![]() | The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject.(May 2020) |
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit disclosure as to the origins of an investigation. [1]
In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer. [2] This practice gained support after the Supreme Court's 2009 Herring v. United States decision. [2]
![]() | This section needs expansionwith: commentary by legal analysts on the legal status of this practice. You can help by adding to it. (October 2014) |
In August 2013, a report by Reuters revealed that the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration advises DEA agents to practice parallel construction when creating criminal cases against Americans that are based on NSA warrantless surveillance. [1] The use of illegally obtained evidence is generally inadmissible under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. [3]
Two senior DEA officials explained that the reason parallel construction is used is to protect sources (such as undercover agents or informants) or methods in an investigation. One DEA official had told Reuters: "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day. It's decades old, a bedrock concept."
An example from one official about how parallel construction tips work is being told by Special Operations Division that: "Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle." DEA would alert state troopers and they may wait for that certain vehicle and decide to use drug searching dogs to see if there is any illegal drug-related activity. [4] Parallel construction allows the prosecution building the drug case to hide the source of where the information came from to protect confidential informants or undercover agents who may be involved with the illegal drug operation from endangering their lives.
A number of former federal agents had used parallel construction during their careers, according to Reuters interviews. Most of the former agents had defended the practice of parallel construction because, according to them, no falsified evidence or illegally obtained material were presented in courts.[ clarification needed ].
A judge can rule evidentiary material inadmissible if it is suspected that the evidence was obtained illegally.[ citation needed ]
Parallel construction in this case in the US usually is the result of tips from the DEA, as well as the Special Operations Division that are derived from sources within foreign governments, intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. According to a senior law enforcement official and a former US military intelligence official tips are not given to the DEA until citizenship is verified to avoid any illegal wiretapping of US citizens who are abroad. US authorities require a warrant to wiretap domestic US-persons (citizens and non-citizens alike) and to wiretap US citizens who are abroad. [1] [5]
The Reuters piece occurred amid reporting of the 2013 NSA leaks, although it made no "explicit connection" to the Snowden leaks. [6] [7]
The Register argues the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 introduces parallel construction for evidence obtained through surveillance under the act, and prevents it being revealed or questioned in court. [8]
Parallel construction was used to hide the fact that the Enigma machine encryption had been cracked. Operations based on intelligence recovered this way were authorized if there was a plausible alternate means for the data to have been obtained. Many losses were suffered when preventing them would have alerted the Nazis that Enigma had been deciphered. [9]
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
The USA PATRIOT Act was a landmark Act of the United States Congress, signed into law by President George W. Bush. The formal name of the statute is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, and the commonly used short name is a contrived acronym that is embedded in the name set forth in the statute.
A covert listening device, more commonly known as a bug or a wire, is usually a combination of a miniature radio transmitter with a microphone. The use of bugs, called bugging, or wiretapping is a common technique in surveillance, espionage and police investigations.
Wiretapping, also known as wire tapping or telephone tapping, is the monitoring of telephone and Internet-based conversations by a third party, often by covert means. The wire tap received its name because, historically, the monitoring connection was an actual electrical tap on an analog telephone or telegraph line. Legal wiretapping by a government agency is also called lawful interception. Passive wiretapping monitors or records the traffic, while active wiretapping alters or otherwise affects it.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is a United States federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Justice tasked with combating illicit drug trafficking and distribution within the U.S. It is the lead agency for domestic enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act, sharing concurrent jurisdiction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. However, the DEA has sole responsibility for coordinating and pursuing U.S. drug investigations both domestically and internationally.
Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, but it may also be carried out by corporations. Depending on each nation's laws and judicial systems, the legality of and the permission required to engage in mass surveillance varies. It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes. It is often distinguished from targeted surveillance.
A pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), is a device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications.
In the United States, the exclusionary rule is a legal rule, based on constitutional law, that prevents evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights from being used in a court of law. This may be considered an example of a prophylactic rule formulated by the judiciary in order to protect a constitutional right. The exclusionary rule may also, in some circumstances at least, be considered to follow directly from the constitutional language, such as the Fifth Amendment's command that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" and that no person "shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
The state secrets privilege is an evidentiary rule created by United States legal precedent. Application of the privilege results in exclusion of evidence from a legal case based solely on affidavits submitted by the government stating that court proceedings might disclose sensitive information which might endanger national security. United States v. Reynolds, which involved alleged military secrets, was the first case that saw formal recognition of the privilege.
Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, on the matter of whether wiretapping of private telephone conversations, conducted by federal agents without a search warrant with recordings subsequently used as evidence, constituted a violation of the target’s rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that the Constitutional rights of a wiretapping target have not been violated.
The USA PATRIOT Act was passed by the United States Congress in 2001 as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. It has ten titles, each containing numerous sections. Title II: Enhanced Surveillance Procedures granted increased powers of surveillance to various government agencies and bodies. This title has 25 sections, with one of the sections containing a sunset clause which sets an expiration date, December 31, 2005, for most of the title's provisions. This was extended twice: on December 22, 2005 the sunset clause expiration date was extended to February 3, 2006 and on February 2 of the same year it was again extended, this time to March 10.
NSA warrantless surveillance — also commonly referred to as "warrantless-wiretapping" or "-wiretaps" — was the surveillance of persons within the United States, including U.S. citizens, during the collection of notionally foreign intelligence by the National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. In late 2001, the NSA was authorized to monitor, without obtaining a FISA warrant, phone calls, Internet activities, text messages and other forms of communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lays within the U.S.
The following is a section summary of the USA PATRIOT Act, Title II. The USA PATRIOT Act was passed by the United States Congress in 2001 as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Title II: Enhanced Surveillance Procedures gave increased powers of surveillance to various government agencies and bodies. This title has 25 sections, with one of the sections containing a sunset clause which sets an expiration date, of 31 December 2005, for most of the title's provisions. On 22 December 2005, the sunset clause expiration date was extended to 3 February 2006.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications which were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, described how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."
Warrantless searches are searches and seizures conducted without court-issued search warrants.
Transnational organized crime (TOC) is organized crime coordinated across national borders, involving groups or markets of individuals working in more than one country to plan and execute illegal business ventures. In order to achieve their goals, these criminal groups use systematic violence and corruption. Common transnational organized crimes include conveying drugs, conveying arms, trafficking for sex, toxic waste disposal, materials theft and poaching.
Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, 568 U.S. 398 (2013), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that Amnesty International USA and others lacked standing to challenge section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008.
The Hemisphere Project, also known as Hemisphere, is a mass surveillance program conducted by US telecommunications company AT&T and funded by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Former U.S. President Barack Obama favored some levels of mass surveillance. He has received some widespread criticism from detractors as a result. Due to his support of certain government surveillance, some critics have said his support violated acceptable privacy rights, while others dispute or attempt to provide justification for the expansion of surveillance initiatives under his administration.
The Farmer's Market, formerly Adamflowers, was an online black market for illegal drugs. It was founded by Marc Peter Willems in or before 2006, and moved operations to the dark web in 2010 using the Tor anonymity network. It was closed and several operators and users arrested in April 2012 as a result of Operation Adam Bomb, a two-year investigation led by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
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