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by vkou 680 days ago
No legal precedent can prevent parallel construction, because when it is done right, nobody but the police are actually aware that it took place.
1 comments

Without speaking of the general case, this specific legal precedent does prevent parallel construction for this particular source of data.

In order to obtain the data that law enforcement would have to "discover" through parallel construction, they need Google to cooperate and run the analysis to give them the required data. They can try to make this request through informal channels, but Google will say that they need a warrant. They can't make the request through formal channels because no judge will give them a warrant. So that's pretty much it.