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Credit to Author: Louise Matsakis| Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2018 01:10:10 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2013, 18-year-old <\/span>Tadrae McKenzie robbed a marijuana dealer<\/a> for $130 worth of pot at a Taco Bell in Tallahassee, Florida. He and two friends had used BB guns to carry out the crime, which under Florida law constitutes robbery with a deadly weapon. McKenzie braced himself to serve the minimum four years in prison.<\/p>\n But in the end, a state judge offered McKenzie a startlingly lenient plea deal: He was ordered to serve only six months\u2019 probation, after pleading guilty to a second-degree misdemeanor. The remarkable deal was related to evidence McKenzie\u2019s defense team uncovered before the trial: Law enforcement had used a secret surveillance tool often called Stingray to investigate his case.<\/p>\n Stingrays are devices that behave like fake cellphone towers, tricking phones into believing they\u2019re pinging genuine towers nearby. By using the device, cops can determine a suspect\u2019s precise location, outgoing and incoming calls, and even listen-in on a call<\/a> or see the content of a text message.<\/p>\n Many people may have been convicted using techniques that violated their rights.<\/p>\n McKenzie\u2019s lawyers suspected cops had used a Stingray because they knew exactly where his house was, and knew he left his home at 6 a.m. the day he was arrested. The cops had obtained a court order from a judge to authorize Verizon to hand over data about the location of Mckenzie\u2019s phone. But cell tower data isn\u2019t precise enough to place a device at a specific house.<\/p>\n The cops also said they used a database that lets law enforcement agencies locate individuals by linking them with their phone numbers. But the phone McKenzie was using was a burner, and not associated with his name. Law enforcement couldn\u2019t adequately explain their extraordinary knowledge of his whereabouts.<\/p>\n The state judge in the case ordered police to show the Stingray and its data to McKenzie\u2019s attorneys. They refused, because of a non-disclosure agreement with the FBI. The state then offered McKenzie, as well as the two other defendants, plea deals designed to make the case go away.<\/p>\n The cops in McKenzie\u2019s case had ultimately failed to successfully carry out a troubling technique called \u201cparallel construction.\u201d<\/p>\n First described in government documents obtained by Reuters<\/a> in 2013, parallel construction is when law enforcement originally obtains evidence through a secret surveillance program, then tries to seek it out again, via normal procedure. In essence, law enforcement creates a parallel, alternative story for how it found information. That way, it can hide surveillance techniques from public scrutiny and would-be criminals.<\/p>\n A new report<\/a> released by Human Rights Watch Tuesday, based in part on 95 relevant cases, indicates that law enforcement is using parallel construction regularly, though it\u2019s impossible to calculate exactly how often. It\u2019s extremely difficult for defendants to discern when evidence has been obtained via the practice, according to the report.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen attorneys try to find out if there\u2019s some kind of undisclosed method that\u2019s been used, the prosecution will basically stonewall and try not to provide a definitive yes or no answer,\u201d says Sarah St. Vincent, the author of the report and a national security and surveillance researcher at Human Rights Watch.<\/p>\n In investigation reports, law enforcement will describe evidence obtained via secret surveillance programs in inscrutable terms. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen plenty of examples where the police officers in those reports write \u2018we located the suspect based on information from a confidential source;\u2019 they use intentionally vague language,\u201d says Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the ACLU\u2019s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project. \u201cIt sounds like a human informant or something else, not like a sophisticated surveillance device.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes, when a savvy defense attorney pushes, an unbelievable plea deal is offered, or the the case is dropped entirely. If a powerful, secret surveillance program is at stake, a single case is often deemed unimportant to the government.<\/p>\n \u201cParallel construction means you never know that a case could actually be the result of some constitutionally problematic practice,\u201d says St. Vincent. For example, the constitutionality of using a Stingray device without a warrant is still up for debate, according to the Human Rights Watch report. Some courts have ruled<\/a> that the devices do in fact violate the Fourth Amendment.<\/p>\n Hemisphere, a massive telephone-call gathering operation revealed by The New York Times<\/em> in 2013<\/a>, is one of the most well-documented surveillance programs that government officials attempt to hide when they use parallel construction. The largely secret program provides police with access to a vast database containing call records going back to 1987. Billions of calls are added daily.<\/p>\n In order to create the program, the government forged a lucrative partnership with AT&T, which owns three-quarters of the US\u2019s landline switches and much of its wireless infrastructure. Even if you change your number, Hemisphere\u2019s sophisticated algorithms can connect you with you new line by examining calling patterns. The program also allows law enforcement to have temporary access to the location where you placed or received a call.<\/p>\n