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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._
by 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.