I wonder how much of this was actually parallel reconstruction vs "investigative research"
Its much less about your politics than it is your credulous insinuation that illegal search and seizure is not taking place because searches "need" probable cause to be effected.
The purpose of parallel construction is to create an artificial heritage for evidence collected without probable cause. This is done by finding probable cause for a search that you will then claim uncovered evidence that was in fact previously discovered during the course of an illegal search.
The lawyer, doing his job, will ask where the evidence came from and what the probable cause was for that search. He will be lied to, and told that the evidence was discovered during the course of the second 'investigation' (the existence of the first investigation, the real investigation, will be kept a secret.)
For a simple example of how this would work, imagine a naive police officer acting on his own: The police officer, spurred on by prejudice, breaks into several homes in a neighborhood looking for evidence of a grow op. He finds one such operation, but since his search was illegal nothing he found can be used in court. He then gets the bright idea to leave the police station an 'anonymous' tip. That tip is then used to justify a search warrant, which is then used to reveal the presence of a grow op.
That situation is trivial and the "anonymous tip" is immediately cause for suspicion. Things get much hairier when you add more participants, and make them reasonably intelligent.
TL;DR: The entire point of parallel construction is that the defenses lawyer can do his job, but it won't matter.
Now, I haven't followed the US law or police news closely, since my interest is at most academic, but my picture of parallel construction is that you first use unreliable/inadmissible sources to construct a picture of the situation, then using that general knowledge to locate actual admissible evidence.
So the cop might use inadmissible sources to know there's an person of interest somewhere. But he still needs admissible evidence to demonstrate probable cause if he wants to enter and use results of this second search to be useful. Otherwise he's exactly in the situation of the 'naive' cop from your example, where he can only say 'anonymous tip', doesn't have a record for that, and his 'real' investigation gets dismissed.
What you seem to be describing is taking inadmissible evidence and then somehow inserting it into results of a legal search - i.e. planting evidence. That's not a new idea, I guess, but is it really so common, and how is that caused by parallel construction?
Meanwhile, we're no closer to understanding how "parallel construction" could have been helpful in this case, which is the question the thread purports to answer.
ie, I would use illegal means to obtain proof that you have convicted a crime, then I would use parallel construction to provide a legal explanation for how I obtained the proof.
iee, parallel construction is what they use when they did not have probable cause.
I am having trouble believing that you do not understand that? what am I missing?
I am not sure how you are so confident that the NSA was not at all involved in this capture, and that parallel construction was therefore entirely unnecessary.
When reading that article, and various other sources, one thing that stands out is that even after arresting an administrator - which did lead to various other arrests - they still had no direct link or identification for Ulbricht.
Ulbricht was careful enough that although the police were apparently communicating directly with him, and arresting a number of others that were more directly involved, there was no way for them to locate or identify him.
Note, that this remains true even after he believes that one of his contacts has murdered someone on his behalf. He maintains the firewall between himself and that contact.
Frankly, that is fairly impressive, he must have been a careful man.
Suddenly they find a link buried in the forever webs between a nickname he uses and his actual name and bingo, they have him.
Now, it entirely could have gone down like that. It is completely plausible. Most likely the link was there all along, just waiting for someone to stumble on it.
BUT, that is rather the point of parallel construction, isn't it? to bridge the gap between the information they have and the information that they can present in court, in a totally plausible way.
I am not claiming the truth to be one way or the other, who knows (hell, who cares in this case), but I am claiming that to disregard the possibility and maintain that it is absurd is to ignore the fact of parallel construction and the fact of its frequent use.