NAVY ILLEGALLY HACKING ‘ALL CIVILIAN COMPUTERS’ IN SEVERAL STATES
“So far as we can tell from
the record, it has become a routine practice for the Navy…”
Navy Illegally Hacking 'All
Civilian Computers' in Several States
Image Credits: U.S. Navy /
Flickr
by MIKAEL THALEN |
INFOWARS.COM | SEPTEMBER 15, 2014
The Navy’s primary law
enforcement agency has been conducting illegal surveillance operations against
countless civilian computers for the past several years, a federal appeals
court found last week.
Documents obtained by the
Courthouse News Service reveal a 2010 case in which a Naval Criminal
Investigative Service Agent in Georgia used an advanced surveillance software
program known as “RoundUp” to scan every civilian computer in Washington state
for child pornography.
NCIS Agent Steve Logan was
able to locate one suspect, Washington-resident Michael Dreyer, and immediately
turned the information over to police, who subpoenaed Dreyer’s internet service
provider with the FBI. Dreyer was charged in federal court after the officers,
and Homeland Security at a later date, used the illegally-obtained data to
acquire a search warrant for his house.
After Dreyer’s lawyers
questioned the search warrant’s legitimacy, Navy representatives claimed that
the initial surveillance operation was justified due to Washington state’s
heavy “saturation” of Navy personnel and Dreyer’s prior military service.
A panel of the Ninth
District Court of Appeals in San Francisco disagreed, stating that the search
never targeted specific military bases or personnel but instead searched
millions of computers not associated with the military.
“To accept that position
would mean that NCIS agents could, for example, routinely stop suspected drunk
drivers in downtown Seattle on the off-chance that a driver is a member of the
military, and then turn over all information collected about civilians to the
Seattle Police Department for prosecution,” wrote Judge Marsha Berzon.
While possession of child
pornography is undoubtedly the most vile of offenses, the government’s use of
dragnet surveillance against millions of Americans not suspected of a crime
still remains unconstitutional.
“This is, literally, the
militarization of the police,” defense attorney Erik Levin told the San
Francisco Chronicle. “They have enough funding that they can go out and stray
from the core mission of national security and get into local law enforcement.”
Unsurprisingly, the case
also revealed the illegal surveillance practice to be a regular occurrence
inside the Navy.
“So far as we can tell from
the record, it has become a routine practice for the Navy to conduct
surveillance of all the civilian computers in an entire state to see whether
any child pornography can be found on them, and then to turn over the
information to civilian law enforcement when no military connection exists,”
the ruling states.
“We have here abundant
evidence that the violation at issue has occurred repeatedly and frequently,
and that the government believes that its conduct is permissible, despite prior
cautions by our court and others that military personnel, including NCIS
agents, may not enforce the civilian laws.”
The Navy, like countless
other government agencies, may also be engaged in “parallel construction,” a
technique used by law enforcement to conceal when data is provided illegally by
federal agencies.
Speaking with Infowars
earlier this month, NSA whistleblower Kirk Wiebe explained how the federal
government routinely engages in the practice.
“Now we have NSA
collaborating with FBI and DEA doing something called ‘Parallel Construction.’
In such a scenario, NSA sends information to a law enforcement agency, such as
Drug Enforcement Agency and that agency uses the information secretly to investigate
individuals, circumventing the law. No warrants,” Wiebe said.
“In fact, the agency
actively covers up the source of the information to make it look like the
information came out of classical law enforcement investigatory techniques. DEA
has a special unit called the ‘SOD’ – Special Operations Division that does the
cover up work. The legal consequence of doing this kind of surreptitious
collaboration between intelligence and law enforcement is to deny an accused
person their legal rights under the Constitution. They are denied the
opportunity to face their accuser because the source of the information is kept
under wraps/hidden.”
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