DEA regularly mines Americans' travel records to seize millions in cash

[Calculating]

WASHINGTON — Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases.

Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash.

DEA agents have profiled passengers on Amtrak trains and nearly every major U.S. airline, drawing on reports from a network of travel-industry informants that extends from ticket counters to back offices, a USA TODAY investigation has found. Agents assigned to airports and train stations singled out passengers for questioning or searches for reasons as seemingly benign as traveling one-way to California or having paid for a ticket in cash.

The DEA surveillance is separate from the vast and widely-known anti-terrorism apparatus that now surrounds air travel, which is rarely used for routine law enforcement. It has been carried out largely without the airlines’ knowledge.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/08/10/dea-travel-record-airport-seizures/88474282/


Good old civil forfeiture. Better not travel with money in our formerly free country. If you do, LE can take the money from you without due process and then challenge you to prove that you got it legally.

All you never wanted to know about civil forfeiture
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken

IMO it's time for the DEA to be abolished. They no longer serve their original purpose. Now they serve to protect the interests of big pharma/big prison/Law Enforcement/Big alcohol etc.

[villager]

1. Part of the reason they literally can't afford to change their stance on marijuana

Science be damned, etc.

[Warpy]

3. I pointed out that it's easy money for them

since cannabis is so easy to trace and track. It's bulky and can be sniffed out by trained dogs.

Anyone who makes regular trips to Mexico for any reason at all can't travel with adequate cash these days because it will be seized. An ATM and credit card will have to do, the high fees enough of a bribe to the banks to satisfy them.

The DEA is nothing but another racketeering organization. We didn't elect them. We don't want them by an increasing majority every single year. The plutocracy loves them so we're going to continue to be robbed and oppressed by them.

[villager]

4. From municipal cops to the Federal ones, it's pretty much all a shakedown racket now

Whether you're "motoring while poor" (or black, or anything else "suspicious&quot in your own town, and ticketed for "safety" reasons (i.e., to help keep self-funding courts and cops), or daring to drive the interstates (where all cash is suspicious, and will be seized, thanks), it's increasingly obvious that our "public" "servants" are an armed, self-interested entity.

[Warpy]

5. Civil asset forfeiture by state and local cops was quietly ended

last year, the legislation signed by our GOP governor (which shocked the hell out of me), so the DEA are the only ones robbing us now.

It's a border state and on the rail line to California so DEA robberies make the news here.

[msongs]

2. welfare for the government employees racket nt

[Festivito]

6. DEA: Not enough science to legalize it AND no science on it because it's illegal. eom

[Dawson Leery]

7. I would love to see the DEA and it's parasites eliminated from the budget.

[awoke_in_2003]

8. Civil forfeiture is so extremely unconstitutional...

what ever happened to due process? Oh yeah- the "war" on drugs.