> Police Department signed an agreement with Amazon's home surveillance equipment company, Ring, in 2019 to gain special access to the company's Neighbors app
While the programmes could no longer be seen or heard, the screen still functioned as a surveillance device, as after Winston is taken into the Ministry of Love, the audio of his meeting with O'Brien with the telescreen "off" is played back to Winston.
You may be thinking of a different chapter, but O'Brien's apartment wasn't in the Ministry, it was in a different "quarter of the town where they lived" where "the whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro—everything was intimidating".
We really need these things to be Closed Circuit by law. Want the data? Get a warrant and seize the device physically. Centralized databases of surveillance information needs to be outlawed criminally.
When "choice" effectively limits societal options or generates massive externalities and/or long-term unpredictable impacts, all parties upon whom the "choice" impacts are not given voice, or choice.
Often commonweal is a better guiding light than "choice".
It's the user's choice to use a cloud-hosted security system. They can weigh the trade-offs and risks for themselves, same as with any other system.
Whether that data is accessible by law enforcement is a completely separate issue. A proper solution would be limiting this access and requiring consent and transparency, not removing infrastructure options because you think you know better than everyone else about what's best for them.
The issue, by virtue of legally allowed warrantless access, is inextricably conjoined, and the impacts of that choice accrue to not only the decisionmaker, but to countless others. Your premises are false.
Your proposed (and grossly insufficient) remedy is one form of legal mandate.
I'd strongly commend Shoshana Zuboff, Hanna Arendt, and Paul Baran, amongst numerous others:
"On the Engineer's Responsibility in Protecting Privacy", Paul Baran, 1968:
Another view was expressed by AI pioneer and Nobel Laureate (economics) Herbert Simon:
"The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing."
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:
That's a wildly unreasonable stretch and limiting freedom for the claim of security leads to far worse results.
Infrastructure and third-party vendors need to be managed against risk. This is no different than using Gmail vs your own hosted email box. Same with a million other services. Are you claiming that they should all be shutdown now?
Legal issues need to be fixed by legal solutions, not by disallowing the service from existing.
Isn't the whole reason people buy those is because they back up to the cloud and they can view the feed from anywhere? CC security cameras are nothing new
Warrants are extremely easy to get, basically rubber stamped. It's so bad that LE will put in things they know are outright unconstitutional, knowing the magistrate won't really read it or care about citizen's rights.
Even an extremely easy to get warrant takes both time and effort, by multiple people, to get. It's incomparable to an automatic feed to all the Ring cameras in a neighbourhood.
It's the difference between surveillance and mass surveillance. The latter is the bigger problem and warrants will solve it.
Is it clear what this "special access" is? After touring the landing page of Amazon's Neighbors app it's not clear to me how this affects privacy. It could be as benign as a message board moderator position. Don't mistake me for saying that this is okay, I think this is dystopic, but I fear it will be hard to convince people with a Ring device that this is dangerous.
It's really interesting to me that in Los Angeles, we have every technology except for "Gunshot Detection". Anyone know why? It seems like one of the less intrusive forms of surveillance. Isn't this the thing that turns a series of cameras in the direction of a very loud sound? Seems less harmful than specifically copying down every license plate that drives by an intersection, or every face that enters a building. (Which isn't to say they should have it, just that it's an odd omission.)
From what I've read, by itself, it's not a great system. For example, you can shoot a gun somewhere else to distract officers, and some noises are misclassified as guns (teaching officers to ignore those alarms, making the system ineffective).
Wrapped in a weatherproof container roughly the size of a watermelon, each ShotSpotter sensor combines microphones, hardware, software and a clock linked to the Global Positioning System, which uses satellites and radio navigation to pinpoint precise times and locations.
In the cacophonous urban environment, sensors are calibrated to ignore all sounds except for those that most closely match the “impulsive” sound of an explosion, said James Beldock, a senior vice president for ShotSpotter.
“It’s a very, very sharp wave,” Beldock said. “No other sound works that way.”
The blast of a gun is different from other explosive sounds because it is directional, meaning that the noise changes its frequency as the bullet moves through space. A person may hear a gunshot a half-mile away if the gun is fired toward him. But a person 200 yards away may hear nothing if the gun is fired away from him.
Once sensors register a potential gunshot, they transmit the data to the ShotSpotter computer network for analysis. The computer server compares the time that each sensor logged the sound to calculate the likely location of its source, a process of triangulation and multilateration.
“That sound will reach a sensor 100 yards away at a different time than it reaches a sensor 200 yards away,” Beldock explained.
The more sensors that capture the noise, the more accurate the location. A sound detected by 10 sensors can be located to within two feet, he said.
The computer system also classifies the likely source of the sound based on its sharpness, frequency and consistency across sensors. This is critical, because other impulsive sounds — including fireworks, backfires and helicopters — can also trigger the remote sensors.
> sensors are calibrated to ignore all sounds except for those that most closely match the “impulsive” sound of an explosion
> The blast of a gun is different from other explosive sounds
> “It’s a very, very sharp wave,” Beldock said. “No other sound works that way.”
> Other impulsive sounds — including fireworks, backfires and helicopters — can also trigger the remote sensors
They're calibrated just to hear explosions, and in fact _no other explosive sound works that way_, but then they're triggered by...helicopters? Which are not propelled by explosions?
For what it's worth, neither bullets nor helicopters are propelled by explosions. While the distinction is somewhat technical, gunpowder doesn't explode--it just burns really fast. This is less important for small arms than for, say, artillery, but being able to control burn rates is critical for the design of most firearms/cannons and things like solid-fuel rocket motors (which function as one big propellant grain)--in many of these cases, detonation would likely prove catastrophic.
All that to say that helicopter blades can create similar pressure waves as gunshots. Supersonic bullets passing overhead make very distinctive sounds, but the noise of the gunshot itself is much less unique. I never really got comfortable living in places with a large number of cars that backfired a lot, because I couldn't easily tell it apart from gunfire.
Any chemical reaction that produces more outputs than inputs by volume can explode if you trap that pressure.
The flame front on gunpowder isn't fast enough to make a pressure wave that sounds like a bang if there's nothing to trap the combustion byproducts (like the space behind a bullet as it travels down the barrel).
You can harmlessly set off gunpowder (old school black powder and equivalents) as a party trick. Don't try that with Semtex.
I'm not an acoustics expert but I think it's going to be fundamentally very hard if not impossible to build a shotspotter type system that both works in an urban environment (where sound bounces off all sorts of things) and doesn't get a false positive from things like motorcycles backfiring.
It's no doubt referring to the "whap whap whap" sound of the tail rotor's wake causing interference patterns with the main rotor's wake.
Next time you're near a helicopter in flight, notice that the "whap whap whap" chopping sound is more prominent at certain angles. Because it's constructive interference the pressure wave can be quite large and sharp... just like a gunshot, I guess?
These sensors are usually on rooftops, and while I believe they could pick up conversations if we’re next to it or yelled loudly (as in, physically capable of capturing frequencies of human voices), I don’t believe they have a use for recording lots of audio to some permanent storage. Their main purpose seems to be posting time stamped events of a particular sound occurrence with a couple seconds of sound surrounding the event. [0]
> Only two seconds before a gunshot and four seconds after a gunshot are recorded, the company claims.
If they were recording full conversations on purpose without permission that would expose a lot of liability, and unless every customer is in on it (I doubt these distributed public entities are coordinated) I think there would be some documented story by now.
"The D.C. police’s Shotspotter system was turned off for the [Fourth of July, 2020] holiday, presumably because fireworks would have set it off constantly."
Let us not forget the Netsential leak from #BlueLeaks a few weeks ago.
Netsential.com [1] was a Houston-based software dev, hosting, and cloud provider. I lived most of my life in Houston, and they are loosely connected to an old ISP called Texas.net and a more recent data center company called Data Foundry.
Something like 630+ websites were hosted by Netsential. All of them DHS fusion centers, multi state intel sharing groups, police training outfits, etc. The source code leaked as well for all of these websites. Extremely poorly done ASP.net rigged together "web apps" with CSV files being used for the backend data tier.
Here is the most fascinating thing. 7 years ago, as part of the Edward Snowden document dump, a single page screenshot of an list of the Top 16 addresses the NSA was targeting in North America appeared.
#16 on that list [2], codenamed WAXTITAN, was the IP address 64.9.146.208, which belonged and belongs to Netsential/YHC Corporation [3].
The question now I think is who in the world are these other 15 IP addresses, all of which are scattered around typically rural North America?
This is a throwaway account as I will be mentioning some slightly sensitive personal details.
I do not currently work in law enforcement or intelligence, but for various reasons from some years ago to the present I have been a member of one of the fusion-center-type communities which Netsential hosts. A small amount of my personal information is included in the breach as a result, but of course, this is far from the first time that's happened to me.
I think you have somewhat of a misunderstanding about Netsential's service offerings. While they do provide physical hosting, that is not their primary product, they are not used for "managing the physical servers (think Dell blade computers for instance) that these websites ran on top of" as you say in the blog post. This is only incidental. Their primary product is the software, which is not very good from either a code quality or user experience perspective, but is reasonably unique in its capabilities. They offer a completely "turnkey" solution, including for example a telephone technical support/customer service line for users of the portals that they staff and handles routine things like password resets.
They're not a hosting company, they are primarily a SaaS operation that also does some custom software development.
So it's not at all true that there's no reason to use them over a cheaper service like Azure. These organizations would need to hire some other company to develop the software if they did that, and that would end up costing them more because they'd be looking at a semi-custom project (COTS CMS solutions would partially meet the needs) rather than "just another license" with Netsential.
that is an incredible connection. thank you for sharing. im glad im not the only one who has read most of the Snowden leaks, and whenever anything new happens like a big hack or leak, i go back and search the Snowden files to see if there are any connections.
in that list of program names, i remember seeing WILDCHOCOBO and DARKTHUNDER in other Snowden files.
page 19 of that is very very interesting. it lists around 100 NSA programs that are all part of some kind of global passive CNE implanted on hundreds of servers that provides ingest/exfil to feed back home into XKEYSCORE.
DARKTHUNDER is also on there.
the odd thing is that slidedeck is about NSA program JOLLYROGER tracking SD cards via their unique hardware volume IDs.
why would NSA TAO be hacking MSPs like Netsential at all? why is NSA spying on Fusion Centers, who get their reports from FBI, who themselves got the data to write the reports from NSA SIGINT? why is NSA spying on regional and local Law Enforcement further down the food chain? NSA already has that data. NSA wouldnt even need to use TAO and CNE to collect data from Netsentia. They could just ask for the data.
my best guess is it's some kind of Inside Threat monitoring system. TAO hacks into those systems to install CNE implants that watch for SD cards being inserted, to detect rogue Fusion Center and LE personnel who are bulk stealing files by copying them onto SD cards.
but that seems like a really dumb thing to do. why not just disable the SD card readers and/or remove the hardware? a PC in a Fusion Center shouldnt even have an SD card reader.
ironic, since Snowden roughly implied in his recent autobiography that the way he stole millions of NSA's top secret files was by sneaker net'ing them home using SD cards.
LOL NSA has been screwing up its defense against SD cards for at least a decade and that screw up is what made Snowden possible.
i bet dozens of Russian and Chinese and Israeli moles have stolen far more than Snowden ever took from NSA using
My concern is similar to yours. By hacking and subverting everything, the NSA paved the way / "presented a picture of what was possible" to rogue foreign governments. The US was unprepared for this, and once it was realized, we couldn't even morally accuse them of wrong due to NSA past...
I think US agencies have sort of realized this mistake now, and actually for the last couple of years. The former NSA directors have said some revealing comments that reflect pretty authentic looking doubt, shame, and guilt over the various pathways programs took (with the exception of perhaps Admiral John Poindexter).
Perhaps agencies like the DHS, which when it was created was the largest reorganization of government since the Department of Defense was created in 1947, have not yet learned...
The NSA was something like 50 miles away from where this data was being hosted. It could have all been hosted in the much better / actually CJIS compliant Azure South at 5150 Rogers Road.
That some random hosting company Netsential, not even a Microsoft Partner was chosen, makes both me and apparently the NSA suspicious.
More than likely DataFoundry is a front company. DataFoundry, which definitely is a real company, was ultimately hosting the Nestential sites. Their founders are former Peace Corps [1] recruits from the 1970's. They look like nice people but definitely not engineering experts. Also everyone at the company has been in place for nearly its entire existence. That is a tell-tale sign of fraud, a tech company should have massive movement within its executive ranks during these last two decade boom years. Also no one I know has done business with them, and even their customer list seems pretty thin when you realized almost all of them have the same one or two Private Equity owners...
While far less interesting, I can't help but notice this quote from your source:
"In addition to Texas.Net and Data Foundry, Ron and Carolyn established a Usenet company, Giganews, and an Internet security solutions company, Golden Frog, which provides one of the world’s leading VPN services, VyprVpn."
How extremely curious -- they are & have been a major seller of Usenet access & "privacy"/VPN services for the past few decades; hmm.
None of this is really that surprising. DataFoundry is a real company and pretty typical for the industry, I don't see any particular reason to suspect that they're a front. They're on the small side for the datacenter/colo sector but similar to something like PheonixNAP. While I can't say I know any of their customers personally I have gotten quotes from them in the past which were competitive but not quite the best available.
No particular technical expertise is involved in running these sorts of companies, those staff are hired. The top-level executive management is more reminiscent of commercial real estate than anything technical---it's buying land, building buildings, and putting tenants in them.
That the owners of the company have been involved in Usenet and VPN services is quite unsurprising---these are both industries that are technically simple, easy to get into, and can show a pretty quick profit. The up-front capital involved to get into them is having rack space and connectivity... things that, as owners of a colo outfit, they already had on hand. VPN services also have a high degree of customer overlap and can share infrastructure with usenet, so there is a VERY high degree of overlap between usenet providers and VPN providers---to the extent that it's more suspicious if a Usenet provider doesn't share owners with a VPN provider.
And this is just state surveillance. There’s a guy who’s building a private surveillance network in San Francisco, with the buy in of the District Attorney and local police departments, and a goal of complete surveillance of city streets.
I just loaded the map by itself in its own tab [0].
I think it just wasn't tested very well in Firefox. The third party map is blanking out for me at widths over 2048 pixels in a Firefox window. That's what I get for using an ultrawide monitor, I guess.
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.
Genuinely curious, in what context is it perjury? My understanding of parallel construction is:
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.
The problem is, that they lied about how they got te evidence.
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.
That doesn't mean those stops aren't base on intel gained via legal warrants. It's more likely the police are trying to protect a source, either a person or technical means that is providing them greater information.
Yes, it already happens and that's why it's a problem. If they discovered that they should "randomly" pull over that vehicle through evidence that was gathered illegally, then it should also be considered a violation of the 4th amendment... which is likely why the EFF has launched this project.
It would be interesting - and likely amusing - to extrapolate how many people must be driving around with huge caches of drugs, based on an assumption that purportedly unrelated traffic stops (or equivalent) were in fact random samples.
I really do think a "google maps" for police activity needs to be created -- including every single arrest, prosecution , subsequent legal claim... you should be able to rate police officers like restaurants on Yelp
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.
It might be worth coming up with an example that doesn’t illustrate an end that may justify precisely the means you describe. In your hypothetical scenario, the system would be working as intended according to many people, because the drug dealer would have otherwise gotten away with illegal activity that those people perceive as harmful.
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. Illegal searches are illegal no matter the sound basis after the fact. As an order of our society, historically police where not supposed to go looking for crime. They where commissioned to enforce the law. One cannot enforce the law by breaking the law and it has set a very bad precedence that the police now go looking for crime. Because if they "believe" you are a criminal there is a better than average chance they are going to find something no matter how petty or insignificant. The point being, it does not matter the end result, it never justifies the action in retrospect as the person is and should be assumed innocent until legal evidence of a crime is uncovered. If it was obtained illegally all evidence even parallel construction should be tossed out for the taint it bring with it.
>>In your hypothetical scenario, the system would be working as intended according to many people, because the drug dealer would have otherwise gotten away with illegal activity that those people perceive as harmful.
>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".
All of that is true, and nonetheless the parent comment stands: it will be rhetorically more convincing if you show how this negatively impacts the law-abiding.
While it may be move convincing, the hope is for people to see that these rights exist for a reason and that even in the presence of mortal outrage, they should still be defended. Because someone out there, is morally outraged at the way you live your life and would make something illegal that you do if they could. That is the whole point of the bill of rights and the amendments. Is to guarantee a base level of freedom no matter how the winds change. I don't understand why that is so hard for people to get. Maybe it's because I am older and boy have I seen the winds change, but it only takes one swing away from your viewpoint to understand how important they are.
Like having a police officer watch you shower, jerk off, and eat pizza in your underwear every day, in your own home, while you have no drugs there, but they think you do?
Let’s start with the same scenario: cameras are placed inside a home to try to catch you packing drugs except... it turns out you’re not a drug dealer. So they wait, and wait, and the whole time record everything going on in your house. Your arguments with your wife, your “romantic time”, the ridiculous things your kids say.
Doesn’t that feel like a huge violation of your privacy?
> It might be worth coming up with an example that doesn’t illustrate an end that may justify precisely the means you describe
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".
Yes, but what if the cameras are not illegally placed, but in fact put there with a warrant. Then there is nothing illegal going on at all, but it would still be in LE interest to parallel how they know about the drugs, so that they can continue using the camera and maybe find out where the next shipment is going to be as well.
The principle of the "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree" says that if $A is inadmissible, then evidence derived from $A is inadmissible. The perjury is claiming (possibly a lie by omission) that $B was not derived from $A. Sometimes this involves a (more direct) lie inventing an alternate history for $B.
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.
IIUC, and I may not, that's slightly too strong and there are some circumstances where evidence that's (shall we say) barely inadmissible doesn't necessarily invalidate later evidence.
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.
Not quite. If someone says “Jim told me that Matt killed the guy”. That’s inadmissible hearsay, but it doesn’t mean the cops can’t go interrogate Matt and generate admissible evidence.
That's not right at all. Loads of stuff is inadmissible as evidence but not illegal. For example, in many countries phone intercept is inadmissible. For example, in The Wire, they might hear a drug deal being arranged on the phones, then arrange to be on patrol with a drug dog and find the stash. The phone recording would be inadmissible (even though it would help the prosecution), the evidence used to prosecute would have to be paralleled.
If the evidence they're hearing on the phone is not admissible, there's a good chance it's because they're listening through illegitimate means as well, hmm?
In the UK, they do not have the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine. Parallel Reconstruction is not needed to bypass admissibility constraints because those constraints don't exist in the first place.
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.
Parallel construction is still used in the UK. That's my point - it is used to conceal sources in a wide variety of circumstances, and is orthogonal to any issues regarding illegality of evidence.
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. 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>".
Interesting...so it's kinda like clean-room reverse engineering, except that there's no mandate for the clean-room?
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...
>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.
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.
The officers are lying to the court about how the case was built. That is often relevant to a defense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree) and they are lying in this way specifically to deprive defendants of the ability to challenge the collection of that evidence.
Intentionally and materially lying to the court is clearly perjury.
I think the issue is that in the moral sense if something is inadmissible but is used to obtain admissible evidence, everything derived should also be inadmissible (GPL style). In this case the officer in perjuring himself by trying to pass off inadmissible evidence as admissible but this is more of a play on words than actual legal doctrine if I understand it correctly. What I think OP is saying is that it should be perjury and I totally agree.
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.
There is nothing inherently wrong with parallel construction, it just means concealing a source. It seems like you have probably leant the term in the context of illegally obtained information, but that is orthogonal to concealing a source.
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.
If I am accused of a crime, I have the right to face my accusers and contest all of the evidence against me. Parallel construction is deliberately depriving me of that right, by lying in court. The fact that it's common shouldn't make us lose track of that.
This isn't a very good argument against parallel construction, because you are able to contest all of the evidence being used in court against you.
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.
that's incorrect, you're allowed to also have access to evidence the prosecutor doesn't reference directly. For instance, if there is some evidence that someone else committed a crime such as existence of security footage or DNA evidence, they're required to produce it along with all the other evidence during discovery. Of course they might not use that conflicting evidence in court, but it was gathered and thus is legally obligated to be given to the defense.
Withholding evidence from the defense is very incompatible with our justice system.
No, you don't have an absolute right to know all the details of how an investigation was conducted. You don't necessarily get to see the intelligence that supported a search warrant, for example.
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.
It's perjury. Read the other replies. There's nothing good faith about perjury. If you're trying to protect a source, get the source protected by a court order.
I don't have experience of extortion, either, but I'm plenty qualified to object.
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.)
Exactly there are established legal proceedings to protect sensitive information be it a source that could be endangered, classified information or a method employed, the judge can seal that information, but it has historically been the judges call and that should not be taken out of the courts hands by law enforcement.
The other side of that is that most of these surveillance technologies could potentially be used by the population against the police and public officials.
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.
Stuff like this gives me some hope. Where states like China have complete surveillance and control over their citizens, and that's where other fascist states seem to be headed, at least in western countries we are having these debates. And even though it seems like an ever-losing battle, my hope is that we can all be educated enough and band together on things that unite us to fight back against surveillance society controlled and abused by the powerful few.
Yeah but doesn’t it feel like a race to the bottom? I mean, it feels like our politicians think country X is doing it so we (western democracy) better too, or risk losing global position in military/economy/etc
The traditional reminder that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which built this atlas, is only able to do do thanks to the donations of individuals like you:
While there is a listing for Drones, I think they may need to add a category for when they are deployed in a Pervasive Wide Area mode like as in "Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All" [1] as trialed in Baltimore [2] sometime back. Who knows what the current state of play is for this?
In Beverly Hills, there's some push for futuristic tech with autonomous cars and facial recognition. My point is, the people that participate in the local government and police measures are very average. Any smart, capable person could get involved and help develop better programs.
However, because law enforcement and wealth inequality is what it is, I'm somewhat open to surveillance system in certain areas of BH that are high risk targets. I hope these systems aren't used against regular residents and only actual threats. But, of course, that's a fallacy.
Surveillance just going to get worse in the US Why?
There has been a police shortage since the early 2010's where most departments only had a 1/3 of the manpower that was needed. Now with public sentiment against the police, I'm sure the police shortages will increase, eventually forcing the government to rely on more surveillance, AI, and robotics to fill the gap.
Anyone notice that the facial recognition points north of SF are errors? They contain information about programs in Nebraska and Florida. I wonder what led to the error and if there are more.
Reading through a couple of the descriptions it looks like they have a state-wide database for searching face images against FL driver's licence photos. Since all the departments are signed onto the system, they all get the symbol but there may be other reasons/more invasive systems mixed in with the clutter so take that for what it's worth.
In Monroe county, FL we voted out a host of surveillance tech like traffic cameras etc. I was actually surprised to see that the sheriffs office signed onto the Ring data sharing as surveillance tech has been thoroughly rejected by our community, and we are small enough and close knit enough down here, that organized movements regularly vote people out that cross too far over the line.
That being said, the police force has a pretty stellar reputation of not looking for trouble and bad cops are usually shown the door pretty quickly. The rest of FL though is a mess, traffic light cameras everywhere, licence plate scanners, stingray. You name it they are decked out with it.
if you read it right, it's all in the construction.
so you or better everyone should share this page, as well as if you want to contribute something, register there https://atlasofsurveillance.org/collaborate
this is the most scary part.