Obama Admin Allows NSA To Share Data With Law Enforcement Agencies

Knowing that the law is not on their side, federal agencies like the DEA and even the Department of Justice have turned to the NSA to get information about people who they suspect to be criminals but lack sufficient evidence to indict. Using data collected by the agency, they are able to reverse engineer an independent investigation that allows them to act against the suspect in question.

Unfortunately, this is far from the only excess law enforcement has – and will continue to – engage in:

“When it comes to skirting the Fourth Amendment, lying has become standard policy for the American security apparatus, according to Radley Balko of The Washington Post:

And it certainly isn’t the only time that that national security apparatus has let law enforcement agencies benefit from policies that are supposed to be reserved for terrorism investigations in order to get around the Fourth Amendment, then instructed those law enforcement agencies to misdirect, fudge and outright lie about how they obtained incriminating information — see the Stingray debacle. This isn’t just a few rogue agents. The lying has been a matter of policy. We’re now learning that the feds had these agreements with police agencies all over the country, affecting thousands of cases.

Government attorneys understand that if evidence is obtained in an unconstitutional manner the evidence will be inadmissible in court and useless to the prosecution. In legal speak this is called ‘fruit from the poisonous tree.’

With these new provisions in effect, what was once illegal for the feds to do will now become standard operating procedure in America.

According to a report in The New York Times:

The executive branch can change its own rules without going to Congress or a judge for permission because the data comes from surveillance methods that lawmakers did not include in the main law that governs national security wiretapping, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

FISA covers a narrow band of surveillance: the collection of domestic or international communications from a wire on American soil, leaving most of what the N.S.A. does uncovered.

This essentially means that anything not covered by domestic spying law, which is the vast majority of data swept up in these surveillance programs, is fair game for domestic police agencies.

These actions, undertaken in haste during a ‘fog of war’ in the post-9/11 hysteria, reveal that the true target isn’t some nebulas terror organization from a far away land, but the American people themselves.”

Source: Free Thought Project