Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, at BuzzFeed News, are reporting that the Drug Enforcement Agency has been granted power to conduct covert surveillance and collect intelligence on people participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd.
They have published the memo granting the powers.
Here is the lede of their article:
The Drug Enforcement Administration has been granted sweeping new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” and collect intelligence on people participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to a two-page memorandum obtained by BuzzFeed News.
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The memo requests the extraordinary powers on a temporary basis, and on Sunday afternoon a senior Justice Department official signed off.
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The DEA is limited by statute to enforcing drug-related federal crimes. But on Sunday, Timothy Shea, a former US attorney and close confidant of Barr's who was named acting administrator of the DEA last month, received approval from Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer to go beyond the agency’s mandate “to perform other law enforcement duties” that Barr may “deem appropriate.”
emptywheel has an article providing detailed background:
the DEA’s informant network is understood to be even more extensive [than the FBI’s], and often more easily leveraged because of steep war on drug sentences.
There’s good reason to believe the DEA’s access to Stingrays used to track cell phone location escapes the close scrutiny of other agencies. As Kim Zetter noted on Twitter, that may include Dirtboxes, plane-based Stingray technology.
But the FBI and, especially, the US Marshals also have that technology.
What they don’t necessarily have, however, is access to a surveillance program the precursor to which Barr approved, with no legal review, the last time he was Attorney General.
In 1992, Barr authorized the DEA to use a drug related subpoena authority, 876(a), to start collecting the call records between certain foreign countries and the United States.
Alison Durkee, at Vanity Fair, lays out some of the history of surveillance of protesters by the federal government.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that the federal government has surveilled protesters, BuzzFeed notes. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security monitored social media for “intelligence” on those protesting the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and hatched a plan to “plug” federal agents into protests in Ferguson, Missouri, while the FBI actively surveilled participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement.