THE NEW & IMPROVED GOVERNMENT LIES OF PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION

Have you heard of "parallel construction"? If not, take a breath, this one is rather shocking.

Here’s what parallel construction is, as Wikipedia reports it: "A process of building a parallel – or separate – evidentiary basis for…creating criminal cases against Americans that are actually based on NSA warrantless surveillance."

If this sounds like a rights violation to you, you’re correct. Warrantless surveillance is a blatant violation of the fourth amendment, and illegally-obtained evidence is generally inadmissible under the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine.

Nonetheless, this is exactly what’s happening these days. The NSA is grabbing nearly 100% of all American Internet traffic, emails, etc., sorting it all, then handing it off to be used in criminal prosecutions.

And to prevent cases like this from getting thrown out of court, the they have developed special tricks, like parallel construction.

In actual practice, parallel construction is a three step process:

1. Government employees dig through illegal mass surveillance databases to find ripe targets.
2. Once they figure out how to prosecute the target, they create an alternate path to the evidence. In other words, they cobble together a seemingly legal path to the damning information without ever mentioning the illegal surveillance that located it.
3. They lie to the court and tell them that they found this information via the "legal" path described above.

You might think teaching people to lie in court would be a criminal offense, but even though this has been going on for some years, there have been a grand total of zero prosecutions for it.

And It Gets Worse

If this weren’t bad enough, word broke last year that the IRS (and their Criminal Division, no less) believes that "the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server."

So, if you’ve been storing messages in a free service like Gmail, bad luck for you! The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 allows government agencies to obtain stored  emails without a warrant.

Of course Google makes noises about protecting their customers, but when the needs of Joe Average – who pays them not a cent – come up against the demands of a government that can pull their plugs, which way do you think they’ll go? Heck, how well did they protect General Petraeus?

"It’s okay if…"

Sadly, a lot of people are willing to turn a blind eye to this if it hurts their favorite targets. For example, it is supposedly justified by the War on (some) Drugs. I find no justification in that at all, but some people do. (As far as I’m concerned, the war on drugs made monsters rich, imprisoned millions of non-violent people, corrupted the police, and made no dent in addiction rates.)

Still, quite a few people are willing to ignore rights violations if it "fights drugs." And, I’m sure, quite a few people on the Blue side of the political spectrum would excuse this if it hit their preferred targets… Lois Lerner’s victims, for example.

Both of these justifications, however, are massive errors, because once the camel’s nose is under the tent, it’s only a matter of time before we all get spit upon… or worse. 

Cometh The Tax Man

Yep, that’s what came next. Believe it or not, the IRS has a manual that tells its agents how to do this. Illegal, warrantless surveillance goes through channels to an army of tax-gatherers, who lie to courts and fleece people.

IRS agents (probably a lot of them) spend their days surfing NSA databases (when they’re not surfing porn or playing games), find nice targets who have a few bucks, look for something out of whack in their spending or investments, and then find a "legal" way to hang them with it… after they lie about it in court, of course. 

And we know, for certain, that they’re doing this, because part of their manual has been posted to the Internet, and because they’ve never bothered to deny it.

The Hierarchy of Law

The people who justify this type of thing like to refer to legal decisions, which always sound both impressive and intimidating at the same time. After all, how many of us can argue with citations from Arista v. Lime Wire?

Fortunately for us, those scary arguments are easily dispensed with, by using a simple question:

What is the supreme law of the land?

The answer, of course, is the Constitution. And that means the Constitution matters more than any – or even all – of those case precedents.

The fourth amendment (or any of the amendments) stands above court rulings. The amendment does not have to justify itself, the ruling does. The amendment is sacrosanct, the precedent is subsidiary.

So, if someone tries to correctly interpret an amendment by citing precedent, they are ignorant or worse. The amendment stands at the top of the hierarchy and doesn’t depend on rulings. And if the rulings don’t match the amendment, they are wrong… and it doesn’t matter how many besuited, uniformed and impressively degreed people say otherwise.

Still…

Unfortunately (and regardless of the Constitution), the Feds are doing this all the same. So, until that changes, we must act to protect ourselves. And the best way to do that, in my view, is simply to stay out of their databases. That means that you should not let them see your Internet traffic and that you can’t give them access to your emails.  Remember: You needn’t actually be guilty to be ruined in tax court.

Most people, of course, will do nothing, but the prudent person, as the Bible says, "foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself."

That, however, means that you’ll have to stop posting your information to Facebook, Google and the rest of the freebee services. And you must stop use free email. If those things are too hard for you, then you’re a sitting duck.

The Simple Facts

Let me give this to you straight: If you don’t want be in the tax man’s database, you’ll have to act, and that means spending time or money.

So, you have two primary choices:

1. Spend the time to learn security on your own. If you want to go that route, here’s a free guide to show you how. Or…
2. Pay for a professional security service. Rest assured that you’re not going to find a quality service for five or ten bucks per month. (The service I manage charges $275. per year.) You simply can’t provide security that stands up to professional attacks for pennies; that’s a silly dream.

If you want to find a professional service, demand these protections:

1. That the service runs their own Private Key Infrastructure. You don’t have to understand what that means, but you must ask.
2. They must provide 2 or more hops. Again, you have to ask and get a yes or no.
3. They must have human customer service people. 

Whatever you do, do something.  Don’t allow yourself to be a victim of the illegal fascism of parallel construction.

Long-time TTPer Paul Rosenberg is the CEO of Cryptohippie USA.

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