Justice officials fear nation's biggest wiretap operation may not be legal | Hacker News Reader

Justice officials fear nation's biggest wiretap operation may not be legal

usatoday.com

76 pointsescapologybb11 comments

This example from the article seems illustrative:

> That should have been enough to build a significant federal case with a long mandatory prison sentence, but that was not what happened. Court records show the Justice Department prosecuted the $76,869.94 in a civil asset seizure case. But it did not prosecute Salazar. Instead, Salazar was booked into jail and released the same day; his lawyer, John Passanante, said he has not been charged as a result of the search. Neither the DEA nor prosecutors would explain why.

There are legal restrictions on when law enforcement officers are allowed to use wiretaps and other searches. Rather than enforce these limits directly, the US court system adopted the position that limits on searches would be enforced only by excluding evidence that resulted from illegal searches - but that those who conducted the illegal search could not, themselves, be punished for it. Then later, as the jury trial system and other procedural safeguards broke down, this stopped mattering, since there aren't very many trials to exclude evidence from anyways. In this case, the Justice Department got what it wanted: about $77k in cash. If he had been poor and not had a proper lawyer, he would've also spent significant time in prison.

This is why we need a police force to police the police. If you work in law enforcement and break the rules, you get held personally accountable.

+1 for Body cams?

Yeah, but with publicly accessible feeds. Law enforcement needs a court order to classify data from the public, not the other way around. Also, a "malfunctioning" body-camera disqualifies an officer from duty, etc.

I imagine though it's probably far more important to have unhindered citizen surveilance of law enforcement, along with a court marshall style grand jury.

Everybody knows it's not legal. The question is what is anyone going to do about it? Answer: nothing.

Justice officials fear nation's biggest wiretap operation may not be legal.

Everyone else fears laws will be changed to make nation's biggest wiretap operation perfectly legal.

44000 people in a year, with 2000 working hours per year, comes out to not even three minutes per person.

Surely there is some kind of oversight in place?

What would you expect the overseers to do, and why? It seems that the real question comes down to:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who watches the watchers?

The court is supposed to oversee these searches, and the people are supposed to oversee the courts. It seems that this system is not working very well, as might have been anticipated, because the founding fathers never expected government officials to fight so hard to abridge the rights of the citizenry, nor did they expect that the courts or citizens would go along so willingly. The people simply do not care about abstract rights.

What do they fear? A public relations nightmare? Because they sure as hell aren't going to go to jail for any of this. Neither the Justice Dept. officials, nor the Judge authorizing this, nor the police carrying it out will have to deal with any negative consequences as a result. The USA is a nearly-complete police state, after all.

Most employees aim to minimize their workload. Are these rogue crimefighters truly motivated only by making a negligible difference in the amount of drugs on our streets in the short-term? I think the more likely scenario is that they are reselling some of the seized drugs and pocketing the profits.

Jimmy McNulty is at it again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_McNulty

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