Pubdate: Fri, 09 Aug 2013
Source: Dayton Daily News (OH)
Copyright: 2013 Dayton Daily News
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/7JXk4H3l
Website: http://www.daytondailynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/120
Authors: John Shiffman and David Ingram, Reuters
Page: 9

DEA'S DECEPTION UNDER REVIEW

Program Instructed Agents to Alter Investigative Trail.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Details of a Drug Enforcement Administration
program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to
alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by IRS
agents for two years.

The practice of re-creating the investigative trail is now under
review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have
also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents to
omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA's Special Operations
Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or
investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005
and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The Internal Revenue Service
is among two dozen arms of the government working with the SOD,
including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security
Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed
from the manual.

The Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from
overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA
database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them
launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Internal government documents show that law enforcement agents have
been trained to conceal how such investigations truly begin, to
re-create the investigative trail to cover up the original source of
the information.

DEA officials said the practice is legal and has been in near-daily
use since the 1990s. They have said its purpose is to protect sources
and methods, not to withhold evidence.

Defense attorneys and some former judges and prosecutors say that
systematically hiding potential evidence from defendants violates the
U.S. Constitution. According to documents and interviews, agents use a
procedure they call "parallel construction" to re-create the
investigative trail, stating in affidavits or in court, for example,
that an investigation began with a traffic infraction rather than an
SOD tip.

The IRS document offers further detail on the parallel construction
program.

The 2005 IRS document focused on SOD tips that were classified and
noted that the Justice Department "closely guards the information
provided by SOD with strict oversight." While the IRS document said
SOD information could be used only for drug investigations, DEA
officials said the SOD role has recently expanded to organized crime
and money-laundering.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., expressed
concern with the concept of parallel construction as a method to hide
the origin of an investigation.

"We're working with the DEA and intelligence organizations to try to
find out exactly what that story is," said Rogers, a former FBI agent.

Spokespeople for the DEA and the Department of Justice declined to
comment.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, a member of the Homeland Security and
Government Affairs Committee, said he was troubled that DEA agents
have been "trying to cover up a program that investigates Americans."

Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are
distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Edward Snowden, includes data
about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA
official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law
enforcement.

The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and
Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests
and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records,
and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said.
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