DEA regularly mines Americans' travel records to seize millions in cash [View all]
WASHINGTON — Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases.
Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash.
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 surveillance is separate from the vast and widely-known anti-terrorism apparatus that now surrounds air travel, which is rarely used for routine law enforcement. It has been carried out largely without the airlines’ knowledge.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/08/10/dea-travel-record-airport-seizures/88474282/
Good old civil forfeiture. Better not travel with money in our formerly free country. If you do, LE can take the money from you without due process and then challenge you to prove that you got it legally.
All you never wanted to know about civil forfeiture
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken
IMO it's time for the DEA to be abolished. They no longer serve their original purpose. Now they serve to protect the interests of big pharma/big prison/Law Enforcement/Big alcohol etc.
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