U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans

In another outrageous disclosure, it was reported on August 5th that the NSA has directed a special investigative unit of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), comprised of agents from the FBI, DEA, CIA, IRS, DHS and other agencies, to gather and funnel information seized from and about American citizens in an effort to investigate and prosecute narcotics offenses.

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division. They have been 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.  As part of this operation, the DEA has been routinely “recreating” their investigative trial and thus misrepresenting how certain leads were gathered and how a suspect or certain evidence was ultimately located.  This poses a real threat to the constitutional rights of criminal defendants as it is likely in this scenario that counsel for the defendant is not truly being provided all of the discovery they are entitled to and thus being denied certain information that may be exculpatory (information that may exonerate a defendant).  This would apply to defendants in California and throughout the United States.  More will be revealed concerning these undercover investigations in the near future as more information is revealed about these apparently unconstitutional seizures of information from everyday citizens.

Additional reading: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/uk-dea-sod-idUKBRE9740HP20130805