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by nescoiquid 2122 days ago
At a tangent to your (marvelous) response:

> But what about domestic terrorism, or important exceptions? No problem! Get a warrant.

I've heard about accounts of police investigations being aided with access to the mass surveillance data (through the FBI, I believe). It never goes to a FISA court, and the police use the information to develop a pretext for a warrant.

So even with a warrant, the power may still be unchecked. I believe it reasonable to conclude that conducting mass surveillance can't reliably done without abridging constitutional rights. I guess that leads us back to the unresolved conversation from early in this century about the trade-offs between liberty, privacy, and security.

1 comments

The practice of obtaining warrants with artificial but believable evidentiary basis to conceal the illicit means by which the basis was actually obtained is called "parallel construction", and the intentional practice or facilitation of it should be a felony with a maximum penalty of imprisonment of up to 50 years (2.5x evidence tampering, and I'd be fine with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years). It is a heinous perversion of the public trust, knowingly undertaken by unchecked law enforcement personnel to wilfully conceal unconstitutional acts. Parallel construction is a stain upon the very fabric of our nation... Or, you know, business as usual.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Parallel construction combined with the repeal of Habeus Corpus is reason enough to be rioting in the streets.