between government agencies about the Hemisphere program, and Congressional briefings related to the side-by-side surveillance effort.

The government has refused to turn over much of what's been requested for a variety of reasons, the main one being infamous FOIA exemption b(5). The government has other reasons for withholding information, but this is its favorite. The court, however, finds that most of its arguments amount to little more than "because." From the opinion [PDF]:

Ultimately, the Government's declaration is too vague: it does not indicate even generally what sorts of legal issues are presented in these e-mails, nor does not explain what “features” of the Hemisphere program are at issue. That the communications were between an attorney and agency employees does not establish the documents are protected under the attorney client privilege; without more about what “features” or “legal issues” are discussed or why they might be confidential in nature, the Government has not raised enough facts to show that Document 1 may be protected by the privilege.

As for another disputed document, the court has this to say:

The Government is essentially asking the Court to presume that because it uses the word “subpoenas” and states that attorneys wrote or received emails, these documents therefore reveal attorney-client communications of a confidential nature. Merely reiterating the elements of the privilege, however, does not satisfy the Government's burden of establishing the privilege applies to this document.

Yet another disputed document:

[T]he Government does not articulate why this information is confidential or contains legal advice. While it asserts that this document contains “confidential legal advice,” again, this merely states the element without explaining the basis of that confidentiality.

The review of documents concludes with the court pointing out that the government's sole justification for its bare minimum explanations works against it:

Finally, while the Government argues its generalized descriptions are sufficiently specific to show the documents contain “confidential legal advice,” it relies only on cases that demonstrate how its support in this case is lacking. [...] The Court is not asking the Government to make a herculean effort, merely something beyond regurgitation of the elements.

The court remains less than impressed with the government's lack of effort throughout the remainder of the opinion. It's as if the government assumed the court would rubber-stamp its bare-bones assertions.

[T]he Government makes no further reference to any current or foreseeable litigation in either its supporting declarations or Vaughn Index or provide other context that would allow the Court make a de novo review of the Government's work product assertions. Again, the Government cannot satisfy its burden of proof by relying on a mere recitation of the elements.

[...]

Nor does the Government meet its burden merely by referring to law enforcement efforts.

[...]

The Government merely recites the elements necessary to establish the privilege, but it does not explain why they are met, such as explaining why these particular documents relate to some anticipated litigation.

[...]

[T]he Government does not explain how the disclosure of these documents would affect its deliberative process by preventing or discouraging DEA employees or affiliates from giving their honest opinions, recommendations, or suggestions on how to develop policy decisions.

[...]

None of the Government's evidence suggests that exposing these documents would interfere with law enforcement proceedings.

The court also finds the government cannot withhold information related to cities Hemisphere was deployed in or agencies involved under FOIA exemptions. As the court sees it, the fearful assertions made by the government have no basis in observed reality.

The Government asserts this information “could be used by criminals to disrupt law enforcement operations or obtain unauthorized access to information about such operations.” But the Government does not explain how criminals could do this by using information about the cities and states where Hemisphere. EFF also notes that the public already knows that Hemisphere has regional centers in Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles, but the Government presents no evidence suggesting criminals have used this publicly available information to disrupt law enforcement operations or obtain unauthorized access to information.

The same goes for the names of the telecommunications companies the DEA worked in concert with to obtain telephone records.

[T]he Government asserts criminals could use this information to “tailor or adapt their activities to evade apprehension,” or “to attack facilities involved in the Hemisphere program.” In response, EFF argues the public has known for two and a half years—that is, since The New York Times‟ 2013 article on it—that AT&T supports Hemisphere, and the Government has not shown or even argued that criminals have ever attempted to use this information to evade or disrupt Hemisphere.

The Court agrees with EFF that the Government has not provided facts showing why it is likely criminals would use the identities of the companies that are instrumental to Hemisphere to evade or attack Hemisphere-related facilities.

The next step is an in camera review of the documents by the court to determine whether or not there's anything in these documents the government is justified in withholding. So far, the court appears unconvinced the government is engaged in anything more than opacity for opacity's sake. If the review goes as badly for the government as its FOIA lawsuit defense has, a lot more information on the Hemisphere program should be headed our way.

Filed Under: b5, dea, foia, hemisphere, surveillance
Companies: at&t, eff

US Government Gives $11,000 Back To College Student Three Years After The DEA Took It From Him

from the ABORT,-FAIL dept

Another high-profile asset forfeiture battle has resulted in the government relinquishing its claim on seized cash and returning it to its owner.

In February 2014, DEA agents took $11,000 from Charles Clarke at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The DEA claimed Clarke's luggage "smelled" like marijuana. It may have been right (Clarke was a recreational marijuana smoker), but it didn't even bother to get a second opinion from a drug dog. Nor did it find any drugs or paraphernalia when it searched Clarke and his baggage.

It did, however, declare the $11,000 in college funds Clarke had saved over five years to be drug money. So, it took the cash from him and sent him on his way.

Normally, the burden of proof falls on the person whose property has been taken. That's how civil asset forfeiture works. The government files a claim against the seized property, cutting the original owner of the property out of the loop as much as possible. Fortunately, the judge presiding over the forfeiture dispute shifted the burden back on law enforcement after finding Clarke to be a credible complainant.

"Frankly, the fella sounds like he's telling the truth," U.S. District Court Judge William O. Bertelsman said in a hearing over how much information the U.S. government should be required to turn over to Clarke's lawyers. "He's not changed his story once in all the depositions and testimony that he's given even under the threat of perjury."

Bertelsman also ordered the government to show proof that the seized money was the result of criminal activity. This was obviously going to be a problem for the government, considering all it had to work with was some luggage that carried a hint of marijuana odor. That, and Clarke's cash, which it was in no hurry to give up, especially since it had to split the take thirteen ways.

While no further details have been released, it's probably safe to assume the government never came up with the proof Bertelsman was looking for. The Institute for Justice -- which represented Clarke in this case -- is reporting that the government is returning the seized cash to the college student.

“The United States government has agreed to give Charles Clarke back every penny of the $11,000 it seized from him at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in February 2014, plus interest. Charles is very pleased that he will get his life savings back and that the whole ordeal is now behind him.”

All it would take to combat many questionable seizures would be a shift in the burden of proof. The process makes it almost impossible for those whose property has been seized to mount a successful attempt to reclaim it. The filing of cases as "Gov't v. Property" allows the seizing agency to run unopposed (as it were), since the seized property can't speak for itself and the property owner is tied up in bureaucratic paperwork with strict time limits that is wholly reliant on the seizing agency properly notifying seizure victims of the whereabouts of their cash, etc.

If the government can't come up with criminal charges, it very likely cannot come up with proof the money is tied to illegal activity. But too few courts are willing to shift the burden of proof, leaving the government to indulge in its perverted incentives.

Filed Under: civil asset forfeiture, dea

New Docs Detail How AT&T Planned To Profit Massively By Helping Law Enforcement Spy On The Public

from the privacy-trampling-as-a-business-model dept

Back in 2013 the New York Times profiled just the latest in AT&T-related surveillance scandals, revealing the existence of "Project Hemisphere." The original report detailed how Project Hemisphere is a joint program between AT&T and the DEA that provides a variety of federal and state law enforcement agencies with nearly real-time access to logs and location data on nearly every single call that touches the AT&T network. Unlike AT&T's NSA-related scandals, in many ways this system is much larger than anything covered previously. It's also much older, with the project having roots as far back as 1987.

Making the revelations even more notable was the fact that the report indicated that AT&T had employees embedded with the DEA to help expedite access to this data. This difficulty in trying to determine where the government begins and AT&T ends isn't new; AT&T has long helped the FBI tap dance around privacy and surveillance law, often having its own employees actively working as government intelligence analysts.

But a new report released this week by The Daily Beast indicates that Project Hemisphere is even bigger than originally claimed in the New York Times report. While the Times suggested this project originated as a "partnership" specifically tailored for drug enforcement operations, the outlet obtained AT&T documents (pdf) on Project Hemisphere that make it clear that the project was designed by AT&T from the ground up as a significant money making opportunity. The program also has a notably wider scope than originally reported:

"AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud. Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

While phone companies like AT&T are in some instances legally obligated to hand over customer data to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, AT&T has a nasty habit of going well, well beyond this, frequently with only a fleeting regard to existing law. Repercussions for this behavior have been minimal to non-existent, with AT&T frequently scoring massive government telecom contracts, and the government itself happy to retroactively change the law whenever its telco partners get into the slightest bit of hot water.

The leaked documents noted that AT&T was notably sensitive to information on this program seeing the light of day, AT&T informing its government BFFs that data collected from Hemisphere should not be used in "any judicial or administrative proceedings unless there is no other available and admissible probative evidence." Since those charged with a crime have the legal right to see the evidence against them, this often results in the government concocting a false investigative narrative to obfuscate the use of programs like hemisphere.

It likely goes without saying, but EFF attorney Adam Schwartz makes it abundantly clear that's not how functioning democracies and legal systems are supposed to work:

"Once AT&T provides a lead through Hemisphere, then investigators use routine police work, like getting a court order for a wiretap or following a suspect around, to provide the same evidence for the purpose of prosecution. This is known as “parallel construction."

“This document here is striking,” Schwartz told The Daily Beast. “I’ve seen documents produced by the government regarding Hemisphere, but this is the first time I’ve seen an AT&T document which requires parallel construction in a service to government. It’s very troubling and not the way law enforcement should work in this country."

Unsurprisingly, efforts by the EFF and others to obtain more detail on Hemisphere using the FOIA have proven fruitless. The only public discourse on the matter is violently superficial, with AT&T, as you might expect, denying it's doing anything remotely wrong:

"Like other communications companies, if a government agency seeks customer call records through a subpoena, court order or other mandatory legal process, we are required by law to provide this non-content information, such as the phone numbers and the date and time of calls,” AT&T’s statement said.

Right, except that's hard to claim when the documents make it clear that AT&T built Hemisphere from the ground up with the express intent of making money off of the government's mammoth, consistently-law-skirting information dragnet. This latest report indicates that law enforcement agencies pay anywhere from $100,000 to upward of $1 million a year or more for access to Hemisphere, netting AT&T a cozy profit for helping government tap dance over, under and around privacy and surveillance law.

Which brings us to this week's news that AT&T intends to spend another $85 billion to acquire Time Warner. This is the same company that not only builds business models based on trampling the legal rights of American citizens, but pioneered new and exciting ways of charging its broadband customers a steep premium for "privacy" on the other end of the equation. What could possibly, possibly go wrong as AT&T attempts to become larger and more powerful than ever before?

Filed Under: dea, drug enforcement, law enforcement, mass surveillance, profit, project hemisphere, surveillance
Companies: at&t

Local Superior Court Judge Says DEA's Wiretap Warrant Factory Perfectly Legal

from the Judge-Malloy's-Wiretap-Warrant-Laundry-Service dept

Over the past several years, the DEA has run hundreds of wiretap warrants through a single county judge's court after getting them approved by whoever happened to be in the local district attorney's office when agents need one signed. The latter part of this process runs contrary to statutes enacted specifically to prevent abuse of wiretap warrants by the federal agencies.

The approval process, which had been streamlined to eliminate any possible roadblocks to the DEA's deployment of wiretaps all over the country, was considered by the DOJ to be far enough outside legal boundaries as to make the warrants questionable, if not legally "toxic."

The district attorney who was supposed to personally approve these wiretap warrants never did. Former Riverside County district attorney Paul Zellerbach delegated this task to anyone but himself. Because of this, some of the warrants have been challenged in court, leading to the DOJ stepping in to salvage wiretaps its lawyers had previously instructed DEA agents to keep out of federal courts.

Not much of this seems to matter now, as another Riverside County judge has just declared the DEA's wiretap warrants to be perfectly valid.

Superior Court Judge John Molloy ruled that the district attorney was allowed to delegate the responsibility of approving wiretap applications to his second-in-command.

Except that's not really what happened. Zellerbach, who managed to obtain a warrant of his own by failing to show up for court, never designated any particular person to approve the warrants. As Brett Kelman and Brad Heath reported earlier, Zellerbach himself stated that he delegated this task to "lower level lawyers," rather than a specific person -- contrary to statutes directly stemming from the federal government's previous abuse of wiretap warrants to surveil civil rights leaders during the 1960s.

Federal law bars the government from seeking court approval for a wiretap unless a top prosecutor has personally signed off on that request.

Zellerbach claimed he had no time to personally approve these wiretap requests. And he probably didn't, what with the DEA funneling several hundred of these through his office and into the hands of county judge Helios Hernandez (who singlehandedly approved five times as many wiretap warrants as any other judge in the nation).

Judge Molloy, however, likely views this abuse of the system as good police work.

Molloy, a former prosecutor who used to work with wiretap applications, ruled that Zellerbach’s practice of letting his number-two prosecutor sign off on them did not violate state or federal wiretap laws.

Molloy also said that because Zellerbach was away at an education conference in another Southern California town when the specific wiretap defense lawyers were challenging was approved, he would have been allowed to delegate it anyway.

Zellerbach's second-in-command testified in court that he usually handled wiretap requests, paying no mind to the federal limitation that Zellerbach be actually absent before he had permission to do so.

Under Zellerbach, that person was Van Wagenen. However, on Friday, Van Wagenen testified that he didn’t actually check if Zellerbach was available before he signed hundreds of applications.

“The protocol was that I was to sign the application instead of Mr. Zellerbach,” Van Wagenen said.

“On any occasion?” asked defense attorney Jan Ronis.

“If I was available and in the office, yes,” Van Wagenen answered.

Judge Molloy revisited the questioning minutes later.

‘Did you ever ask Paul Zellerbach to review a wiretap application?” Molloy asked.

“I did not,” Van Wagenen said.

"This is fine" ruled the judge, and at least one warrant -- if not dozens of others obtained in the same jurisdiction (which would be a significant percentage of the DEA's wiretap warrants) -- has been given a post facto veneer of lawfulness. This takes some weight off the DOJ's legal team, which had previously advised the DEA to steer clear of federal prosecutions stemming from questionable warrants. Now, it can just let the highest level local judge's blessing do its work for it.

Filed Under: dea, helios hernandez, john molloy, paul zellerbach, privacy, riverside county, wiretaps

Report: DEA Blowing Money On Liars, Thieves, And Amtrak Employees

from the nothing-like-spending-other-people's-money dept

If the Drug War is US law enforcement's wildly-swinging fist, the DEA is its middle finger. Once the pointless brutality stops, the finger is extended to everyone -- especially taxpayers.

Even the agency's name inadvertently belies its twisted motivations: "Drug Enforcement Administration." Without further information, the name, on its own, seems to suggest a shoring up of the drug trade, rather than an adversarial force.

The DEA has a lot of skin in the drug game. Without the steady flow of drugs, it ceases to exist. It operates with a great deal of autonomy and is often excused its worst excesses because most people agree (without much thought) that drugs are bad.

The DEA controls a vast network of confidential informants. Actually, to state it more accurately, the DEA oversees… Never mind. The DEA pays a great deal of money to confidential informants. Beyond handing out cash, the DEA apparently does little else to keep its informants in line.

A just-released Inspector General's report [PDF] on the DEA's use of confidential informants finds the agency has no problem paying out vast sums of money to lying informants and that it maintains a small army of otherwise-employed citizens who moonlight as cash/drug-sniffing humans for the nation's top drug warriors.

This year's report builds on the lowlights of last year's examination of the DEA's informant program, in which the OIG basically stated the entire program runs without sufficient oversight. Nothing has changed in the interim. This report includes even more details of excess, abuse, and stupidity.

Fun fact: lying to prosecutors, judges, and the DEA itself isn't enough to prevent the agency from giving an informant even more chances to lie -- all the while being paid handsomely for making stuff up.

[W]hile DEA policy prohibits paying deactivated sources who were deactivated because of an arrest warrant or for committing a serious offense, we found two concerning instances of payments to previously-deactivated sources. In one case, the DEA reactivated a confidential source who previously provided false testimony in trials and depositions. During the approximate 5-year period of reactivation, this source was used by 13 DEA field offices and paid $469,158. More than $61,000 of the $469,158 was paid after this source was once again deactivated for making false statements to a prosecutor.

That's just one case. There are many more. The OIG notes that $9.4 million in tax dollars was shelled out to deactivated informants, suggesting that not working for the DEA is a great way to make a living.

Then there's the so-called "limited use" informants. These are Amtrak, airline, and parcel service employees the DEA pays to keep any eye out for cash and drugs. Lots of money is misspent here with even less oversight than goes into the paying-people-for-doing-nothing program.

Another area of concern is the DEA’s oversight of confidential sources it categorized as “Limited Use,” often referred to as “tipsters,” which DEA policy specifies are sources who make information available independently without direction by the DEA. The Limited Use category is regarded by the DEA as low-risk and therefore DEA policy requires the least supervision. Yet we found that Limited Use sources were some of DEA’s highest paid sources, with 477 Limited Use sources during the period of our review having received an estimated $26.8 million.

[...]

Some of these sources received significant payments for their assistance, including an airline employee who received more than $600,000 in less than 4 years, and a parcel employee who received over $1 million in 5 years.

Unsurprisingly, the DEA is very interested in cash, despite its supposed drug focus. Consequently, "limited use" informants need a bit more hands-on treatment to keep them zeroed in on seizable currency. As the OIG points out, the extra attention paid to handling "limited use" informants makes them no longer "limited use" -- and therefore supposedly subject to stricter oversight. Not that this happened either.

We believe that DEA Agents directed the actions of these sources extensively enough that they could not reasonably be understood to have acted “without direction” and therefore do not fit the definition or purpose of “Limited Use.”

[...]

We also found the DEA did not appropriately track all confidential source activity; did not document proper justifications for all source payments; and, at times, did not adequately safeguard traveler information.

The DEA is given billions of dollars to work with every year. Some of this goes to its informants, some of which are very unreliable. Apparently none of the budget goes towards recordkeeping.

Because DEA’s files do not detail the universe of information provided by its sources, it is unable to examine their reliability and whether they frequently or rarely provide useful information, or whether the information DEA agents acted upon resulted in identifying individuals involved in illegal activity or instead caused DEA to regularly approach innocent civilians for questioning. We are deeply concerned about this inability to assess source reliability, which seriously impairs DEA’s ability to oversee and manage the activity of these sources and the Confidential Source Program overall.

As if its lying informants weren't troublesome enough, the DEA also gave informants free reign to act as contractors and "hire" their own informants to work underneath them. Unlike other Ponzi schemes, the sucker here is at the top of the pyramid, rather than the bottom.

Additionally, we were extremely concerned to discover the DEA condoned its confidential sources’ use of “sub-sources,” who are individuals a source recruits and pays to perform activities or provide information related to the source’s work for the DEA. During our review of DEA files, we found evidence of sources who were paid based, in part, on the need to pay “sub-sources,” but the information in the files was insufficient to allow us to determine the full extent of such payments.

As for the lying, the DEA seems completely unconcerned that it may be doing little more than funding a network of bullshit artists.

[T]he DEA does not independently validate the credibility of sources used for intelligence programs or the accuracy of the information they provide…

And the DEA spends money like any entity blessed with piles of unearned cash.

Additionally, when we asked the DEA Intelligence Division to provide us with an itemized list and overall total of payments to intelligence-related confidential sources, it was unable to do so. We reviewed DEA records and estimated that, during the 5-year period of our review, the Intelligence Division paid more than $30 million to sources who provided narcotics-related intelligence and contributed to law enforcement operations, $25 million of which went to just 9 sources. Additionally, we identified one source who was paid over $30 million during a 30-year period, some of it in cash payments of more than $400,000. We concluded the Intelligence Division’s management and oversight of its sources was not commensurate with the large amount of payments it made to them.

The entire report is an indictment of the DEA's willingness to throw good money after bad, and its unwillingness to perform even the most perfunctory of oversight. The joke, of course, is that the report will not result in any indictments, even if the behavior detailed borders on fraudulent.

Filed Under: dea, informants, liars, money, thieves

Arrest Warrant Issued For District Attorney Involved In DEA's California Wiretap Warrant Mill

from the DEA-DOA dept

Former Riverside District Attorney Paul Zellerbach is in trouble, as Brad Heath and Brett Kelman report for The Desert Sun.

A judge issued an arrest warrant Tuesday for former Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach after he failed to appear at a court hearing to answer questions about an eavesdropping operation so vast it once accounted for nearly a fifth of all U.S. wiretaps.

[...]

"He should have been there," said Jan Ronis, the attorney who subpoenaed Zellerbach. "But he just blew us off. We could have had court today."

It's not uncommon for Zellerbach to go missing when people need him. When Zellerbach ran the DA's office, he was rarely there. The DEA found his office to be just as accommodating, with or without him, though. Although the DEA was supposed to run its wiretap warrant requests through federal judges and have them signed by the district attorney himself, it often found it easier to obtain a signature from whoever happened to be at the office and run them by Riverside County judge Helios Hernandez, who approved five times as many wiretap applications as any other judge in the US.

The wiretap applications' reach frequently exceeded their jurisdictional grasp, traveling far outside of Riverside County, California, to be deployed against suspects as far away as North Carolina. But that was only one issue with the warrants applications approved by Zellerbach's office.

The DOJ's lawyers didn't like the DEA's skirting of federal rules for wiretap applications.

"It was made very clear to the agents that if you're going to go the state route, then best wishes, good luck and all that, but that case isn't coming to federal court," a former Justice Department lawyer said.

"They'd want to bring these cases into the U.S. Attorney's Office, and the feds would tell them no (expletive) way," a former Justice Department official said.

California's wiretap laws weren't being followed either, thanks to Zellerbach holding office in absentia.

Riverside County’s former district attorney, Paul Zellerbach, has acknowledged that he allowed lower-level lawyers to do that job, saying he could not recall ever having reviewed a wiretap application himself. Four of the wiretaps in the Kentucky case were approved by one of Zellerbach’s assistants, and one was approved by an assistant to his successor.

Now, the DEA's toxic and possibly illegal wiretap warrants are being challenged, now that defense lawyers know exactly how much -- and how often -- state and federal requirements were being skirted by the drug warriors. That's what has led to Zellerbach's arrest warrant.

The first challenge, filed in Kentucky, led a federal judge to say that Riverside had issued so many wiretaps “that constitutional requirements cannot have been met.” The second challenge, filed locally, led to the warrant being issued for Zellerbach.

Zellerbach was subpoenaed to appear in the case of Christian Agraz, 33, an accused drug trafficker who was allegedly caught on a wiretap selling bricks of heroin in 2014.

The former DA did not appear at the hearing in the Agraz case on Tuesday morning, so Judge Michele Levine issued a bench warrant and assigned a bail of $1,500.

The constitutional requirements say Zellerbach was supposed to sign each wiretap application personally. Paul Zellerbach can't recall approving a single one of the hundreds that flowed through his office over the years.

The DEA's Riverside County-centric drug war looks like it's going to result in several cases being tossed out. Fortunately, the DEA still can keep everything it's claimed via civil asset forfeiture, which makes good busts out of bad ones and makes obtaining convictions entirely optional.

Filed Under: dea, district attorney, doj, paul zellerbach, riverside county, wiretaps

DEA Accessing Millions Of Travelers' Records To Find Cash To Seize

from the trolling-for-dollars dept

The DEA -- along with several other law enforcement agencies -- has shown, over the years, that civil asset forfeiture is the tail wagging the dog. It may have been put in place to separate criminals from their cash, but is now used mainly to pad agency budgets and increase discretionary spending.

This attitude is summed up by the former DEA supervisor quoted in Brad Heath's (USA Today) investigation into the agency's forfeiture activities.

“They count on this as part of the budget,” said Louis Weiss, a former supervisor of the DEA group assigned to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “Basically, you’ve got to feed the monster.”

The monster is insatiable. The DEA loves taking cash from travelers so much it has hired TSA screeners as informants, asking them to look for cash when scanning luggage. It routinely stops and questions rail passengers in hopes of stumbling across money it can take from them.

But it goes further than just hassling random travelers and paying government employees to be government informants. As the USA Today's article points out, the DEA is datamining traveler info to streamline its forfeiture efforts.

DEA agents have profiled passengers on Amtrak trains and nearly every major U.S. airline, drawing on reports from a network of travel-industry informants that extends from ticket counters to back offices, a USA TODAY investigation has found. Agents assigned to airports and train stations singled out passengers for questioning or searches for reasons as seemingly benign as traveling one-way to California or having paid for a ticket in cash.

The DEA's cash-seizing efforts add another layer of surveillance to the traveling experience. It's not just multiple agencies looking for terrorists. It's also at least one agency looking for nothing more than cash. And it works. Heath notes that the DEA's surveillance apparatus has resulted in at least $209 million seized from over 5,000 passengers over the last decade.

This is wonderful news if you believe the DEA's job is to take cash off the streets. Not so much if you believe it should be taking criminals off the street.

In most cases, records show the agents gave the suspected couriers a receipt for the cash — sometimes totaling $50,000 or more, stuffed into suitcases or socks — and sent them on their way without ever charging them with a crime.

Case in point: the DEA seized $25,000 from a traveler after profiling her as a suspected drug courier, based on her itinerary and a past conviction for smuggling. But even though the DEA suspected her of being part of a trafficking operation, it seemed entirely uninterested in doing anything more than taking the cash.

Agents seized the money, and let Tillerson go. Her lawyer, Cyril Hall, said she was never arrested, or even questioned about whether she could give agents information about traffickers.

A year later, Tillerson produced paperwork showing the cash the DEA seized was lawfully obtained. The government agreed to give it back -- minus $4,000 prosecutors decided to keep just because.

The DEA, of course, claims that seizing cash (without pursuing indictments) is an essential part of its efforts to cripple drug trafficking operations. But after several decades of interdiction and forfeitures, most drug cartels seem to be every bit as financially healthy as the DEA is.

The perverse incentives of asset forfeiture don't just corrupt the DEA. They infect everyone involved in the process.

Five current and former agents said the DEA has cultivated a wide network of such informants, who are taught to be on the lookout for suspicious itineraries and behavior. Some are paid a percentage if their tips lead to a significant seizure.

[...]

[A]mtrak’s inspector general revealed that agents had paid a secretary $854,460 over nearly two decades in exchange for passenger information. A later investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the secretary initially looked up reservations only at agents’ request, but quickly “began making queries on his own initiative, looking for indicators that a person might be planning to transport illegal drugs or money on a train,” according to a report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Airlines refuse to work directly with the DEA, but that hasn't stopped the agency from finding airline employees willing to peruse itineraries -- or pass them on to the DEA -- for a cut of the cash. The DEA can't use info from terrorist databases, so it has created an ad hoc network of informants to create a cash-focused surveillance network. Cash is king. Everything else about the drug war -- indictments, convictions, etc. -- is just a sideline.

“We want the cash. Good agents chase cash,” said George Hood, who supervised a drug task force assigned to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago before he retired in 2007. “It was just easier to get the asset, and that’s where you make a dent in the criminal organization.”

Welcome to the Drug War, where whatever's "easiest" is the government's focus.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, cash, civil asset forfeiture, dea

Judge Says Stash House Sting Operations Allow Prosecutors To Be Judge, Jury, And Executioner

from the the-fix-is-always-in dept

The question the government doesn't want to answer is whether we're better off pursuing fake criminals or capturing the real ones. Law enforcement does both, but sting operations -- both of the terrorist and the drug variety -- have been increasing over the years, turning officers and agents into actors and stage directors.

The FBI has been crafting "terrorists" from a collection of outcasts, retirees, and the developmentally disabled for years. Canada's law enforcement is just as willing to score on unguarded nets, traipsing happily over the line between "highly questionable" and "actual entrapment" in its own terrorist "investigations."

The ATF and DEA have combined forces to drag weapons into drug dealing using elaborate sting operations to entice no small number of people to get prepped to rob a nonexistent stash house of imaginary drugs. This would be bad enough, as it often appears the ATF is willing to bust anyone that engages in speculation about stash house robberies. Adding insult to injury, the federal government recommends sentences based on the fake amount of fake drugs not actually found in the fake stash house suspects talked about robbing.

Judge Otis Wright tore into the government for its willingness to craft imaginary stash house robberies and followed it up by asking for convicted suspects to be locked up for real years, based on nothing more than what the government told defendants would be located in the fake stash house.

In these stash-house cases, the Government’s “participation in the offense conduct” is what makes them particularly repugnant to the Constitution. Everything about the scheme—and therefore almost everything bearing upon a defendant’s ultimate sentence—hinges solely on the Government’s whim. Why were there not 10 kilograms in the stash house? Or 100? Or 1,000? Why were the guards allegedly armed—necessitating that Defendants bring weapons along with them? All of these factors came down to the ATF and the undercover agent alone. That sort of arbitrariness offends the Constitution’s due-process demands.

The government loves these cases because they're easy wins. There are no suspects to track down after a robbery. Instead, every suspect is safely housed in an undercover agent's vehicle, unwittingly waiting to be arrested. The suspects never lay low until the heat dies down, forcing the government to perform actual investigative work. Instead, the suspects are guided through the process of planning for a stash house robbery, including being given weapons to do so if they fail to provide their own. With massive sentences predicated on made-up drug quantities hanging over their heads, plea deals favorable to federal prosecutors are easy to obtain.

Another federal judge has plenty of problems with the government's stash house stings. Pennsylvania's Gerald McHugh has just issued a memorandum [PDF] trimming back the sentence handed to Clifton McLean, mainly due to the government's sentencing recommendation being based on the amount of drugs it said would be found at the fake stash house, rather than on anything tangible. [h/t Brad Heath]

Early last year, the judge took note [PDF] of the government's willingness to push people into actions they may not otherwise have taken.

Initially, there is no indication that McLean was involved in an ongoing criminal enterprise to commit stash house robberies prior to his initial contact with the government informant, and there is also no indication that the government believed it was infiltrating an already-existing conspiracy to commit such a robbery. Rather, in the best case scenario for the government, a newly created conspiracy was hatched when McLean allegedly approached the CI for the first time, though this initiation is less than certain. This factor weighs in favor of McLean.

[...]

The third factor, and certainly one of the most important, is the nature of government instigation or origination of the crime. The outcome of this inquiry is less clear. The government has asserted that the paid CI in this case was initially approached by McLean, who then inquired about whether the CI knew of any stash houses that McLean could rob. There are many questions surrounding this initial engagement. The encounter was not recorded, which is to be expected since the government asserts that the meeting was not planned, and a CI cannot be expected to wear a wire at all times. However, what this means is that the only person, aside from McLean, who can speak to what occurred at that meeting is the CI, who was not present to testify at the evidentiary hearing. While this is certainly a valid trial strategy, and may reflect government concern over the informant’s safety, I am hesitant simply to adopt this second-hand account of what occurred at this meeting, as told by the agents to whom the CI reported. I certainly do not discredit the testimony of the agents, but all they can testify to is what the CI relayed to them and their impression of his credibility. On top of this, the determination of whether McLean was inquiring about a stash house robbery is based on the CI’s account of slang that McLean used and the CI’s personal interpretation of that slang, with no additional context provided.

Unlike other stings the ATF has run, McLean showed more interest than most in pursuing a stash house robbery. But even though the judge didn't see enough to indicate entrapment, he's less pleased with the government's sentencing recommendations.

The structure of sting operations such as this is highly problematic. In practical terms, “sentencing discretion is delegated all the way down to the individual drug agent operating in the field.” United States v. Staufer, 38 F.3d 1103, 1107 (9th Cir. 1994). Although the Government defends the specified amount as necessary to protect its agents, I find that rationale troublesome on several levels. First, law enforcement’s tactical concerns should not control either the severity of charges against a defendant or the range of sentences. To the extent that the Government constructs a crime, its elements should be related to a defendant’s culpability. Here, where the record is clear that McLean was “in for a penny, in for a pound,” specifying such a high amount does not truly bear on his culpability. Once the Government established that McLean was willing to engage in an armed robbery of any quantity large enough to resell, its core law enforcement objective was met.

[...]

The Government clearly had an interest in exposing the scope of his capability and connections, and in seizing as great a quantity of drugs as possible. No similar interest exists where the crime itself is fictional.

But if the objective is really to hit stash house sting suspects with the full force of sentencing guidelines, then the objective is "whatever nets the most years in prison." The judge here finds the government always conjures up a quantity of fake drugs that will generate the longest minimum sentence.

From my review of reported cases nationwide, I have not identified any investigation where the specified amount of cocaine in the fictional stash house was less than 5 kilograms. By statute, 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(A), 5 kilograms is the amount that triggers exposure to a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence.

[...]

[B]y the Government’s reasoning, the very nature of this type of undercover operation necessarily requires, for the safety of its operatives, a scenario that automatically triggers mandatory minimum sentences, even if the target of the sting would otherwise have taken the bait, and regardless of whether the suspect had ever before dealt in quantities of this kind.

The government's "evidence" of its fake drug amounts is nothing more than agents' testimony. They can swear they told the defendant there would be more than 5 kilos of drugs. It makes little difference that there were never any drugs to be stolen. The government then wraps itself in its "operative safety" blanket and hopes the judge won't question its inexplicable need to protect its agents by consulting drug sentencing guidelines. Judge McHugh, however, did take a look at it, and doesn't like what he sees -- a government agency pushing judges towards harsher sentences by insinuating anything less would be dangerous for law enforcement agents.

Preliminarily, I have an institutional concern that the Government couches the justification for its techniques in terms of officer safety. Unquestionably, undercover operatives are individuals of great commitment and courage who take risks average citizens would find intolerable. Their safety must be of paramount concern. At the same time, however, tying the physical safety of an agent to a mandatory triggering quantity of drugs is problematic. Such a rationale cannot help but inhibit any judge who must consider the implications of sting operations because no responsible judicial officer would ever want to place agents in harm’s way. But without in any way jeopardizing the safety of any agent, a court can certainly ask why, even if it is necessary for purposes of “credibility” to specify certain amounts as part of an operation, why is it necessary to charge the target of the investigation with such high amounts in every case?

[...]

In short, nothing about the actual record in this case validates the proposition advanced by the Government that substantial amounts of cocaine are fundamental to the success of its operation.

This not only prevents judges from exercising discretion, it also prevents the jury from doing its job properly.

Absent some constitutional prohibition, because the jury found McLean guilty of conspiring to possess 5 kilograms or more of cocaine, I am bound to sentence him accordingly. This underscores the due process concerns at the heart of sting operations. Since no drugs existed, McLean was charged with conspiring and attempting to possess the amount of drugs the Government decided to offer him, after he had agreed to participate in a fictional robbery. The Government made a deliberate choice concerning which offenses and quantities to charge, a choice that then constrains the jury.

The judge goes on to note the government even cited a decision finding against mandatory minimum sentences to support its argument for a mandatory minimum sentence. On top of that, it used the fake drug quantity to ensure it got the sentence it sought, leaving no room for meddling from troublesome judges or jurors.

It is certainly true that the jury “found” the defendant guilty of a conspiracy to possess greater than 5 kg of cocaine, but the Government assured such a result in advance by the script that it wrote and the charges that it brought. In that sense, a stash house sting operation is the “perfect” crime, at least from the standpoint of the prosecution, in that it predetermines both verdict and sentence.

In the end, Judge McHugh does what he can… which isn't much. He boots the government's mandatory minimum-triggering claim of five kilograms and uses a lower amount. In total, it only takes away five years of McLean's 19-year sentence. But McHugh shows his courtroom won't be a place where the government can expect easy wins with prosecutions where the fix is in from the moment the indictment drops.

Some courts have suggested that so long as there is a “reasonable” explanation for the amount of drugs specified in an undercover operation the Government’s conduct will pass constitutional muster. I am not prepared to adopt such an approach where the Government’s premise cannot be tested in any meaningful way and is refuted by specific evidence of record...

To the extent that principles of Due Process are meant to be a check on government power, there is no more fundamental interest than liberty. A sting operation that constructs a crime implicates liberty interests in a unique way, in that the Government seeks out its citizens for the purpose of testing their willingness to commit a criminal act. There can be no greater manifestation of the coercive power of Government than creating what is, in effect, a morality test, while specifying the penalty for failing that test in advance.

A check on government power is what's needed. Very few courts have been willing to place themselves between defendants and law enforcement agencies that would rather create criminals than go after those already in circulation.

Filed Under: clifton mclean, dea, drug raids, entrapment, fake criminals, fbi, gerald mchugh, law enforcement, own plots, stash house

For The First Time, A Federal Judge Has Suppressed Evidence Obtained With A Stingray Device

from the get-a-warrant,-g-men dept

Evidence acquired using Stingray devices has rarely been suppressed. This is due to the fact that it's almost impossible to challenge. The reason it's almost impossible to challenge is because the FBI -- and the law enforcement agencies it "partners" with (via severely restrictive nondisclosure agreements) -- will throw out evidence and let suspects walk rather than expose the use of IMSI catchers.

Earlier this year, a Baltimore city circuit judge threw out evidence obtained with the Baltimore PD's cell tower spoofing equipment. And this was no run-of-the-mill drug bust. An actual murder suspect had evidence suppressed because of the BPD's warrantless deployment of a Stingray device. Without the use of the Stingray, the BPD would not have been able to locate the suspect's phone. And without this location, there would have been no probable cause to search the apartment he was in. You can't build a search warrant on illegally-obtained probable cause, reasoned the judge. Goodbye evidence.

"I can't play the 'what if' game with the Constitution," [the judge] said, lamenting that it protects people from illegal searches even when the defendant is "likely guilty."

Now, it's finally happened at a higher level. For the first time ever, a federal judge has suppressed evidence obtained by the warrantless use of a Stingray device.

U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan on Tuesday ruled that defendant Raymond Lambis' rights were violated when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used such a device without a warrant to find his Washington Heights apartment.

The DEA had used a stingray to identify Lambis' apartment as the most likely location of a cell phone identified during a drug-trafficking probe. Pauley said doing so constituted an unreasonable search.

"Absent a search warrant, the government may not turn a citizen's cell phone into a tracking device," Pauley wrote.

The opinion [PDF] notes the DEA first tried to locate Lambis using cell site location info but found it wasn't precise enough. So, it deployed a Stingray to track him down, ultimately ending with a DEA tech roaming an apartment's hallways with a cell site simulator until Lambis was located.

A few hours later, DEA agents showed up at the apartment, where Lambis' father allowed them to enter and Lambis himself consented to a search of his room and belongings.

It's pretty tough to work your way backwards from a consensual search to a suppression order, but Lambis' lawyer was apparently up to the challenge. But -- as in the Baltimore PD case -- the DEA would never have known which apartment Lambis was located in without the use of a cell site simulator, and that's where it all falls apart for the DEA.

The government tried to argue that two fairly recent cases involving thermal imaging (Kyllo) and drug dogs (Thomas) weren't applicable, as its "limited search" only disclosed information it could obtain without a warrant: cell site location. This is at odds with its reasons for deploying the cell site simulator -- which was that the CSLI it obtained wasn't precise enough to locate the suspect.

The court finds the government's attempt to route around these two precedential decisions unavailing, noting that the use of a cell site simulator is actually more intrusive than the search methods used in the cases the DEA's lawyers wanted to have ignored.

The Government attempts to diminish the power of Second Circuit precedent by noting that Thomas represents a minority position among circuit courts. But this Court need not be mired in the Serbonian Bog of circuit splits. An electronic search for a cell phone inside an apartment is far more intrusive than a canine sniff because, unlike narcotics, cell phones are neither contraband nor illegal. In fact, they are ubiquitous. Because the vast majority of the population uses cell phones lawfully on a daily basis, “one cannot say (and the police cannot be assured) that use of the relatively crude equipment at issue here will always be lawful.”

The court also points out that the DEA -- for whatever reason -- obtained a warrant for the cell site location info. It wonders why it didn't bother to obtain a warrant for the cell site simulator deployment, seeing as it obtained a warrant for information it could have obtained without one. It also notes that a warrant for CSLI is not the same as a warrant for obtaining precise location info via the use of sophisticated electronic equipment.

The fact that the DEA had obtained a warrant for CSLI from the target cell phone does not change the equation. “If the scope of the search exceeds that permitted by the terms of a validly issued warrant . . . , the subsequent seizure is unconstitutional without more.” Horton v. California, 496 U.S. 128, 140 (1990)... Here, the use of the cell-site simulator to obtain more precise information about the target phone’s location was not contemplated by the original warrant application. If the Government had wished to use a cell-site simulator, it could have obtained a warrant. And the fact that the Government previously demonstrated probable cause and obtained a warrant for CSLI from Lambis’s cell phone suggests strongly that the Government could have obtained a warrant to use a cell-site simulator, if it had wished to do so.

The government also tried to use the Supreme Court's horrendous Strieff decision to save the evidence, but the court notes that the "temporal proximity" between the illegal Stingray search and the consensual search of the apartment was too close to allow the illegality of the original search to dissipate.

The government also tried to use the Third Party Doctrine to salvage its warrantless search, but the court refuses to be sold on this bad idea.

This Court need not address whether the third party doctrine is “ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks,” United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945, 957 (2012) (Sotomayer, J., concurring), because even under the historic framework of the doctrine, it is not available to the Government here. The doctrine applies when a party “voluntarily turns over [information] to third parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 744 (1979) [...] However, the location information detected by a cell-site simulator is different in kind from pen register information: it is neither initiated by the user nor sent to a third party.

[...]

Unlike CSLI, the “pings” picked up by the cell-site simulator are not transmitted in the normal course of the phone’s operation. Rather, “cell site simulators actively locate phones by forcing them to repeatedly transmit their unique identifying electronic serial numbers, and then calculating the signal strength until the target phone is pinpointed.”

These points are good. The following, though, is even better. The court finds the government can't attempt to use the Third Party Doctrine when it has chosen to act as the "third party" in this equation.

For both the pen register and CSLI, the Government ultimately obtains the information from the service provider who is keeping a record of the information. With the cell-site simulator, the Government cuts out the middleman and obtains the information directly. Without a third party, the third party doctrine is inapplicable.

The Second Circuit has yet to make a decision on the reasonable expectation of privacy in CSLI. If this is appealed, it may finally have to handle that question. Then again, CSLI is only partially implicated here and it may be able to let the Fourth Amendment's reach be determined on a case-by-case basis until something more directly addressing the issue comes along. If nothing else, the ruling here should encourage more federal agencies operating in this district to get a warrant "just in case." Then again, the secrecy surrounding Stingray devices discourages the creation of paper trails, so it may be that the government will continue to roll the Fourth Amendment dice until a higher court tells them otherwise.

Filed Under: dea, evidence, raymond lambis, stingray, suppression, surveillance, warrant

DEA Finally Decides To Do Something About Its Wiretap Warrant Abuses

from the Re:-Something:-Will-this-do? dept

The DEA will no longer be able to waltz into Riverside County (CA) judge Helios Hernandez's chambers and walk out with signed wiretap warrants. I mean, they'll still be able to get Judge Hernandez to sign warrants. After all, no one does it better:

Nearly all of that surveillance was authorized by a single state court judge in Riverside County, who last year signed off on almost five times as many wiretaps as any other judge in the United States.

He's so efficient even the DEA can't quite wrap its mind around it.

Hernandez approved 20 times as many wiretaps as his counterparts in San Bernardino County. DEA officials said they could not explain that difference.

The DEA never let Rule 41 jurisdiction limitations bother them. Agents used wiretap warrants to track suspects all over the nation. The DEA also didn't let the DOJ's hesitancy to condone its actions/warrants get in the way of its drug warring. DOJ lawyers heavily hinted that if the DEA wanted to use questionable wiretap warrants, it had better not be dragging its raggedy affidavits into federal court.

But drag those affidavits into federal court it did, forcing the DOJ to defend the very warrants it told the DEA to stop dropping off at its place. The DOJ's lawyers said the toxic, possibly illegal warrants were actually 100% legal, perfectly compliant with federal and state law -- even though they were missing the signature of the local District Attorney, as required by federal law.

The DEA -- having had its bogus warrant assembly line exposed by USA Today's Brad Heath and Brett Kelman -- is finally moving towards curbing its wiretap abuse.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has ordered its agents to seek input from federal prosecutors before tapping Americans’ phone calls or text messages, months after it came under fire for a vast and legally questionable eavesdropping program in the Los Angeles suburbs.

The rules are a significant change for the drug agency, which had dramatically increased its use of wiretaps over the past decade by seeking authorization from state judges and prosecutors who were willing to approve the surveillance more quickly and with less scrutiny.

In theory, this means DEA agents will have to have federal prosecutors sign off on affidavits/warrants before running them past whoever happens to be manning the desk at the local DA's office. This won't necessarily make them more compliant with federal law, as it has historically been truly rare to find the local DA actually in his office, but it does mean there will finally be some oversight in place. To date, the only "oversight" the DEA has had to endure is the occasional DOJ lawyer telling agents "no fucking way" (ACTUAL QUOTE) whenever they approached federal prosecutors with a drug bust.

And, unless DEA brass is really serious about changing the agency's shady methods, it's likely nothing will change. Drug warriors, like water, seek their own level, running downhill against the least resistance.

Wiretaps are considered so intrusive that federal law requires approval from a senior Justice Department official before agents can even ask a federal court for permission to conduct one. The law imposes no such restriction on state court wiretaps, even when sought by federal agents.

Unless the DEA (or Congress) closes this loophole, nothing will change. There may be a temporary improvement, but it will be just that: temporary. The DEA has long been used to jumping zero hurdles on its way to intercepting communications. There's no reason to believe it won't revert to form unless steps are taken to prevent it. In fact, the DEA's actions will probably have less effect on its wiretap abuse than the installation of a new district attorney. As of the end of February, DA Mike Hestrin had only approved 14 wiretap warrants -- a huge decrease from the 126 approved over the same two-month period last year.

Filed Under: abuse, dea, helios hernandez, riverside, warrants, wiretaps