-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Fwd: [Full-disclosure] FBI San Diego, Drug Investigations and 9/11
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 02:47:29 -0400
From: Nancy Kramer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Hello Declan,
Maybe you will find this post from one of my security lists
interesting. Maybe this person's observations should be part of Politech.
Regards,
Nancy Kramer
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: "Jason Coombs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 06:06:13 +0000 GMT
Cc: Full-Disclosure <[email protected]>,
Antisocial <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [Full-disclosure] FBI San Diego, Drug Investigations and 9/11
Hello, Kelly.
I'm writing in response to your article from today in the San Diego
Union-Tribune:
San Diego FBI Officials Call 9/11 Criticism 'Dead Horse'
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/terror/20050609-2002-terrorfolo.html
I work as an expert witness in civil and criminal court cases involving
computer forensics and information security.
In 2003 I became involved as expert witness on behalf of a defendant in a
Federal criminal drug prosecution case in San Diego county.
In the course of the law enforcement investigation, which occurred prior
to the PATRIOT Act, the FBI computer forensics lab in San Diego assisted
the DEA with Internet wiretaps of the suspects' computers, possibly in
violation of wiretap laws, which at the time had no reference to Internet
type data communications electronic intercepts.
The defendant was tried and convicted, and the case is now pending appeal.
During my review of the case on behalf of the defendant, I was shocked to
see how far and how long law enforcement allowed the suspects to operate
their drug operation in San Diego.
Instead of arresting the suspects when the FBI and DEA had conclusive
proof of crimes, law enforcement seems to have toyed with the suspects,
dragging out the investigation and making it absurdly complicated and
costly. Law enforcement had proof sufficient to convict several months
before the first drug sale occurred in the case, and they sat and watched,
as though they were more interested in playing with their shiny new
computer surveillance toys than in putting an end to the drug crimes in
progress so they could move on to more important things, like the
terrorists known to the CIA to be inside our country, who by coincidence
lived virtually next-door to these drug offenders in San Diego.
Law enforcement delayed making arrests in this drug case until their
priorities were changed after 9/11.
Meanwhile, drugs were being manufactured and sold in San Diego within full
video surveillance and other plain view of the FBI and DEA.
I'm certain that I'm allowed to talk about the case now that it is over,
and the defendant on whose behalf I did my work previously expressed a
willingness to have his case publicized.
If you're interested in this story, let me know and I can put you in
contact with the defendant in the case.
He and his criminal associates appeared to be non-violent drug offenders
who became guinea pigs for the development of the FBI and DEA's electronic
intercept investigations techniques, which paved the way for parts of the
PATRIOT Act which subsequently granted authorities additional capabilities
to use computer surveillance technology in ways that I believe are
inappropriate.
Computer electronic intercepts allow automated intelligence gathering
according to sophisticated automated rules, in effect allowing computers
to do, through the use of secret law enforcement software, what human law
enforcement would never be allowed by law to do themselves.
For this and other reasons, all electronic intercepts that use computer
software to analyze data (including voice recognition processing of
digital audio) may be a violation of our various Constitutional
protections. They certainly create opportunity for systematic abuses, and
in the absence of a cultural bias toward full disclosure there is very
real possibility of harm to the public interest.
We all know by now how little effort anyone in the law enforcement
community put into overcoming institutional and case management barriers
that made it culturally, politically, and in some respects legally
impossible within our country to take proactive and imaginative yet
constitutionally-correct actions to advance the early detection of serious
violent crime like 9/11.
What I find amazing about the case I worked on was the extent to which the
system that we still have today continues to create unproductive barriers
that make law enforcement mistakes and courtroom rules completely
unresponsive to, and disinterested in, positive change and procedural
enlightenment.
The idea that law enforcement is entitled to have and hold secrets, and
have their transgressions covered up by cooperative judges -- in effect
granting law enforcement the flexibility to make up the rules whenever
they like, which is essentially what the PATRIOT Act has granted free
license to do, and what the Bush administration is now requesting by way
of extensions to PATRIOT -- the idea that these extra powers somehow solve
the underlying systemic problems that allowed the 9/11 conspiracy to
unfold is just wrong.
It is systemic flaws that cause law enforcement and the courts to invest
huge sums of money into extremely complex and lengthy drug investigations
instead of quickly and efficiently prosecuting small offenses before they
grow into larger ones.
And it is systemic flaws that allow otherwise-good people who have drug,
debt, and career problems to be destroyed by society rather than receive
help from its protective machinery, all while real threats to public
safety are institutionally ignored.
This case illustrates better than any I have seen before just how wrong
the double standard is that we apply to non-violent drug offenders. They
are part of society and deserve its protection, yet we assign teams of
people to investigate and watch their activities every minute of every
day, track their movements with GPS and wireless technology, and intercept
all of their communications, all according to a belief that these people
are a threat to, rather than a part of, America.
Such persons are a part of America and need protection from themselves,
perhaps. They are certainly a part of America whose problems should not be
permitted unnecessarily to grow to the point that they cause harm to
others. Strangely, harm to others was a foregone conclusion made not by
the drug offenders but by lawmakers,law enforcement, the public, and the
courts, who see fit to create millions of dollars of financial burden for
taxpayers over the lifetime of a career criminal rather than intervene
when common sense says the public's intervention has a chance to
rehabilitate the offender.
Does the offender not deserve protection from the harmful psychological
and biochemical effects of the very drugs that become their ticket to a
mandatory life sentence in Federal prison?
Drug offenders who appear to represent little or no threat to the public
safety other than their own drug addictions and lack of access to
conventional employment, whom could in fact be set straight as productive
law-abiding rehabilitated members of society at a fraction of the cost of
merely investigating their criminal activities much less prosecuting and
then handling appeals court procedures concerning them, these people
receive a huge percentage of taxpayers' law enforcement and public safety
money.
We entrust a needlessly-complex system with their care and protection
without making an effort to know what that system is doing, and we are now
giving that system more license to operate in secret, based on the idea
that these people are the enemy.
It just may be the case that increasingly our own decisions and
misjudgments are the real enemy, yet we ensure that we are never
confronted with this possibility by the degree to which we demonize all
criminals and removing from them their status first and foremost as human
beings who obviously have serious problems.
That the defendant in the instant case clearly does not have a malicious
desire to harm others should mean something but it does not. He will most
likely remain a prisoner for the rest of his life, as a direct result of
the misguided priorities of the system of criminal law and justice that we
have created today.
It was imminently within the grasp of the justice system during the year
2000 to put a stop to a growing drug offense very early in its
development, giving the drug offenders access to care and a prison
sentence that would have been less than the rest of their natural lives,
and in so doing free up the very resources in San Diego that would have
been capable, and were entrusted with the responsibility, to find and stop
terrorists operating in San Diego.
The FBI in San Diego missed the opportunity to stop 9/11 because they were
busy wasting taxpayer money allowing drugs to be sold in San Diego just so
they could get a bigger prison sentence for the offenders and so they
could practice and perfect their computer skills.
We, the people who allow this government to operate on our behalf in this
manner and without our oversight or involvement, we are to blame for this
systemic problem just as much if not more than the hard-working and
honorable law enforcement officers who risk their lives to protect us.
I can assure you from first-hand observation that the systemic flaws
remain, and that unless they are solved there will be more negative
consequences of expanding the power of law enforcement to act in secret in
order to comply with our country's senseless mandates that compel us to
create as many prisoners as possible.
Sincerely,
Jason Coombs
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.science.org/jcoombs/
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