![]() ![]() In these instances, local law enforcement follows a suspect and then pulls them over for a mundane reason, like failing to use a turn signal. Parallel construction can also involve a simple event like a traffic stop. “ is obscuring what we believe to be warrantless or otherwise unconstitutional surveillance techniques, and they’re also jeopardizing a defendant’s ability to obtain all the evidence that’s relevant,” says Mackey. It’s currently waiting for a California judge to decide whether more information can be made public without impeding law enforcement’s work. The EFF filed Freedom of Information Act and Public Records Act requests in 2014 seeking info about Hemisphere, but the government only provided heavily redacted files. “It’s highly likely that innocent people who are doing completely innocent things are getting swept up into this database.” “What Hemisphere’s capabilities allow it to do is to identify relationships and associations, and to build people’s social webs,” says Aaron Mackey, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The Justice Department billed Hemisphere as a counter-narcotics tool, but the program has been used for everything from Medicaid fraud to murder investigations, according to documentation obtained in 2016 by The Daily Beast. The program also allows law enforcement to have temporary access to the location where you placed or received a call. Even if you change your number, Hemisphere’s sophisticated algorithms can connect you with you new line by examining calling patterns. In order to create the program, the government forged a lucrative partnership with AT&T, which owns three-quarters of the US’s landline switches and much of its wireless infrastructure. The largely secret program provides police with access to a vast database containing call records going back to 1987. Hemisphere, a massive telephone-call gathering operation revealed by The New York Times in 2013, is one of the most well-documented surveillance programs that government officials attempt to hide when they use parallel construction. “It sounds like a human informant or something else, not like a sophisticated surveillance device.” “We’ve seen plenty of examples where the police officers in those reports write ‘we located the suspect based on information from a confidential source ’ they use intentionally vague language,” says Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project. In investigation reports, law enforcement will describe evidence obtained via secret surveillance programs in inscrutable terms. Vincent, the author of the report and a national security and surveillance researcher at Human Rights Watch. “When attorneys try to find out if there’s some kind of undisclosed method that’s been used, the prosecution will basically stonewall and try not to provide a definitive yes or no answer,” says Sarah St. It’s extremely difficult for defendants to discern when evidence has been obtained via the practice, according to the report. That way, it can hide surveillance techniques from public scrutiny and would-be criminals.Ī new report released by Human Rights Watch Tuesday, based in part on 95 relevant cases, indicates that law enforcement is using parallel construction regularly, though it’s impossible to calculate exactly how often. In essence, law enforcement creates a parallel, alternative story for how it found information. First described in government documents obtained by Reuters in 2013, parallel construction is when law enforcement originally obtains evidence through a secret surveillance program, then tries to seek it out again, via normal procedure. ![]()
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