NSA Memo 'Blurring The Lines' Between Terrorism And Drugs

The National Security Agency is "blurring the lines" between the war on drugs and the war on terror, according to a memo produced by the spy agency itself and published Monday by Glenn Greenwald's new website The Intercept.

The partially classified 2004 memo, written by an unnamed NSA employee who served as the Drug Enforcement Administration's "account manager," provides one of the most revealing glimpses yet at the ways counterterrorism and counternarcotics operations have melded since Sept. 11, 2001.

Its not like we expected any different, just shows you in these memos what lengths they went to though, intercepting a lot of non pertinent information.

The memo was published in conjunction with a new Intercept story detailing how the NSA recorded "virtually every" cell phone call in the small island nation of the Bahamas. The spy agency reportedly used a DEA "backdoor" to gain access to Bahamian cell phone networks.

In August, Reuters revealed that the NSA helped source information for a secretive DEA unit called the Special Operations Division. The NSA's information-gathering role was then obscured through a process called "parallel construction" when the drug agency brought criminal charges http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/nsa-drug-war_n_5353819.html

Sounds familiar.


Comments


[6 Points] byte8:

well honestly that's not too untrue.

When you buy coke, undoubtedly that cash is funding cartels, who are killing innocent people.

The thing is, darknetmarkets could remove the cartel as the middleman, so I see darknetmarkets as going the other way. But the truth is, right now the market is not big enough that you're NOT funding terrorists. Maybe your LSD and RC's and mescaline and pot isn't going to cartels. But coke and meth and heroin probably are.


[6 Points] presidentofdarknet:

insert tinfoil hat here

My particular conspiracy theory that I have always considered at least plausible is that the reason drugs are kept illegal is, mainly, to keep the status quo of many state agencies, including random police departments and agencies such as the FBI, the DEA or the NSA, and to pass laws and do operations that would otherwise be too risky.

I'm not implying that many people know of this fact; I'm sure pretty much about everyone on the FBI/DEA/NSA genuinely believes that drugs should be illegal (because there are actually good arguments about why they should be illegal). It's just the heads of the lobbies who end up controlling most of politics that are somewhat aware of the fact.

The logic is as follows: Those people need a way to keep their operations (wars / political surveillance / monopolies / ...) going on, while keeping the illusion in the citizen's mind that they are living in a democracy and ultimately end up deciding what happens. So there needs to be an enemy which can be used to justify the political actions required to carry the operations.

Ultimately, the best way they have figured out is to blame it on terrorists. Those can be used to justify an always-on state of paranoia. However, this clashes with the fact that there aren't that many terrorists, so there needs to be some way to make the problem bigger than it is.

And drugs present an obvious solution to this problem: They are a market with high demand, but where many people can be easily convinced that they should be illegal. This creates an enormous amount of money laundering and cartels which can then be blamed on evil terrorists and used to justify the official policies.

Sorry for the offtopic, just felt like inserting my stupid mumbo-jumbo in this post.


[2 Points] Daemon_Monkey:

Why should drugs be illegal?