‘PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION’
U.S. Authorities Illegally Using Secret Domestic Spying To Target Citizens For Arrest
By Elizabeth Coady
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER FRIGHTENING REVELATION about America’s rule-of-law being shat upon.
News of the latest violation comes from Reuters which reveals that the National Security Agency is funneling information from “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records” to DEA agents who channel the information to local authorities to launch criminal cases against Americans.
In addition, the DEA agents are helping to creating “false” investigative trails to hide the original source of the information, according to the report. The practice, known as “parallel construction,” “is being used against ordinary American citizens and not foreigners targeted as terrorists.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” Harvard Law professor Nancy Gertner told the news outlet. “It is one thing to create special rules for national security. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”
Anonymous sources told Reuters though that the practice is routine. “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” a source said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”
DEA officials refused to comment, but a document revealed to Reuters shows that operations of the Special Operations Division “cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function.” Rather, agents are directed to site “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”
New Jersey defense attorney Lawrence Lustberg told Reuters that “any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin ‘would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional.’ ”
The secretly-collected information is held in what’s known as the DICE database, accessed by about 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officials. “We use it to connect the dots,” a source told Reuters.
“It was an amazing tool,” one retired federal agent told Reuters. “Our big fear was that it wouldn’t stay secret.”
