Riverside County Superior Court Judge Helios Hernandez approved nearly five times as many wiretaps last year as any other judge in the United States.
(Photo: Brett Kelman, The Desert Sun)
[From article]
Federal drug agents have built a massive wiretapping operation in the Los Angeles suburbs, secretly intercepting tens of thousands of Americans' phone calls and text messages to monitor drug traffickers across the United States despite objections from Justice Department lawyers who fear the practice may not be legal.
Nearly all of that surveillance was authorized by a single state court judge in Riverside County, who last year signed off on almost five times as many wiretaps as any other judge in the United States. The judge's orders allowed investigators — usually from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — to intercept more than 2 million conversations involving 44,000 people, federal court records show.
The eavesdropping is aimed at dismantling the drug rings that have turned Los Angeles' eastern suburbs into what the DEA says is the nation's busiest shipping corridor for heroin and methamphetamine. Riverside wiretaps are supposed to be tied to crime within the county, but investigators have relied on them to make arrests and seize shipments of cash and drugs as far away as New York and Virginia, sometimes concealing the surveillance in the process.
The surveillance has raised concerns among Justice Department lawyers in Los Angeles, who have mostly refused to use the results in federal court because they have concluded the state court's eavesdropping orders are unlikely to withstand a legal challenge, current and former Justice officials said.
[. . .]
Federal agents often prefer to seek permission to tap phones from state courts, instead of federal courts, because the process is generally faster and less demanding than seeking approval through the Justice Department. In addition, California law allows them to better conceal the identities of confidential informants they rely on to help investigate drug rings. Over the past decade, drug agents have more than tripled their use of wiretaps, mostly by using state court orders.
[. . .]
DEA officials said it should not come as a surprise that so much of their surveillance work happens in the area around Riverside — a vast expanse of suburbs and desert east of Los Angeles, crisscrossed by freeways that have become key shipping routes for drugs moving from Mexico to the United States and for cash making the return journey.
[. . .]
But current and former Justice Department officials said prosecutors in Los Angeles repeatedly told the drug agency that they would not accept cases based on state-court wiretaps – and those from Riverside County in particular – because they believed the applications being approved by state judges fell short of what the federal law requires. Prosecutors were particularly concerned that the DEA was seeking state-court wiretap orders without adequately showing that it had first tried other, less intrusive, investigative techniques.
"They'd want to bring these cases into the U.S. Attorney's Office, and the feds would tell them no (expletive) way," a former Justice Department official said.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/11/11/dea-wiretap-operation-riverside-california/75484076/
Justice officials fear nation's biggest wiretap operation may not be legal
Brad Heath and Brett Kelman, USA TODAY 4:41 p.m. EST November 11, 2015
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