Protests, Profits, and Parallel Construction

The Surveillance State

Parallel Construction

In situations where Stingray is used, however, officers are not able to disclose the source of the information they obtained using the technology. Thus they employ a technique called “parallel construction,” where officers develop alternate “stories” which follow traditional procedure to describe how information was obtained after using secret surveillance programs. In one such case involving a young man in Florida, the police provide him with a plea deal instead of sentencing him in prison when the defense attorney raised concerns about how the evidence was obtained.( https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-programs/).

While these devices are being used on protesters and in other areas of police work, that is not their “advertised” purpose. Police departments who’ve spoken on the use of this technology have alleged that these techniques are critical parts of their counter-narcotics tasks forces’ operations. (https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-programs/). Yet, reports have surfaced stating that these surveillance technologies have been employed for a variety of other matters including investigations of Medicaid Fraud. Id.

Likely to no one’s surprise, the use of these devices has been found to be unconstitutional, as it violates the Fourth Amendment. (Jones v. United States, No. 15-CF-322 (Sept. 21, 2017.) While most Americans would likely agree that efficiently capturing those engaged in illegal activities should be a priority, it is not acceptable for such actions to take place in direct conflict with our laws.

The use of other large scale surveillance programs such as, Project Hemisphere, to track citizens is equally worrisome. Hemisphere is essentially a secret program that can “search trillions of call records and analyz[e] cellular data to determine where a target is located.” (https://www.thedailybeast.com/atandt-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit). What’s startling is that in many ways it appears that such programs are a direct result of the capitalist society in which we live. Technological advancements in particular are driven by a rational desire to become more efficient, profitable, calculable and predictable, therefore allowing for a maximization of profits (See George Ritzer, The “McDonaldization of Society”). In the realm of law enforcement, technology that can be leveraged to identify criminals and their associates means more effect apprehension, and in theory a “safer” society. Large corporations such as AT&T are thus incentivized to develop “innovative” technology like Hemisphere and sell it to the highest bidder. While privacy, or eroding privacy, is profitable, it is difficult to imagine a world where the Department of Justice doesn’t purchase such software, and citizens’ tax dollars aren’t being used to spy on them

Hemisphere

The verbatim repetition of a paragraph happened originally as an editing error. But its retention shows that there's been no proofreading, which is a habit lawyers need to have, like breathing.

While judicial intervention on these matters must continue, it is imperative that Congress intervene. The continued use of parallel construction by police departments severely interferes with the ability to obtain a fair trial. “It really gives a lot of power to the executive branch,” says St. Vincent. “It cuts judges out of the role of deciding whether something was legally obtained.” (https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-programs/). The curtain must be pulled back so the public can both become aware and provide comment on these practices. Whether police seek to control communities through violent force or secret data acquisition, unconstitutional means shall continue to be challenged. Ironically, protesters taking to the streets may be the necessary catalyst to drawing further attention to these practices.

There's a lot in this draft. Too much, in fact. I think the best route to improvement here is tighter focus.

If this isn't an essay about parallel construction, then it's taking up way too many sentences. If this is an essay about parallel construction then it needs to pull in much tighter and makes its ultimate proposal clearer.

If the point is that police behave in more constitutionally-infringing ways when police are themselves the issue bringing people into the street, then you have good work to do that the next draft would gain space for by removing the relatively smaller issue of parallel construction altogether. Paramilitary organizations, which is what police are, use all the tools they have for any purpose on the purpose of "force protection," or collective self-defense. So anything they can do that pushes the lines they will do in the ways that most push the lines when they feel threatened. That's why tight judicial supervision, not at the incident level but at the department level is so important. Consent decrees are important because federal lawyers and those they get evidence from can be in front of a federal judge on the consent decree violation really quick, and those orders the city will be in contempt not to obey immediately. So everybody negotiates in the shadow of that possibility, and restraint comes from the top down. The Trump Administration stopped making or enforcing those decrees, which the cop unions liked, and all cities noticed. Now there is some serious political will to push the needle in the other direction. But the sullen proto-insurrectionary sentiment among the Trump voters in our paramilitaries is also a fact in the calculations.