From the above at TDB:
That’s an increasingly and appallingly widespread sentiment even in post-Snowden America, where we still have cops and pundits who insist that only people with something to hide worry about the end of privacy. As Harvey Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, could tell you, in today’s America, we’re all guilty of multiple crimes even before we get up in the morning.
Which is what we talked about way back a short time.
Smoking Gun: DEA Manuals Show Feds Use NSA Spy Data, Train Cops to Construct False Chains of Evidence
Trainers justify parallel construction on national security and PR grounds: "Americans don't like it"
by Shawn Musgrave
Muckrock, February 3, 2014
Drug Enforcement Administration training documents released to MuckRock user C.J. Ciaramella show how the agency constructs two chains of evidence to hide surveillance programs from defense teams, prosecutors, and a public wary of domestic intelligence practices.
In training materials, the department even encourages a willful ignorance by field agents to minimize the risk of making intelligence practices public.
The DEA practices mirror a common dilemma among domestic law enforcement agencies: Analysts have access to unprecedented streams of classified information that might prove useful to investigators, but entering classified evidence in court risks disclosing those sensitive surveillance methods to the world, which could either end up halting the program due to public outcry or undermining their usefulness through greater awareness.
An undated slide deck released by the DEA to fleshes out the issue more graphically: When military and intelligence agencies “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." Law enforcement agencies, on the other hand, “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.”
CONTINUED...
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-parallel-construction-guides/
Hannah Arendt warned us what this all means, back when there were a lot of people who learned what GESTAPO was before Hogan's Heroes.
Via Chris Hedges:
The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.
Thanks for the heads up, starroute! And to think I often wonder how they got Don Siegelman in prison.
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