Americans may have faced widespread privacy violations as outsourced government spies rooted through their luggage or mail looking for evidence to give to the Drug Enforcement Administration in exchange for cash rewards, a House committee heard Wednesday.
For a federal agency to snoop through the belongings of private citizens could be a Fourth Amendment breach. But the Justice Department says that the DEA allowed for exactly that behavior by recruiting and paying millions of dollars to “voluntary” sources working at Amtrak, airlines and parcel companies.
“If you incentivize an Amtrak employee or an airplane employee or a cargo company employee [to seize shipments of money for a reward], how many boxes are they opening? How many passenger manifests are they providing? How many people are getting pulled out of line to find the person or persons where a seizure results in a reward?” Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Department of Justice investigators spent two and a half years investigating the DEA’s confidential source program and released their findings in September. They uncovered a system rife with problems. Full story...
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For a federal agency to snoop through the belongings of private citizens could be a Fourth Amendment breach. But the Justice Department says that the DEA allowed for exactly that behavior by recruiting and paying millions of dollars to “voluntary” sources working at Amtrak, airlines and parcel companies.
“If you incentivize an Amtrak employee or an airplane employee or a cargo company employee [to seize shipments of money for a reward], how many boxes are they opening? How many passenger manifests are they providing? How many people are getting pulled out of line to find the person or persons where a seizure results in a reward?” Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Department of Justice investigators spent two and a half years investigating the DEA’s confidential source program and released their findings in September. They uncovered a system rife with problems. Full story...
Related posts:
- Canadian newspaper says Montreal police tracked journalist's iPhone
- U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades...
- Your HDDs were riddled with NSA spyware for years...
- Australian police track mobile phones the NSA way...
- Former president Jimmy Carter sends snail mail to avoid NSA snooping...
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