The hits just keep coming against the Obama administration as news breaks that a secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) unit is using "intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans."
Not only are they using this information for purposes that have no connection to "national security," but they are actively 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.
The information origins are also being hidden from defense lawyers, and in some cases prosecutors and judges.
According to Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011, "I have never heard of anything like this at all." She continues on to say "It is one thing to create special rules for national security. Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."
Since the NSA programs and the metadata collected is only supposed to be used against terrorists, according to the Obama administration, guess that means we are all terrorists now.
