4 ms·

They already mention Lavabit. How were they protected by US law exactly?

gamblor956 13y ago
Evidence must be acquired by legal means to be usable in US courts. This means that data acquired by the NSA can't be used in court by the government in a prosecutorial setting unless the prosecution can establish how the evidence was acquired. If they can't, the evidence is tainted, as it all evidence discovered through the tainted evidence, and can't be used in court. While prosecutors frequently try to argue parallel construction (they would have discovered the evidence anyways through other means), judges rarely accept this argument unless the prosecution can show that such other means were already underway and yielding evidence that would have led to the tainted evidence. (This is rare, because at this point in the proceedings, the investigating agency has usually moved on to investigating other cases. The law doesn't move as fast as it does on Law & Order or CSI.) Also...Lavabit isn't relevant. That idiot thought he came up with some brilliant "hack" of the legal system based on a bizarre misunderstanding of the law and it bit him in the ass. Even a first year law student could have told him that scheme wouldn't have worked. If he had wanted to make a subpoena-proof system which would have prevented him from actually providing decrypted customer data, he should have designed such a system. Instead, he built a system that let him decrypt customer data...while also decrypting the data for every other customer.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  You're confusing doing "parallel construction" (which is getting information illegally and secretly and then constructing an alternative method to "discover" the same information that will seem legal when the original source of the information is concealed) [1] with invoking the "inevitable discovery" exception to the exclusionary rule [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_discovery

Evidence must be acquired by legal means to be usable in US courts. This means that data acquired by the NSA can't be used in court by the government in a prosecutorial setting unless the prosecution can establish how the evidence was acquired. If they can't, the evidence is tainted, as it all evidence discovered through the tainted evidence, and can't be used in court. While prosecutors frequently try to argue parallel construction (they would have discovered the evidence anyways through other means), judges rarely accept this argument unless the prosecution can show that such other means were already underway and yielding evidence that would have led to the tainted evidence. (This is rare, because at this point in the proceedings, the investigating agency has usually moved on to investigating other cases. The law doesn't move as fast as it does on Law & Order or CSI.) Also...Lavabit isn't relevant. That idiot thought he came up with some brilliant "hack" of the legal system based on a bizarre misunderstanding of the law and it bit him in the ass. Even a first year law student could have told him that scheme wouldn't have worked. If he had wanted to make a subpoena-proof system which would have prevented him from actually providing decrypted customer data, he should have designed such a system. Instead, he built a system that let him decrypt customer data...while also decrypting the data for every other customer.

dragonwriter 13y ago
You're confusing doing "parallel construction" (which is getting information illegally and secretly and then constructing an alternative method to "discover" the same information that will seem legal when the original source of the information is concealed) [1] with invoking the "inevitable discovery" exception to the exclusionary rule [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_discovery