Police officer Joe David’s tiny family firm ‘Black Asphalt’ would brand itself as a counterterrorism specialist and work with DHS and the Dept. of Justice. It would receive millions from federal contracts and grants as the leader of a cottage industry of firms teaching aggressive methods for highway interdiction. Along the way, working in near obscurity, the firm would press the limits of the law and raise new questions about police power, domestic intelligence and the rights of American citizens.
DHS spokeswoman Marsha Catron downplayed the department’s involvement, saying in a statement that it has awarded “Desert Snow less than 20 contracts since 2008 for specialized law enforcement training and educational services.” That includes three contracts this year worth more than $268,000 with Customs and Border Protection, one of them in August.
In 2004, David started a private intelligence network for police known as the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System. It enabled officers and federal authorities to share reports and chat online. In recent years, the network had more than 25,000 individual members, David said.
Operating in collaboration with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal entities, Black Asphalt members exchanged tens of thousands of reports about American motorists, many of whom had not been charged with any crimes, according to a company official and hundreds of internal documents obtained by The Post.
For years, it received no oversight by government, even though its reports contained law enforcement sensitive information about traffic stops and seizures, along with hunches and personal data about drivers, including Social Security numbers and identifying tattoos.
Black Asphalt also has served as a social hub for a new brand of highway interdictors, a group that one Desert Snow official has called “a brotherhood.” Among other things, the site hosts an annual competition to honor police who seize the most contraband and cash on the highways. As part of the contest, Desert Snow encouraged state and local patrol officers to post seizure data along with photos of themselves with stacks of currency and drugs. Some of the photos appear in a rousing hard-rock video that the Guthrie, Okla.-based Desert Snow uses to promote its training courses.
The firm defends its training as first-rate, and David once likened the firm’s students to special forces operators. “Like the SEAL team, Army Rangers or any other top notch outfit it requires commitment and perseverance to be part of ‘the team,’ ” David wrote in a sales pitch posted on Black Asphalt.
“Desert Snow. It sounds like a covert military operation or a street name for designer cocaine. Truth be told, it’s something much more sinister in my modest opinion,” Oklahoma defense attorney Adam Banner wrote in a legal blog, adding that it “seems to amount to little more than a free-for-all cash grab.”
There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, DHS and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.
Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases — 4,455 — where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.
Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.
Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said.
DEA spokesman Rusty Payne said that computers at the agency’s El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) once housed Black Asphalt. In a subsequent e-mail, Payne said that agents only used it as a source of information. “We would go in there to grab information,” he said.
Payne also told The Post that the DEA had recently stopped using Black Asphalt reports because of concerns that they “would never hold up in court.”
Payne said officials at Justice and DEA are now reviewing their use of the system. However, as recently as May, internal Black Asphalt records continued to list officials at the agency, along with officials at DHS, CBP and ICE, as members.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/07/police-intelligence-targets-cash/?hpid=z3
