So the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret that nearly everything about it is classified, including the size of its budget and the location of its office – has been using the immense pools of data collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to go after American citizens for ordinary drug crimes. Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, have been coached to conceal the existence of the program and the source of the information by creating what’s called a ‘parallel construction,
Sunday, August 11th, 2013
The NSA-DEA Police State Tango
Author: ANDREW O'HEHIR
Source: Salon
Publication Date: Saturday, Aug 10, 2013 09:30 AM PDT
Link: The NSA-DEA Police State Tango
Source: Salon
Publication Date: Saturday, Aug 10, 2013 09:30 AM PDT
Link: The NSA-DEA Police State Tango
Stephan: If you read a novel that described the current surveillance state in America, and its interaction with increasingly militarized law enforcement agencies, you would see clearly that the U.S. is a soft police state. All reviewers of such a book would exclaim this. Just as happened with Orwell's 1984.
But, because we are living it day-by-day, people seem to hardly notice.