• Tag Archives DEA

  • The DEA Is Seizing Cash Without Warrants In Its Version Of Stop-and-Frisk

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Federal drug agents may be racially profiling and unjustly seizing cash from travelers in the nation’s airports, bus stations and train stations. A new report released by the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Justice examined the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s controversial use of “cold consent.”

    In a cold consent encounter, a person is stopped if an agent thinks that person’s behavior fits a drug courier profile. Or an agent can stop a person cold “based on no particular behavior,” according to the Inspector General report. The agent then asks people they have stopped for consent to question them and sometimes to search their possessions as well. By gaining consent, law enforcement officers can bypass the need for a warrant.

    But after reviewing the DEA’s policies, the Inspector General concluded, “cold consent encounters and searches can raise civil rights concerns.” In one incident, DEA agents cold-stopped an African-American woman at an airport and allegedly subjected her to “aggressive and humiliating questioning”; the woman was a Pentagon lawyer and travelling on government business.

    Little wonder research by the U.S. Department of Justice found that cold consent encounters are “more often associated with racial profiling than contacts based on previously acquired information.” Cold consent has even been compared to stop-and-frisk.

    Moreover, agents can seize cash they find during a cold consent encounter. According to data analysis conducted by the Institute for Justice, half of all DEA cash seizures from 2009 to 2013 were under $10,000. Thanks to civil forfeiture laws, law enforcement can take cash and other valuable property, based on an officer’s often subjective determination of probable cause, even from those who have not been charged with a crime.

    Disturbingly, the Inspector General found that DEA interdiction task force groups have been seizing cash from travelers and then urging them to sign forms disclaiming their own cash and “waiving their rights.”

    Full article: http://www.forbes.co … n-of-stop-and-frisk/


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  • Maybe a Government That Constantly Violates Rights Is More Rotten Than We Realize

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Just two days ago, the New York Times revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration engages in domestic phone surveillance on a scale that may dwarf the snoopy misdeeds of the National Security Agency. Through its Hemisphere Project, the DEA partners with AT&T to trawl through 26 years (and counting) of stored phone data to identify repeating patterns of calls that can identify people even if they frequently change anonymous “burner” phones. That call you make to your bookie every Saturday? Yeah. That’s a give-away, no matter if you make it from different numbers. As Reason’s Matt Welch remarked after the report’s publication, it “should put to rest the debate over whether we live in a free country. We don’t.” He’s right, though after the headlines of recent months (and the years before) it’s not clear that the matter should still be a subject of debate.

    Why do records of phone calls matter? As the ACLU’s Catherine Crump notes, “While people may dispose of their phones, it’s much harder for people to change their lives. If Alice calls Bob twice a day and Carol every Sunday, Alice is likely to do that even if she switches phones. By analyzing calling patterns within the database, it’s possible to identify Alice’s new phone.” Tracking and recording the patterns of our lives is deeply revealing about who we are and how we live.

    The Hemisphere database is searchable only through the issuance of a subpoena—an “administrative subpoena” that the DEA issues itself. If you’re thinking that’s not much of a safeguard, you’re probably in good company. At least, the feds seem to believe the public at large would find the program off-putting to the public at large. “All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” a slide given to the Times says. The program was revealed almost incidentally in the course of a lawsuit over federal infiltration of antiwar groups.

    Imagine that. Yet another vast and creepy spy program is revealed in the course of a legal challenge to intrusive government targeting of peaceful political activists. That rabbit hole goes deep.

    This comes against a backdrop of months of revelations of NSA surveillance on phone and Internet communications. And that came after news about the secretive Justice Department seizure of Associated Press phone records and the investigation and threatened prosecution of Fox News reporter James Rosen for reporting on stories in a way the government finds inconvenient.

    That’s all this year, and it’s not, by any means, a complete list of the disturbing incursions into personal freedom committed by the federal government.

    Full article: http://reason.com/bl … hat-constantly-viola


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  • Cops kill dog, handcuff kids in wrong-house raid

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    A federal court case has been launched after a SWAT team in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area busted into the wrong house, shot the family’s dog, handcuffed the children and forced them to “sit next to the carcass of their dead and bloody pet for more than an hour.”

    The case has been outlined by Courthouse News, and Mike Riggs at a Reason.com blog wrote, “Shawn Scovill of the taskforce may have raided the wrong house, but he didn’t want to let the opportunity to rifle through someone’s things go to waste. So he and his team ransacked the Franco house for over an hour, and managed to find a .22 caliber pistol in the ‘basement bedroom of Gilbert Castillo,’ which the suit says they attributed to the head of the Franco household, Robert Franco.”

    According to CN, a claim over the attack on the family has been filed in federal court by a team of lawyers representing the family. The plaintiffs are the nine people in the Franco home on the evening of July 13, 2010, including three children, and the case seeks $30 million for the civil rights violations and other damages.

    Defendants include the St. Paul police department, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and members of the Dakota County Drug Task Force.

    Robert Franco explains in the claim the attack officers raided the wrong house, and Task Force Officer Scovill, who set up the raid, “provided false information to a Minnesota District Court judge in order to obtain a search warrant.”

    According to CN, Franco alleges, “Defendant Scovill lied when he informed the district court judge who reviewed Scovill’s search warrant application that Scovill had obtained information from the confidential informant that the plaintiff’s home was the properly targeted house and that the address and the identity of the individuals who resided therein were the plaintiffs.”

    The complaint explains what officers should have known: that a neighbor should have been the intended target.

    CN reported, “Plaintiff Roberto Franco was not named in the search warrant, nor was any person who lived in the raided house named in the search warrant.”

    Added the complaint, “Plaintiff, Roberto Franco, had never been discussed or considered a suspect by law enforcement, Scovill or any of the defendants directly involved or indirectly involved in the raid, relative to any alleged involvement by Franco in any distribution of contraband prior to the wrong house raid.”

    Franco pointed out that the neighbor’s name was actually on the warrant.

    Instead, the SWAT team “negligently raided the home” and spent the next hour “physically brutalizing all the above-named occupants of said house,” according to the complaint.

    Added Riggs, “Since the DEA is named in the suit, the Francos’ legal team will likely find itself going head-to-head with Obama administration lawyers, who argued a similar case earlier this year before the Ninth Circuit.

    Full article: http://www.wnd.com/2 … in-wrong-house-raid/


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