More Illegal government surveillance exposed
Aug 05, 2013
No wonder the NSA is upset. One by one, its secret illegal activities are being exposed, thanks to some of the people who work in those very programs. Some of their employees, who see what is going on, obviously disagree with what these government programs are doing to the Constitution.
Little by little, Mystery Babylon's secret government is coming to light. Apart from secrecy, it cannot survive, so it fights back as hard as it can. But time is against them, because God is in the process of setting the people free. The following is a Reuters report entitled:
DEA Special Operations Division Covers Up Surveillance Used To Investigate Americans: Report
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges....
The only reason they try to conceal their activity is because they know it is illegal as well as unconstitutional and don't want to get embarrassed by public exposure.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."
It will be interesting to see what excuse they come up with this time. The NSA's previous claim was that the so-called "Patriot Act" made their suveillance legal, even though they used some creative interpretations of the Act that went far beyond the intent of the legislators who introduced the bill. This time, however, it appears that they are being caught red-handed doing things that are obviously illegal.
I have a suggestion. Just admit that the Constitution is "just a piece of paper," as one recent president called it. Admit that the government is no longer a nation of laws, but a nation of Executive Orders.
Then we will at least know where we stand.