[dsfyu404ed]

And if that apparatus was used to prosecute US citizens for non-major crimes with any frequency it would come under scrutiny very quickly and you'd have politicians jockeying to legislate it out of existence and take credit.

Even if you take the parallel construction angle, no politician except maybe a dinosaur that is super-secure in their position (on the federal level that would be people like Pelosi, Fienstien, etc.) is going to tolerate that because if the other side can prove you knew then you're not going to have a job after the next election.

Obviously we need to remain vigilant but there are existing feedback mechanisms that generally prevent wide spread abuse.

[50656E6973]

Isn't the advantage of parallel construction that it's extremely difficult, often impossible to detect and thus scrutinize?

[dsfyu404ed]

To do parallel construction at scale you'd need to get the information into the hands of law enforcement in a plausibly deniable way. Doing that at scale would either have a predictable pattern (if every agency starts getting "anonymous tips" then questions are going to start getting asked) or would need to involve many people in order to plant the information in a more varied manner. Involving the recipient agencies themselves is not going to happen because two people can only keep a secret if one of them is dead so a cool million is going to be a non-starter.

[mindslight]

A simple setup is to leave local PDs in the dark as they can always ask for the FBI's help for serious cases. Then the FBI gets access to tools provided by the NSA that look innocuous. For instance, lets assume the NSA snoops enough TOR to do packet correlation attacks. Imagine a simple tool where an FBI agent can enter an IP address or two, and get a list of "associated" IP addresses. Each IP can then be followed as its own lead. Once you've found the needle in a haystack, it's very easy to construct a false narrative of how it was found.

Politically, I don't know how it's possible to look at the current climate and think it will work against mass surveillance. Politicians will just shy away from directly confronting the issue. Whenever any spotlight gets close, the agencies will continue categorize it as national security / tough on crime / etc. The best political ally is seemingly the judiciary, and that itself will only slow things down.

[Forbo]

Too late, it's already happening: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...