Don’t worry! The data is only being used to investigate terrorists…

New discoveries about the activities of our criminal government continue, and today I learned that the NSA data — which we were told was only being gathered to fight terrorists — is routinely made available to the DEA for use in drug cases.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is 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.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

Of course they are, and they have gotten away with it not only because they lie, but because the courts have so whittled away at the Fourth Amendment that it barely means anything.

Another article attempts to make a distinction between the NSA and the DEA.

Reuters has uncovered previously unreported details about a separate program, run by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, that extends well beyond intelligence gathering. Its use, legal experts say, raises fundamental questions about whether the government is concealing information used to investigate and help build criminal cases against American citizens.

Whether?

I’d say that question has been answered. When NSA shares its data with the DEA, the two become partners in this unconstitutional exercise.

NSA=DEA.

No wonder the latter thinks they’re the equivalent of the CIA, and are not accountable to anyone. That unaccountability resulted in a college student who wasn’t accused of any crime being held without food and water for five days till he nearly died. They think they can do anything they want, because the taxpayers end up bailing them out.

In addition to the DEA, the NSA intercepts are being sent to local police:

NSA: Much of what the agency does remains classified, but Snowden’s recent disclosures show that NSA not only eavesdrops on foreign communications but has also created a database of virtually every phone call made inside the United States.

SOD: The SOD forwards tips gleaned from NSA intercepts, wiretaps by foreign governments, court-approved domestic wiretaps and a database called DICE to federal agents and local law enforcement officers. The DICE database is different from the NSA phone-records database. DICE consists of about 1 billion records, and is primarily a compilation of phone log data that is legally gathered by the DEA through subpoenas or search warrants.

Got that? Total surveillance plus total sharing of data, and pretty soon people are going to be asking a basic question.

At what point should it be recognized that the United States has become a totalitarian country?

It is bad enough for things to have reached the point where we are living in a lawless surveillance state, but now that we know the surveillance data is being used for law enforcement purposes, the secret police state is fait accompli. We have no rights and the government can do what it wants.

What I am hoping will happen is that they’ll keep digging, and that defense lawyers will be able to get their clients’ criminal cases reversed. I would like to see a reminder that this country still has vestiges of being the United States of America, even if these rogue unconstitutional agencies are working to make it into something else.