This is very disturbing news.
9th Circuit tosses child-porn evidence, cites Navy snooping
9th Circuit judges say Naval Criminal Investigative Service has routinely probed the computers of civilians in Washington and elsewhere looking for evidence of crimes.
By Mike Carter
Navy criminal investigators repeatedly and routinely peeked into the computers of private citizens in Washington state and elsewhere, a violation of the law so “massive” and egregious that an appeals court says it has no choice but to throw out the evidence against an Algona man sentenced to 18 years in prison for distribution of child pornography.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision handed down last week, said the 2012 prosecution of Michael Allan Dreyer by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle demonstrated Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agents “routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate” the Posse Comitatus Act, a Reconstruction-era law that prohibits the military from enforcing civilian laws.
The court called the violations “extraordinary” and said evidence presented in Dreyer’s prosecution appears to show that “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 that information to civilian law enforcement when no military connection exists.”
When NCIS Agent Steve Logan identified Michael Allan Dreyer as a child porn suspect he then checked to see if Dreyer was a service member and saw he wasn't.
Logan then summarized his investigation and forwarded it to the NCIS office in Washington state, which turned it over to the Algona Police Department, according to the documents.
“Such an expansive reading of the military role in the enforcement of civilian laws demonstrates a profound lack of regard for the important limitations on the role of the military in our civilian society,” wrote Judge Marsha Berzon.
Logan, the NCIS agent, had argued he had chosen to scan computers in Washington partly because of the state’s many military bases.
While he initially was only able to identify the suspect’s whereabouts within a 30-mile radius of the IP address he identified, he wrote in a search warrant that the “large [U.S. Navy/Department of Defense] saturation” indicated a “likelihood” the suspect was in the military.
So apparently NCIS lying about the object of an investigation being a service member is also routine. You have to wonder what else NCIS looks for.
“This,” Levin said, “is the real militarization of police — when the military becomes the police.”
Court Says Navy Investigators Illegally Scan Civilian Computers
by MARTIN KASTE
An appeals court ruling has offered a rare glimpse at the extent to which military police investigations reach into civilians' computers. Apparently, they scan civilian computers quite often — and to a degree that a 9th Circuit appeals court has now found violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.
Civilian law enforcement agencies use the same kind of software, without the court's objection. If you open your computer up to file-sharing, it's pretty much guaranteed that the "shared" portion of your hard drive will be scanned by law enforcement — repeatedly.
The NCIS agent who caught Dreyer testified that he used the software to target file-sharers with IP addresses in the state of Washington, because it has Navy installations. But since there's no way to narrow that kind of search to Washington residents who are in the military, he was effectively searching the whole state.
I doubt there is a state without some kind of military base, so we're probably all fair game for NCIS snooping.
"Part of the fabric of our culture is a deep-seated suspicion of the military engaging in civilian affairs," says Levin. "What [NCIS] did here is really unprecedented."
This shows the extent the Obama Administration has let federal surveillance mushroom out of control on its watch,... if they didn't authorize it.