Forget TikTok – Deal With The OG Privacy Vandals, Republicans

I’ve written many times in this space about how our own government regularly violates our privacy, personal security and Fourth Amendment rights. The bipartisan political class generally ignores such encroachments, preferring instead to chase assorted hobgoblins like TikTok like so many pitchfork wielding peasants.

Would that they cared enough, or were honest enough, to look at the threats within their own purview. As Joseph Cox reports in this piece for Vice, the OG privacy vandals – the Drug Enforcement Administration – long used methods that skirted, or flat-out ignored, constitutional restrictions on surveillance:

For years, the DEA secretly paid workers inside U.S. agencies and companies for access to user data, rather than going to a court to obtain a search warrant for such data. That included paying sources inside the parcel industry to open and reroute packages; airline industry sources who provided flight itineraries, dates of birth, and seat numbers; and workers at private bus companies who provided daily lists of passengers who bought tickets in cash.

Paying moles inside companies allowed the DEA to passively monitor some services for potential targets without the friction of going through the courts, where such broad surveillance could be denied outright. In some cases, the DEA used the information to seize money or drugs from people. But buying the information in the first place may in some cases skirt Fourth Amendment protections.

The DEA promised it gave up such practices a few years ago. Apparently, that was…. In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland from Sens. Ron Wyden (D) and Cynthia Lummis (R), the lawmakers note that the DEA still hasn’t banned the practice of allowing agents to pay informants at private companies for data the agency would otherwise have to get a warrant for:

The DOJ must explicitly prohibit these practices to ensure that all of its components, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) do not use confidential sources to avoid using appropriate legal processes to obtain Americans’ data.

When DOJ components seek to acquire and use a U.S. company’s customer datasets, they should direct all requests for such data to the organization’s lawyers, and should not instead pay low- level employees. To that end, we urge you to strengthen the DOJ’s policies to prevent this outrageous practice, which undermines the rule of law, violates Americans’ privacy and harms the reputations of American companies.

Wyden and Lummis make further demands of Garland, including “…each of the companies and non-profit organizations from whom the DEA is currently, or has in the past ten years, obtained customer data through a confidential source…”

That information ought to be enlightening.

But even if it isn’t released, it is still a hopeful sign that not everyone in Congress is content to allow government to violate American’s basic Fourth Amendment rights without accountability or consequence.

More of this, please.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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