On Monday, Reuters revealed that a government agency has been collecting vast swaths of information of U.S. citizens' communications through “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records.” This time, it's not the National Security Agency and there's no guise of counterterror efforts. According to this latest investigation, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has a secret division -- the Special Operations Division, or SOD -- dedicated to covertly collecting and disseminating information from surveilled communications in order to help law enforcement agencies "launch criminal investigations of Americans.”

The most troubling aspect revealed by the documents obtained by Reuters is that the SOD is expressly directed to cover up the surveillance programs used in these investigations. As Reuters reported:

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The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

Government and law enforcement agencies euphemistically dub this coverup practice the creation of a "parallel construction."