There is no surveillance tech anyone can invent that won't be used at home against the domestic populace. And I do mean against. Parallel construction has become just another tool in the arsenal of control.
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.
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.
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>".
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...
In these cases, the notion that there is something to be reverse engineered was obtained by illegal means.
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.
Intentionally and materially lying to the court is clearly perjury.
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.
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.
The main incentive for paralleling something is to protect the source, to maintain its effectiveness.
Parallel Reconstruction is used to avoid scrutiny of the original source of evidence. Even when used to legitimate ends (and I have doubts how often it's used as such), there are fundamental problems with dodging accountability.
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.
Doesn’t that feel like a huge violation of your privacy?
>But the end does not justify the means, due to the fact that it is a violation of their 4th Amendment specifically the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.
You're greatly underestimating how many people who unironically oppose due process and civil rights because it "helps the bad guys", they themselves "don't have anything to hide", and "if you're being investigated, you probably did something wrong".
Yeah, like being born a Jew in Germany a little over a century ago.
The meaning of "something wrong" can change over time.
Agreed.
And a lot of people will miss an important point: for every dealer caught using 'parallel construction', countless of innocent citizens would have to be surveyed to score a "hit".
"When you see on the news that Police randomly stopped a car and discovered a huge cache of drugs... you don't actually think that's random, do you?"
TBH I had never thought about it before but now I recognize this pattern everywhere.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013...
https://www.deamuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/042215-...
If you "did nothing wrong", you also drive like you did nothing wrong (5-10 over), hit some yellow lights, etc.
If you know you have a bag of drugs in your car, and a police vehicle pulls at a stop next to you, you can panic.
Also if they do stop you, becase you (eg.) didnt use your turn signal, most people just sigh., give some excuse ("I wanted to, but that black car came, and i had to go around, and the cat, and the wipers, and this and that"), and calmly wait for a ticket... people with drugs usually act different.
And thirdly, police usually know all the drug dealers in their area, know their cars, and just have to catch them with enough drugs to make it worthwile.... so they probably get stopped a bit more often than a normal random commuter does, even if neither of them use turn signals regularly.
Oh, it definitly happens.
But officers also make fishing stops all the time too.
So combatting willful ignorance would be the first step, but my optimism meter broke a while ago.
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.
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.
Your position seems to be that there are legitimate reasons it was introduced. I don't disagree with that. That doesn't mean that the process doesn't involve lying in court to deprive people of their rights.
You say "conceal a source" but that is precisely depriving the accused of their explicit constitutional right to be "confronted with the witnesses against them".
(I will note that I've definitely been speaking with a US focus - not all of my comments will generalize.)
I don't think arguing against the legitimacy of the investigative means used to acquire evidence is ever an admissible argument by which to contest that evidence before a jury. If those investigative means were a poisonous tree, that's an argument you make to the judge to preclude admission of that evidence in the first place, before either side gets to contest any evidence.
I think lawyering over whether parallel construction is lying or not is tactically silly. You'll be on much firmer ground arguing that parallel constructions completely undercuts the point of the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, which is to disincentivize illegal means of investigation.
Withholding evidence from the defense is very incompatible with our justice system.
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.
For instance, protesters don't exactly wear body cameras, but they have been using cell phone cameras to document police violence. Many of the other technologies listed (license plate readers, facial recognition, etc..) could also be used, though it would be harder to use those things as effectively as cameras are used now.