Massachusetts Criminal Defense Lawyer Kevin J. Mahoney on NSA Data Collection
The Sons of Liberty, 240 years ago, boarded three East India Company merchant ships and dumped the cargo overboard into Boston Harbor. This was one of the culminating events leading up to the Revolution. So determined were the colonists to live free of oppressive, intrusive, and abusive government, they risked their lives to win their freedom. The Founding Fathers, concerned that any form of government would, over time, evolve into something equally oppressive, constructed clear constitutional limitations on government power. Those limitations were not enough.
A Massachusetts Criminal Defense Lawyer on Federal Abuse of Power
In direct contravention of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, the NSA is collecting and storing phone, email, Facebook, and other records by the trillions. President Obama assures us that the Federal government is not spying on us and the data collected is used only to combat terrorism. The president is very likely not leveling with us. It appears that the NSA, together with the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS, is supplying a Special Operations Division (SOD) of the DEA with intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, and massive database of telephone records to use against American citizens in criminal prosecutions. Worse, SOD is passing along the intelligence data to state and local police departments — with instructions to these law enforcement agencies not to disclose the origins of the investigations. To prevent criminal defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges from making inquiries that, if answered truthfully, would expose the sharing of this data, SOD instructs agents to use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”
The federal government is, without a warrant or even any suspicion of wrongdoing, intercepting, storing, and analyzing an incomprehensible amount of the personal data of its citizens, ostensibly to identify and defeat terrorists, shares that information with the DEA, which in turn disseminates it to state and local law enforcement agencies, and instructs those receiving the information to lie to defense lawyers, prosecutors, and judges about the origin of these criminal investigations. If all of this is true, our federal government is not only engaged in an unprecedented, unsupervised, and unconstitutional surveillance of us, it is directing the recipients of this data to deceive our courts. And while this has been reported in various media outlets, there has been little public outcry. We, apparently, place no real value on our privacy, have come to expect government deceit, or are indifferent to our constitutional rights.
Liberty once forfeited, however, is enormously difficult to recover.
Contact Massachusetts Criminal Defense Lawyer Kevin J. Mahoney
If you are facing criminal charges, you need an experienced and aggressive Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer. Call the Mahoney Criminal Defense Group at 617-492-0055 to schedule a free in-office initial consultation.
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