image credit: TheBlaze
The Drug Enforcement Administration has been sifting through thousands of supposedly private medical files, looking for Texas doctors and patients to prosecute without the use of warrants.
“It’s not like there’s ten of them. There’s probably thousands — I know there are thousands,” Matt Barden, spokesman for the DEA, told the Daily Caller News Foundation about the DEA’s use of administrative subpoenas. But, as a legal brief filed last week points out, lawyers for the federal government can’t find a single case in which a court has “authorized the use of such a broad array of patient information with such a sparse record as to why it needs such information.”
In U.S. v Zadeh, the DEA obtained the records of 35 patient files without showing probable cause or obtaining a warrant issued by a judge. Citing New Deal-era case law, Judge Reed O’Connor noted that “the Supreme Court has refused to require that a federal agency have probable cause to justify issuance of an administrative subpoena,” and that they may be issued “merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even just because it wants assurance that it is not."
Andy Schlafly, the lawyer for the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, has filed an amicus brief stating, “without a warrant and without initially identifying themselves, federal agents searched patient medical records . . . based merely on a state administrative subpoena. A month later the DEA sought enforcement . . . and none of the checks and balances against overreaching by one branch of government existed for this warrantless demand for medical records.”
“Literally, they let the DEA just go wandering through people’s medical records just to make sure laws aren’t being broken. Really? Are you serious?” former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said.
“I think that the public, we’re at a moment now where the public is becoming more aware of and alarmed at privacy violations by the government,” Nate Wessler, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union added. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of awareness about how administrative subpoenas operate or certainly about the vast scale of their use.”
4 comments:
Welcome to the USSA. If you haven't realized yet...the Federal Government, and their thugs, operate entirely beyond the law. You can kick and cry...but it isn't going to change. They realized they can operate in this fashion with impunity...and the power behind such behavior rests secure in the knowledge that the masses will reelect them again and again despite these actions which deprive Americans of their Constitutional rights.
You are so right all the masses care about is how much money they can get out of the government
I used narcotic pain killers for twenty years for atheritis in my right hip & knee, a blown lumbar spin and a broken shoulder ball joint. April 2015, after upping the ante to 30 mg per day of oxycodon (percodan), with the attendant side effects... I decided to kick the habit... Had the shoulder replacement and dropped seventy pound. Went well and now I am drug free. People should get pain relief without the nonmedical DEA being involved. Then let the patient make their own decisions...
Or, even if we don't reelect them, there are rigged caucuses, (rigged against Ron Paul anyway,) polling place shenanigans, like dead people voting, planes with votes crashing, and of course crooked voting machines.
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