SOD: Violating Americans’ Privacy Isn’t Just for the NSA Anymore
SOD whimsically refers to overhauling facts as “parallel construction.” Reuters quotes a former federal agent: “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it…”
Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008, went on the record: “It’s just like laundering money — you work it backwards to make it clean.” Simple, right? Perhaps someone might remind former agent Selander and the United States government that laundering money is illegal.
As if this wasn’t disturbing enough Reuters shared additional information from military and senior law enforcement officials, intended to defuse the incendiary situation: “Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller’s citizenship can be verified … they do a pretty good job of screening, but it can be a struggle to know for sure whether the person on a wiretap is American…”
Isn’t verifying citizenship supposed to be forbidden? If amnesty goes through that should no longer be a legal issue but, to paraphrase Tina Turner, “What’s law got to do with it?”
Defense lawyers and prosecutors alike are incensed about SOD’s tactics. Both claim that SOD’s ploys dance around the edges of the Constitution. Says former federal prosecutor, Henry E. Hockeimer, Jr.: “You can’t game the system …You can’t create this subterfuge. These are …not national security cases. If you don’t draw the line here, where do you draw it?”
Hockeimer’s question comes late; since there is no longer any rule of law evident, one might ask, instead, “land of the free?”
Image: Jorge Royan; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license