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EFF: "Parallel construction" is really intelligence laundering
- derefr 13y agoReally, "parallel construction" sounds like what any forensic analyst would do in the case of definitive-yet-inadmissible evidence: find other evidence to prove what you already "know" (which can also turn out to go against what you "know.") In other words, just do your job anyway, just taking the inadmissible evidence as a hint of what to look for.
- biff 13y agoIt also sounds more pleasant than "dragnet" or "fishing expedition", but if this starts by treating everybody as a possible suspect for an undetermined crime those terms are closer to the truth. A forensic analyst doesn't get started until it looks like a crime's been committed.
- mtgx 13y agoIt's almost like they're using the 1984's Newspeak as guidelines for naming this sort of stuff.
- AnthonyMouse 13y agoNineteen Eighty-Four was published the same year the US changed the name of the Department of War to be the Department of Defense. It's not like it's a new thing. The sad part is that people continue to fall for it.
- caf 13y agoI thought the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine disallowed that.
- stonemetal 13y agoIt does that is why you have to hide it by parallel construction.
- mtgx 13y agoSo it's illegal.
- stonemetal 13y agoI would say it clearly violates the 6th amendment, but I am an uneducated bumpkin when it comes to legal matters. to be confronted with the witnesses against him; Witnesses in this passage supposedly applies to evidence, not just people witnesses. Therefore it should violate that part.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Witnesses in this passage supposedly applies to evidence, not just people witnesses. Witnesses are the people that are the source of evidence. Testimony is one form of evidence, but physical evidence still comes from people.
- zachrose 13y agoWould anybody not expect the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down parallel construction, given a clean enough case?
- jacoblyles 13y agoJaded libertarian here - I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution with the help of a Ouija board, a fifth of whisky, an intern dressed as lady liberty, cryptic signs hidden in the music of Katy Perry, and Alito's pair of lucky dice.
- apalmer 13y agowell any given set of supreme court judges may come to any particular conclusion, and i am not a lawyer so take it for what its worth: parallel construction as concept probably there could be some debate over the specific implementation where neither defense, prosecution or judge is made aware of the actual facts of the case and the enforcement officials actually lie in sworn testimony? not sure why this would even have to go to the supreme court its plain simple and unambiguous perjury.
- apalmer 13y agoIf you know the 'hint' is 50% likely to be true, and the 'hint' is specific enough to check this person at this time, in this place, and the 'hint' provider and the 'hint' acceptor are all working for the same government and are aware of this fact... then how does this differ from the government just using whatever means it wants to collect whatever evidence it wants and pretending that it didnt?
- grecy 13y ago> In other words, just do your job anyway, just taking the inadmissible evidence as a hint of what to look for. But then you're allowing evidence collection by any means. I'll just break into your house and rifle through your documents and possessions until I find evidence you have committed a crime. Better yet, I'll kidnap and torture you until you confess to something. Once I have that (illegal) confession, I'll start my "parallel construction" until I find another way to prove you guilty of whatever it was you confessed to. See any problem with that?
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago> See any problem with that? Exactly. The purpose of the rule excluding improperly obtained evidence is to penalize the government for obtaining it improperly. It's a mechanism designed to ensure compliance: Take away the ability of law enforcement to benefit by breaking the rules and you get less rule breaking. What this is is an end run around all that. The government benefits from violating the constitution by learning which rocks to turn over to make their case and the courts can't punish them for that by taking away the fruits of the illegal search because the government doesn't tell them about it in the first place.
- VladRussian2 13y ago>Really, "parallel construction" sounds like what any forensic analyst would do in the case of definitive-yet-inadmissible evidence that said analyst came by as result of committing a crime (deliberately violating 4th of citizens without probable cause)
- joseflavio 13y agoThere are at least 3 scary factors in this. 1 - What will be next crime that is big enough that justify using this? File sharing? Drinking in public? Jaywalking? Driving above the speed limit? 2 - The data is collected forever! Our current law system is not just in a situation which the prosecutors can dig your past to find problems! Imagine you do some graffiti (ok, I know it is vandalism) to express your indignation, now, if you are ideologically an enemy of the state, they can dig for crimes your whole life...! 3 - The collected data can be used to prosecute you but it can not be used to innocent you. edit: spelling
- ihsw 13y ago> The collected data can be used to prosecute you but it can not be used to innocent you. Actually that would constitute a Brady violation[1]: > The prosecutor must disclose exculpatory evidence known only to the police. That is, the prosecutor has a duty to reach out to the police and establish regular procedures by which the police must inform him of anything that tends to prove the innocence of the defendant. Now, it's at the discretion of the prosecutor, but if you had evidence that evidence was withheld then can exercise some recourse against the prosecutor. Often-times it results in a re-trial rather than a cash settlement or the case being dismissed. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure
- joseflavio 13y agoThe problem is that as the data came from "parallel" investigations, it is way easier for the prosecutor justify that he did not have access to information that could innocent you, no?
- commandar 13y agoJust a friendly tip: innocent generally isn't used as a verb in English. We generally use words like exonerate, absolve, or clear to mean "prove innocence." Your meaning was clear, just saw that you'd done it a couple of times. :)
- ihsw 13y agoThe legality of it is very difficult to challenge (must be done on case-by-case), so a loud smear campaign is our only recourse. Whether the "reliable tip" came from legal or questionable sources is immaterial when there is clear and obvious evidence implicating someone. We can't forget that the NSA is one of many[1] intelligence agencies in the USG, so this parallel construction phenomenon isn't directly attributed to the NSA's spying efforts being focused domestically. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intelligence_community#Members http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intelligence_community#Membe...
- mtgx 13y agoCouldn't it work the same as with those cases where lab evidence was tainted for thousands of people at once, and they needed retrial?
- DamnYuppie 13y agoI believe that a society needs the ability to forget the transgressions of people. This gives us the ability as individuals to grow, otherwise we will be narrowly cast into a role that will determined by actions years ago or in our youth. I know many will overreact and bring out extreme examples of murder or serious violent crimes. Yet that is not what those who are utilizing these tools are going after and prosecuting. They are generally minor or petty crimes, at least that I have read about so far. It seems like an overzealous us of a tool for perfunctory government twerps to feel empowered and make a case for their continued existence...not at all beneficial in the short or long term
- randallsquared 13y ago"I believe that a society needs the ability to forget the transgressions of people." I hope that's not true, because if it is, our society is doomed. The continued development of smaller and cheaper sensors means that our "choice" is between a world in which no one has privacy, or in which only special entities of some sort do. The attempt to protect privacy is one with the attempt to stop information sharing of all other kinds -- possible for specific instances, but not for the general case.
- mtgx 13y agoThe biggest problem with the mass spying/information gathering is that it's done in secret, with no real checks and balances, can't be challenged, and you might not even know when it's used against you. Plus, the people who abuse it escape unpunished. All of these are creating a very dangerous government. Solve all of those problems, and maybe the fact that everything is not so private anymore wouldn't be such a big problem. But that's going to take many decades to fix, and until then I'd rather try to stop the mass spying, by repealing the laws allowing it and cutting their funding.
- randallsquared 13y agoI agree with this, except I think the time frame is more like one decade. By 2020 (to pick a nice number), I expect that people will generally expect that they are being recorded at all times in public. It's almost true that they are, now, but the expectation is lagging.
- gbin 13y agoIMHO This recycling of information can lead to even more abuse. The NSA can do anything illegal and mask it so it can be used domestically then. ie. They can drag somebody outside the US, torture him for "tips" and give the info to another agency that will protect the source of it by bullshitting the prosecutor. Gitmo v2 but nobody would know.
- eegilbert 13y agoEspecially relevant today: Slave records from the 19th century were used to enforce racial purity laws 100 years later. http://backstoryradio.org/shows/keeping-tabs http://backstoryradio.org/shows/keeping-tabs
- pessimizer 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#Holocaust_implications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#Holocaus... --Godwin
- snissn 13y agoIt's like cheating at cards or battleship and getting the right answer. Then later making up a plausible reason how you knew where their battleship would be.
- apalmer 13y agoIts like: 1) Government Employee A uses wire taps, NSA, any evidence finding method at all including inadmissable evidence, illegally aquired evidence, or classified means to collect data 2) Government Employee A anonymously calls Government Employee B and gives them specific actionable tip that Government Employee B is aware is already vetted by a Government Employee and hence is highly reliable 3) Government Employee B uses specific tip to gather further evidence, then using all available evidence sources constructs an alternative 'plausible' but false way that the evidence trail was generated, and presents this to the jury as truth... the prosecutor and judge may or may not be made aware of the true investigation/evidence trail 4) Government officially endorses this method as standard policy
- dllthomas 13y agoOr like flying a scout plane to be spotted by enemy ships before the cruisers intercept them, so they don't know you broke their codes. Of course, what's appropriate in some situations is hugely inappropriate in others.
- pivnicek 13y agoWe got this warrant to search your house because we've already searched your house.
- keithg 13y agoSo what can we do about it? This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. Given our recent enlightenment of government agency behavior, what can we as citizens do to get things moving in a different direction?
- biff 13y agoI think it all begins with educating people about the issue and motivating them to care about privacy again. Ideally they would find this so distasteful that politicians must fix it. If there isn't a political solution, it falls on the technical community to design encryption and privacy into their products that "just works". Here, ideally, the default state of Internet servers and clients would be to encrypt traffic so that they can be used through a service like TOR without worrying about an exit node snarfing usernames and passwords. Then look at integrating TOR functionality into these servers and clients as transparently as possible such that they will relay internal traffic by default and prefer hidden service connections to servers that are both public and private to reduce the need for exit nodes. At the end of the day strong encryption can simply be made illegal, so it's more important to try to get society back to a "mind your own business" outlook. That can start with a concerted effort to talk about it among family and friends, especially at the moment when it's not a partisan issue.
- betterunix 13y agoThere are a few things we can do: 1. Write to your congressman. Tell them that this is unacceptable. 2. Vote third party. Put the hurt on the major parties and force them to move, and if they do not move, remove them and put new parties in their place. 3. Educate people. This is no longer just a crazy conspiracy theory or a bunch of paranoid fears. You have cops, prosecutors, etc. admitting that this is common practice. Also, take a moment to reflect on just how many other things had to happen for us to get into this situation. We are here because something as mundane as a traffic stop can and often does lead to a felony arrest. The intelligence gathering would accomplish nothing if it were not for the massive number of laws, the massive number of victimless crimes, and the vast power we have given to the police. The next time you hear a politician talking about the need to get tough on crime, the need to give the police more power to arrest people, the need for more laws, look back on this and ask yourself if you really want a strict law-and-order society. Be sure to tell others about it too. We need more than an irrelevant minority to understand just how dangerous things are getting.
- dllthomas 13y ago"Parallel construction" is really perjury.
- jrjarrett 13y agoSo what do we DO about things like this? What IS there to do? I fear our freedom as Americans is eroding away and our elected officials are not going to stop it.