> In a management directive issued on Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said it had been hearing complaints about the searches for years — and had recently learned new information that suggested there were significant problems with them, including potential constitutional violations.

For years... The recent info is (of course) a passenger recording their encounter.

> The IG said investigators could not come to any conclusions about whether the searches involved racial profiling because the DEA does not collect data on all the people it stops — only on the cases in which money is seized.

Data on seizures seems like a solid start. Why don't they have data on searches?

> “The Department has long been concerned — and long received complaints — about potential racial profiling in connection with cold consent encounters in transportation setting,” the report said, adding that the DEA between 2000 and 2003 “collected consensual encounter data on every encounter in certain mass transportation facilities as part of a Department pilot project to examine the use of race in law enforcement operations.”

> But neither the DEA nor the Justice Department “drew any conclusions from the data collected about whether the consensual encounters were being conducted in an unbiased manner, and in 2003 the DEA terminated its data collection efforts,” the report said, and “its consensual encounter activities continued.”

Complaints for years, yet decided to stop recording data... That's sketchy as hell.

> The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure.

> That employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded.

"Fight crime with crime" seems to be a fairly widespread attitude amongst government agencies (reminded of the TSA article yesterday), but this seems particularly egregious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228795

I don't know where the government gets off on using "consensual encounters" as a euphemism for 4th Amendment violations.

I'd really like to know what airline had an employee doing this, so I can make sure to never do business with them again.

> Data on seizures seems like a solid start. Why don't they have data on searches?

I thought the Supreme Court found that search _is_ seizure (of your person). Not that I would expect the DEA do categorize them equivalently, of course.

(IANAL, but I do watch lot of YouTube videos.)

> That arrangement is problematic

Understatement of the year.

>The Department has long been concerned — and long received complaints — about potential racial profiling in connection with cold consent encounters in transportation setting,”

While it's useful that anything helps stop these grotesquely pervasive abortions of legality from happening, it's perverse that the main concern was a possibility of racial profiling.

So if minority groups that cause bad political optics aren't being visibly targeted, then it's once again okay to arbitrarily rob legally innocent people under threat of violence, as a fucking government police agency no less?

Also, "cold consent encounters" What a laughable euphemism for coercion and theft.

> Complaints for years, yet decided to stop recording data... That's sketchy as hell.

The motivation could also be practical. Studies are canceled for a variety of reasons unrelated to the conclusion: flawed design, poor data collection process, data doesn't generalize, data isn't specific enough, study has run out of budget, something significant changed in the middle of the study, etc.