Why is this surprising to anyone?<p>It's time to realize that our own law enforcement is a greater threat to us than terrorists abroad. This behavior needs to be made illegal.
How far does the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine go? If someone is caught using illegal evidence, and then let go because of that, can the police follow them around to see if they commit more crimes, or is that all poisoned (because if the original evidence hadn't been obtained, they would never have found this person to follow)? Would they need to wait until the person came up in an entirely unrelated lead? Would they be able to add the information "person was previously let go on technicality for crime X" to a database which generates leads when cross-referencing other data (e.g. people in proximity to a crime, which might be crossed with known criminals? (I don't know if this is actually done))
It talks about Kennard Walters as a success case in the link to the hemisphere program. I decided to look this up.<p>Is this the same case? <a href="http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/10r51h1ls/california-southern-district-court/usa-v-walters/" rel="nofollow">http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/10r51h1ls/california-southe...</a><p>I'm not versed well enough in these things to accurately describe, but it looks like there was a motion for discovery, and the case was effectively dropped a week later?
Suppose that instead of the secret cell phone tracker evidence and the parallel construction, it was an undercover witness and a random bystander witness. Instead of having the undercover officer testify in court and thereby reveal themselves, the cops instead use the undercover witness's information to locate the bystander (e.g. the undercover witness remembered seeing the bystander and gave the police his description to help them find the bystander), and they have the bystander testify in court instead of the undercover witness, and they never say at the trial how they found this witness. Are the police allowed to do this? Should they be? If they are, is it any different from "parallel construction"starting from secret cell phone evidence instead of secret witness testimony? (I'm genuinely curious. I don't know the answers to any of these questions.)<p>Edit: I guess in order to make the analogy more accurate, I would have to specify that the undercover agent knows they did something illegal that would make their own testimony inadmissible as evidence, and this is the motivation for finding the bystander.
"Privacy advocates have long warned of “parallel construction,” in which investigators cover up information obtained without a warrant by finding other ways to attribute it — never allowing the source of the original lead to be scrutinized or subject to judicial oversight."<p>Get used to it. Or fight it.
Part of Stallman's motivation for starting the free software movement was that your computer is an extension of your mind, and ubiquitous computer surveillance is basically the same as Orwell's thought police. The chilling effect is real, as demonstrated by a recent study that showed a drop off in terrorism related searches after the Snowden leaks. I freely research terrorism though, because I'm not "the type of person who would do something". So I basically rely on racial, ethnic, and economic discrimination to feel secure about what I search online. I just don't understand how James Comey and the FBI think that they can make us all safer by turning into criminals themselves.