DEA Has a Surveillance Program

The NSA isn’t the only agency with an advanced and highly secret surveillance program, and this one is used to launch criminal investigations of Americans. Reuters reports that a secretive Drug Enforcement Administration unit passes intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, and telephone records to authorities in the U.S. The unit, called the Special Operations Division, was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and comprises partner agencies including the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and Department of Homeland Security. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the program is that agents are told to use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD,” according to documents obtained by Reuters, to pretend that an arrest came from a random traffic stop and drug search, for example, rather than SOD surveillance.