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DEA And ICE Hiding Secret Cameras In Streetlights 

November 12, 2018

DEA And ICE Hiding Secret Cameras In Streetlights 

According to new government procurement data, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have purchased an undisclosed number of secret surveillance cameras that are being hidden in streetlights across the country.

Quartz first reported this dystopian development of federal authorities stocking up on “covert systems” last week. The report showed how the DEA paid a Houston, Texas company called Cowboy Streetlight Concealments LLC. approximately $22,000 since June for “video recording and reproducing equipment.” ICE paid out about $28,000 to Cowboy Streetlight Concealments during the same period.

“It’s unclear where the DEA and ICE streetlight cameras have been installed, or where the next deployments will take place. ICE offices in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio have provided funding for recent acquisitions from Cowboy Streetlight Concealments; the DEA’s most recent purchases were funded by the agency’s Office of Investigative Technology, which is located in Lorton, Virginia,” said Quartz.

Below is the list Of contract actions for Cowboy Streetlight Concealments LLC. Vendor_Duns_Number: “085189089” on the Federal Procurement Database:

Christie Crawford, who co-owns Cowboy Streetlight Concealments with her husband, said she was not allowed to talk about the government contracts in detail.

“We do streetlight concealments and camera enclosures,” Crawford told Quartz. “Basically, there’s businesses out there that will build concealments for the government and that’s what we do. They specify what’s best for them, and we make it. And that’s about all I can probably say.”

However, she added: “I can tell you this—things are always being watched. It doesn’t matter if you’re driving down the street or visiting a friend, if government or law enforcement has a reason to set up surveillance, there’s great technology out there to do it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Government Agencies are Stockpiling Body Armor, Tactical Gear, Ammo

January 19, 2016

Government Agencies are Stockpiling Body Armor, Tactical Gear, Ammo

Government Agencies are Stockpiling Body Armor, Tactical Gear, Ammo

In recent years under President Obama, federal agencies have been stockpiling alarmingly huge amounts of military hardware, body armor, and riot gear. As concerns continue to mount over an increasingly bloated and powerful federal government, agencies whose primary function is administrative — such as the EPA, FDA, and IRS — have been progressively militarized. Since 2006, 44 federal agencies have spent an astounding $71 million on items such as guns, ammunition, body armor, and riot and tactical gear.

And citizens as well as watchdog agencies are taking due note of these alarming developments.

In a recent audit of the federal government by the nonprofit organization Open the Books, government waste and bloat takes a backseat to the issue of increasingly armed government agencies. Since 2006, nearly $330 million was spent on the same type of equipment by traditional law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, DEA, and Secret Service.

The massive expenditures by agencies which are supposed to be administrative by nature have many people asking why, for instance, the Department of Veterans Affairs would need riot helmets, body armor, Kevlar blankets, and tactical gear. Or why the FDA needs ballistic vests.

As concerned Americans study the numbers in the watchdog audit, many are asking why the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spent $200,000 on body armor during the Obama administration, or for what reason the Zoo Police at the Smithsonian Institution spent $28,000 for body armor during the fiscal year 2012.

Children and adults alike are taught to view police as the “good guys.” However, America’s local police force is increasingly being militarized. Simultaneously media outlets, congressmen, and President Obama are pressing the call for American citizens to be further disarmed and weakened through the systematic dismantling of the Second Amendment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Leaked Documents Show FBI, DEA and U.S. Army Buying Italian Spyware

July 7, 2015

Leaked Documents Show FBI, DEA and U.S. Army Buying Italian Spyware

Featured photo - Leaked Documents Show FBI, DEA and U.S. Army Buying Italian Spyware

The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Army have all bought controversial software that allows users to take remote control of suspects’ computers, recording their calls, emails, keystrokes and even activating their cameras, according to internal documents hacked from the software’s Italian manufacturer.

The company, Hacking Team, has also been aggressively marketing the software to other U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, demonstrating their products to district attorneys in New York, San Bernardino, California, and Maricopa, Arizona; and multi-agency task forces like the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation in Florida and California’s Regional Enforcement Allied Computer Team. (We do not use this product nor are we currently considering a proposal from the vendor/manufacturer to purchase it,” Jerry Cobb, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said.)

The company was also in conversation with various other agencies, including the CIA, the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigative Service, the New York Police Department, and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The revelations come from hundreds of gigabytes of company information, including emails and financial records, which were released online Sunday night and analyzed by The Intercept. Milan-based Hacking Team is one of a handful of companies that sell off-the-shelf spyware for hundreds of thousands of euros — a price point accessible to smaller countries and large police forces. Hacking Team has drawn fire from human rights and privacy activists who contend that the company’s aggressive malware, known as Remote Control System, or RCS, is being sold to countries that deploy it against activists, political opponents and journalists.

Even in the U.S., where the software would presumably be used only with a judge’s approval, the tactic is still controversial. Just last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote to the director of the FBI asking for “more specific information about the FBI’s current use of spyware,” in order for the Senate Judiciary Committee to evaluate “serious privacy concerns.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

DEA GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE DRAGNET EXPOSED; ACCESS TO DATA LIKELY CONTINUES

April 9, 2015

DEA GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE DRAGNET EXPOSED; ACCESS TO DATA LIKELY CONTINUES

Secret mass surveillance conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration is falling under renewed scrutiny after fresh revelations about the broad scope of the agency’s electronic spying.

On Tuesday, USA Today reported that for more than two decades, dating back to 1992, the DEA and the Justice Department “amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.”

Citing anonymous current and former officials “involved with the operation,” USA Today reported that Americans’ calls were logged between the United States and targeted countries and regions including Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America.

The DEA’s data dragnet was apparently shut down by attorney general Eric Holder in September 2013. But on Wednesday, following USA Today‘s report, Human Rights Watch launched a lawsuit against the DEA over its bulk collection of phone records and is seeking a retrospective declaration that the surveillance was unlawful.

The latest revelations shine more light on the broad scope of the DEA’s involvement in mass surveillance programs, which can be traced back to a secret program named “Project Crisscross” in the early 1990s, as The Intercept previously revealed.

 

Documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden,published by The Intercept in August last year, showed that the DEA was involved in collecting and sharing billions of phone records alongside agencies such as the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI.

The vast program reported on by USA Today shares some of the same hallmarks of Project Crisscross: it began in the early 1990s, was ostensibly aimed at gathering intelligence about drug trafficking, and targeted countries worldwide, with focus on Central and South America.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11

April 9, 2015

How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs.

– From today’s USA Today article: U.S. Secretly Tracked Billions of Calls for Decades

 

The drug war is something that wouldn’t even exist in a rational, mature and intelligent civilization. Not only is it ineffective, invasive and brutish, but we now know that the almost religious zealousness with which it has been pursued by its proponents has led directly to the current unconstitutional surveillance state. If not for our acquiescence to the “war on drugs,” would the authoritarian statists amongst us have been able to usher in the even more dangerous but similarly endless “war on terror?” Personally, I doubt it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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