7 ms·

We really need to start calling "parallel construction" what it is: willful, premeditated perjury.

pc86 6y ago
Genuinely curious, in what context is it perjury? My understanding of parallel construction is: 1. Officer receives information $A through inadmissible means (which may be illegal, but not necessarily) 2. With information $A, officer is able to "prove" that a suspect perpetrated a given crime 3. Officer pieces together proof from possible unrelated, but admissible evidence - $B and $C, let's say. 4. And this is the part where I don't know that perjury is what we're talking about: Officer simply testifies to the truth of $B and $C, and that the suspect committed the crime in question.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  It's still fruit of the poisonous tree but step 3 involves concealing this fact in a manner that is nearly impossible for the defense to prove. If a random search wasn't a random search, it's perjury to testify that it was a random search. Good luck proving it, though.
- AWildC182 6y ago
  I think the issue is that in the moral sense if something is inadmissible but is used to obtain admissible evidence, everything derived should also be inadmissible (GPL style). In this case the officer in perjuring himself by trying to pass off inadmissible evidence as admissible but this is more of a play on words than actual legal doctrine if I understand it correctly. What I think OP is saying is that it should be perjury and I totally agree.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Moral? Legal. "Fruit of the poisonous tree" is an established legal principle.
- apazzolini 6y ago
  1. Officer receives information $A through inadmissible means (which may be illegal, but not necessarily) 2. With information $A, officer is able to "prove" that a suspect perpetrated a given crime 3. Knowing information $A, officer makes up bullshit showing that he reached $A solely from investigating leads from $B and $C. 4. $A is now admissible because the officer can show a link leading to $A from $B and $C, but he wouldn't have been able to without actually knowing what $A was. For example, if I gave you a billion files to go through and find one thing, you probably wouldn't be able to. If I gave you the same billion files and told you file X was the one you should look at, you can say "oh I knew to look in X because of <bullshit>".
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    Interesting...so it's kinda like clean-room reverse engineering, except that there's no mandate for the clean-room? I'd be interested to see what a clean-room-like proposal would look like for evidence collection. I.e. independent agencies that can't share evidence/information between them. Of course, then a 9/11 happens and there's lots of hand-wringing about how "we had all the data we needed, the agencies just weren't allowed to talk to each other". Ugh...
    - hansjorg 6y ago
      I'm not sure that's a very helpful analogy. In these cases, the notion that there is something to be reverse engineered was obtained by illegal means.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >I'd be interested to see what a clean-room-like proposal would look like for evidence collection. I.e. independent agencies that can't share evidence/information between them. I'm not sure why you'd want that. The reason why it's outlawed in the first place is because it's illegal search and seizure. Making it look like you obtained it legitimately doesn't right any wrongs, any more than making a murder look like an "accident" makes murder okay.
  - RichardHeart 6y ago
- dllthomas 6y ago
  The officers are lying to the court about how the case was built. That is often relevant to a defense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree) and they are lying in this way specifically to deprive defendants of the ability to challenge the collection of that evidence. Intentionally and materially lying to the court is clearly perjury.
- lmkg 6y ago
  The principle of the "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree" says that if $A is inadmissible, then evidence derived from $A is inadmissible. The perjury is claiming (possibly a lie by omission) that $B was not derived from $A. Sometimes this involves a (more direct) lie inventing an alternate history for $B. Perjury may or may not be the correct or most applicable transgression. Point is, if $A is what led to the collection of $B, then $B should be inadmissible. Presenting $B at trial is a violation of rights.
  - dllthomas 6y ago
    IIUC, and I may not, that's slightly too strong and there are some circumstances where evidence that's (shall we say) barely inadmissible doesn't necessarily invalidate later evidence. But in any case, whether the principle applies to a given instance is something that needs to be tested in court, and parallel construction is deliberately depriving the court of the ability to make a determination.
  - JoeSmithson 6y ago
    That's not right at all. Loads of stuff is inadmissible as evidence but not illegal. For example, in many countries phone intercept is inadmissible. For example, in The Wire, they might hear a drug deal being arranged on the phones, then arrange to be on patrol with a drug dog and find the stash. The phone recording would be inadmissible (even though it would help the prosecution), the evidence used to prosecute would have to be paralleled.
    - frandroid 6y ago
      If the evidence they're hearing on the phone is not admissible, there's a good chance it's because they're listening through illegitimate means as well, hmm?
      - JoeSmithson 6y ago
        No, not necessarily. In the UK, for example, all phone intercept is always inadmissible. The main incentive for paralleling something is to protect the source, to maintain its effectiveness.
- ultramundane8 6y ago
  I believe the simplest perjury in this case is that the officer necessarily lied about their probable cause.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  The problem is, that they lied about how they got te evidence. Eg, they plant a hidden camera in your house, see you packing drugs and puting them in your car in your own garage, and driving away. Since they got the info that you had the drugs from illegally set cameras, they can't just stop and search your car, but they can "randomly" stop you for a traffic check, and just "randomly" have a drug sniffing dog present, which finds the drugs in your car. If the judges let this go through, the police would use more illegal methods (illegal searches, etc.) to gather data, then just "randomly" detect crime, and then the state would win cases.... and we (the people) don't want that. That's why, if you prove, that they knew the drugs were there from an illegal source of information, everything derived from that illegal source should be dropped as a illegally obtained evidence, to disincentivise the use of illegal methods. Basically, the officer saying they randomly stopped you, would be a lie (=perjury), because they stopped you due their illegal cameras.
  - JoeSmithson 6y ago
    Yes, but what if the cameras are not illegally placed, but in fact put there with a warrant. Then there is nothing illegal going on at all, but it would still be in LE interest to parallel how they know about the drugs, so that they can continue using the camera and maybe find out where the next shipment is going to be as well.
    - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
      Then the judge would be aware of the warrant, and wouldnt throw the evidence away, because it would be obtained legally.
      - JoeSmithson 6y ago
        Yes that's precisely my point - there would still be parallel construction but there would be nothing illegal
  - notduncansmith 6y ago
    It might be worth coming up with an example that doesn’t illustrate an end that may justify precisely the means you describe. In your hypothetical scenario, the system would be working as intended according to many people, because the drug dealer would have otherwise gotten away with illegal activity that those people perceive as harmful.
24bug47 6y ago
Well, most people have never heard of "parallel construction" in the first place, and chances are they mostly have no interest in learning about it. So combatting willful ignorance would be the first step, but my optimism meter broke a while ago.
JoeSmithson 6y ago
There is nothing inherently wrong with parallel construction, it just means concealing a source. It seems like you have probably leant the term in the context of illegally obtained information, but that is orthogonal to concealing a source. Parallel construction is a completely normal and legitimate process. People who use it like a spooky term akin to "enhanced interrogation" or "extraordinary rendition" are just loudly signalling they have little firsthand knowledge of law enforcement.
- frandroid 6y ago
  So you're fine with money laundering as well? Because parallel construction is inadmissible evidence laundering.
  - JoeSmithson 6y ago
    > "So you're fine with money laundering as well?" Is this your best effort attempt at assuming good faith? > "parallel construction is inadmissible evidence laundering." Well, it's concealing a source, which is what I said. If you have an informant who's life would be in danger if they were revealed, then anything they tell you would have to be paralleled. There's nothing illegal about their evidence, they would just never testify to it.
    - frandroid 6y ago
      It's perjury. Read the other replies. There's nothing good faith about perjury. If you're trying to protect a source, get the source protected by a court order.
      - JoeSmithson 6y ago
        I have read the other replies, that don't appear to have been made by anyone with any experience of parallel construction.
        deleted 6y ago
justanotheranon 6y ago
the biggest sin of Parallel Construction is that it violates Brady. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland Under Brady, the prosecution is compelled by the Constitution to share all evidence with the defense, in order for the defense to be able to potentially challenge it. Parallel Construction is secret evidence that is intentionally scrubbed from the Court record in order to keep the existence of illegal mass surveillance concealed. You can't challenge Parallel Construction in Court, because the evidence doesn't exist, and even if your defense attorney did have it, that evidence would be inadmissable based on State Secrets being invoked. Meanwhile, we all know domestic mass surveillance is happening, yet our Govt has to pretend it is not happening. The Emperor truly has no clothes. Why is our Govt going to such an extreme length of destroying decades of jurisprudence and risking reducing our Justice System to a farcical Kangaroo Court like in the USSR? As the wise maxim from Watergate goes, "it's not the crime, it's the cover up." Parallel Construction was invented, deployed and standardized as routine policy for one purpose: to prevent the Gov'ts illegal domestic mass surveillance from being challenged in Court, by preventing anyone from gaining legal standing against it. Why doesnt the Govt just admit what we already know? "Yeah, we're spying on all of you, all of your cell phones, your emails and web browsing and Internet comms, we have it all and we search your data for crimes to charge you with." If FedGov admitted the truth, all mass surveillance would be shut down by SCOTUS for violating not only the 4th Amendment, but also Brady and dozens of other laws. But wait, it gets worse. FedGov made the biggest blunder that compounds the error of their original sin. FedGov did not even KEEP TRACK of which collected evidence is Parallel Construction and which is normal evidence. That means hundreds of thousands of decided criminal cases would need to be tossed, because FedGov has no way to go back and comply with Brady, even to say "we are certain that no NSA SIGINT was used as Parallel Construction in your case." The Govt doesnt know!!! If you remember the news from a few years ago where NSA was still retaining all domestic data collected between 2001-2007, and Congress morons were grandstanding "hur dur, NSA is holding American's data forever, we must force NSA to delete it"--the real reason for that was not because NSA wanted to retain your 20 year old emails. It was because NSA knew Brady could be a legal nuke used to annihilate NSA if the Court ever gave standing for someone to challenge Parallel Construction. NSA saved all that data in anticipation of saving its own neck. If NSA had to tell a Judge, "we purged all data about every case between 2001-2007, so we have no way to comply with Brady even if we didnt do anything wrong", that would sink NSA in Court. The FISC Judges would shutdown NSA the same day. but guess what? Congress won that debate and forced NSA to delete the old data collected under STELLARWIND. now NSA has jumped out of the plane without a parachute. someday there will be a Parallel Construction case that causes the sky to fall. it's inevitable. what's going to happen? NSA, FBI, CIA and DOJ will be reigned in by some Judge? the old way will be restored and Law and Order in a mostly fair justice system will be the norm again? lol of course not. FedGov and the Deep State will NEVER give up their power to mass surveil. instead, they will be forced to invent some new Law that allows them to continue business as usual. and that law will be openly and extremely Totalitarian and it will slowly shift America away from being a Democratic Republic towards being a Monarchical Empire.

pc86 6y ago

Genuinely curious, in what context is it perjury? My understanding of parallel construction is: 1. Officer receives information $A through inadmissible means (which may be illegal, but not necessarily) 2. With information $A, officer is able to "prove" that a suspect perpetrated a given crime 3. Officer pieces together proof from possible unrelated, but admissible evidence - $B and $C, let's say. 4. And this is the part where I don't know that perjury is what we're talking about: Officer simply testifies to the truth of $B and $C, and that the suspect committed the crime in question.

jjoonathan 6y ago
It's still fruit of the poisonous tree but step 3 involves concealing this fact in a manner that is nearly impossible for the defense to prove. If a random search wasn't a random search, it's perjury to testify that it was a random search. Good luck proving it, though.
AWildC182 6y ago
I think the issue is that in the moral sense if something is inadmissible but is used to obtain admissible evidence, everything derived should also be inadmissible (GPL style). In this case the officer in perjuring himself by trying to pass off inadmissible evidence as admissible but this is more of a play on words than actual legal doctrine if I understand it correctly. What I think OP is saying is that it should be perjury and I totally agree.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Moral? Legal. "Fruit of the poisonous tree" is an established legal principle.
apazzolini 6y ago
1. Officer receives information $A through inadmissible means (which may be illegal, but not necessarily) 2. With information $A, officer is able to "prove" that a suspect perpetrated a given crime 3. Knowing information $A, officer makes up bullshit showing that he reached $A solely from investigating leads from $B and $C. 4. $A is now admissible because the officer can show a link leading to $A from $B and $C, but he wouldn't have been able to without actually knowing what $A was. For example, if I gave you a billion files to go through and find one thing, you probably wouldn't be able to. If I gave you the same billion files and told you file X was the one you should look at, you can say "oh I knew to look in X because of <bullshit>".
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Interesting...so it's kinda like clean-room reverse engineering, except that there's no mandate for the clean-room? I'd be interested to see what a clean-room-like proposal would look like for evidence collection. I.e. independent agencies that can't share evidence/information between them. Of course, then a 9/11 happens and there's lots of hand-wringing about how "we had all the data we needed, the agencies just weren't allowed to talk to each other". Ugh...
  - hansjorg 6y ago
    I'm not sure that's a very helpful analogy. In these cases, the notion that there is something to be reverse engineered was obtained by illegal means.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >I'd be interested to see what a clean-room-like proposal would look like for evidence collection. I.e. independent agencies that can't share evidence/information between them. I'm not sure why you'd want that. The reason why it's outlawed in the first place is because it's illegal search and seizure. Making it look like you obtained it legitimately doesn't right any wrongs, any more than making a murder look like an "accident" makes murder okay.
- RichardHeart 6y ago
dllthomas 6y ago
The officers are lying to the court about how the case was built. That is often relevant to a defense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree) and they are lying in this way specifically to deprive defendants of the ability to challenge the collection of that evidence. Intentionally and materially lying to the court is clearly perjury.
lmkg 6y ago
The principle of the "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree" says that if $A is inadmissible, then evidence derived from $A is inadmissible. The perjury is claiming (possibly a lie by omission) that $B was not derived from $A. Sometimes this involves a (more direct) lie inventing an alternate history for $B. Perjury may or may not be the correct or most applicable transgression. Point is, if $A is what led to the collection of $B, then $B should be inadmissible. Presenting $B at trial is a violation of rights.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  IIUC, and I may not, that's slightly too strong and there are some circumstances where evidence that's (shall we say) barely inadmissible doesn't necessarily invalidate later evidence. But in any case, whether the principle applies to a given instance is something that needs to be tested in court, and parallel construction is deliberately depriving the court of the ability to make a determination.
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  That's not right at all. Loads of stuff is inadmissible as evidence but not illegal. For example, in many countries phone intercept is inadmissible. For example, in The Wire, they might hear a drug deal being arranged on the phones, then arrange to be on patrol with a drug dog and find the stash. The phone recording would be inadmissible (even though it would help the prosecution), the evidence used to prosecute would have to be paralleled.
  - frandroid 6y ago
    If the evidence they're hearing on the phone is not admissible, there's a good chance it's because they're listening through illegitimate means as well, hmm?
    - JoeSmithson 6y ago
      No, not necessarily. In the UK, for example, all phone intercept is always inadmissible. The main incentive for paralleling something is to protect the source, to maintain its effectiveness.
ultramundane8 6y ago
I believe the simplest perjury in this case is that the officer necessarily lied about their probable cause.
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
The problem is, that they lied about how they got te evidence. Eg, they plant a hidden camera in your house, see you packing drugs and puting them in your car in your own garage, and driving away. Since they got the info that you had the drugs from illegally set cameras, they can't just stop and search your car, but they can "randomly" stop you for a traffic check, and just "randomly" have a drug sniffing dog present, which finds the drugs in your car. If the judges let this go through, the police would use more illegal methods (illegal searches, etc.) to gather data, then just "randomly" detect crime, and then the state would win cases.... and we (the people) don't want that. That's why, if you prove, that they knew the drugs were there from an illegal source of information, everything derived from that illegal source should be dropped as a illegally obtained evidence, to disincentivise the use of illegal methods. Basically, the officer saying they randomly stopped you, would be a lie (=perjury), because they stopped you due their illegal cameras.
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  Yes, but what if the cameras are not illegally placed, but in fact put there with a warrant. Then there is nothing illegal going on at all, but it would still be in LE interest to parallel how they know about the drugs, so that they can continue using the camera and maybe find out where the next shipment is going to be as well.
  - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
    Then the judge would be aware of the warrant, and wouldnt throw the evidence away, because it would be obtained legally.
    - JoeSmithson 6y ago
      Yes that's precisely my point - there would still be parallel construction but there would be nothing illegal
- notduncansmith 6y ago
  It might be worth coming up with an example that doesn’t illustrate an end that may justify precisely the means you describe. In your hypothetical scenario, the system would be working as intended according to many people, because the drug dealer would have otherwise gotten away with illegal activity that those people perceive as harmful.

24bug47 6y ago

Well, most people have never heard of "parallel construction" in the first place, and chances are they mostly have no interest in learning about it. So combatting willful ignorance would be the first step, but my optimism meter broke a while ago.

JoeSmithson 6y ago

There is nothing inherently wrong with parallel construction, it just means concealing a source. It seems like you have probably leant the term in the context of illegally obtained information, but that is orthogonal to concealing a source. Parallel construction is a completely normal and legitimate process. People who use it like a spooky term akin to "enhanced interrogation" or "extraordinary rendition" are just loudly signalling they have little firsthand knowledge of law enforcement.

frandroid 6y ago
So you're fine with money laundering as well? Because parallel construction is inadmissible evidence laundering.
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  > "So you're fine with money laundering as well?" Is this your best effort attempt at assuming good faith? > "parallel construction is inadmissible evidence laundering." Well, it's concealing a source, which is what I said. If you have an informant who's life would be in danger if they were revealed, then anything they tell you would have to be paralleled. There's nothing illegal about their evidence, they would just never testify to it.
  - frandroid 6y ago
    It's perjury. Read the other replies. There's nothing good faith about perjury. If you're trying to protect a source, get the source protected by a court order.
    - JoeSmithson 6y ago
      I have read the other replies, that don't appear to have been made by anyone with any experience of parallel construction.
      - deleted 6y ago

justanotheranon 6y ago

the biggest sin of Parallel Construction is that it violates Brady. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland Under Brady, the prosecution is compelled by the Constitution to share all evidence with the defense, in order for the defense to be able to potentially challenge it. Parallel Construction is secret evidence that is intentionally scrubbed from the Court record in order to keep the existence of illegal mass surveillance concealed. You can't challenge Parallel Construction in Court, because the evidence doesn't exist, and even if your defense attorney did have it, that evidence would be inadmissable based on State Secrets being invoked. Meanwhile, we all know domestic mass surveillance is happening, yet our Govt has to pretend it is not happening. The Emperor truly has no clothes. Why is our Govt going to such an extreme length of destroying decades of jurisprudence and risking reducing our Justice System to a farcical Kangaroo Court like in the USSR? As the wise maxim from Watergate goes, "it's not the crime, it's the cover up." Parallel Construction was invented, deployed and standardized as routine policy for one purpose: to prevent the Gov'ts illegal domestic mass surveillance from being challenged in Court, by preventing anyone from gaining legal standing against it. Why doesnt the Govt just admit what we already know? "Yeah, we're spying on all of you, all of your cell phones, your emails and web browsing and Internet comms, we have it all and we search your data for crimes to charge you with." If FedGov admitted the truth, all mass surveillance would be shut down by SCOTUS for violating not only the 4th Amendment, but also Brady and dozens of other laws. But wait, it gets worse. FedGov made the biggest blunder that compounds the error of their original sin. FedGov did not even KEEP TRACK of which collected evidence is Parallel Construction and which is normal evidence. That means hundreds of thousands of decided criminal cases would need to be tossed, because FedGov has no way to go back and comply with Brady, even to say "we are certain that no NSA SIGINT was used as Parallel Construction in your case." The Govt doesnt know!!! If you remember the news from a few years ago where NSA was still retaining all domestic data collected between 2001-2007, and Congress morons were grandstanding "hur dur, NSA is holding American's data forever, we must force NSA to delete it"--the real reason for that was not because NSA wanted to retain your 20 year old emails. It was because NSA knew Brady could be a legal nuke used to annihilate NSA if the Court ever gave standing for someone to challenge Parallel Construction. NSA saved all that data in anticipation of saving its own neck. If NSA had to tell a Judge, "we purged all data about every case between 2001-2007, so we have no way to comply with Brady even if we didnt do anything wrong", that would sink NSA in Court. The FISC Judges would shutdown NSA the same day. but guess what? Congress won that debate and forced NSA to delete the old data collected under STELLARWIND. now NSA has jumped out of the plane without a parachute. someday there will be a Parallel Construction case that causes the sky to fall. it's inevitable. what's going to happen? NSA, FBI, CIA and DOJ will be reigned in by some Judge? the old way will be restored and Law and Order in a mostly fair justice system will be the norm again? lol of course not. FedGov and the Deep State will NEVER give up their power to mass surveil. instead, they will be forced to invent some new Law that allows them to continue business as usual. and that law will be openly and extremely Totalitarian and it will slowly shift America away from being a Democratic Republic towards being a Monarchical Empire.