Hacker News Reader

Comment by wcfields | Hacker News Reader

What's the legal term? I think it's "double construction"? Where the prosecution knows it's you from illegal means (wiretap/NSA spying) but by that knowledge can go back and construct the legal case in reverse.

It's been rumored that Dread Pirate Of SilkRoad case was figured out that way.

View on HN

It is parallel construction

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911150

> What's the legal term? I think it's "double construction"? Where the prosecution knows it's you from illegal means (wiretap/NSA spying) but by that knowledge can go back and construct the legal case in reverse.

I think the technical term is either "perjury" or "fraud on the court".

The euphemism, though, is "parallel construction".

It is not necessarily illegal means, but simply means that the government do not want to expose in open court. Perhaps this is because they are illegal, or perhaps revealing the source of intelligence could compromise an active intelligence operation. The NSA does not want its methods exposed in open court. You will probably say that this is because they are illegal. But an equally plausible explanation is that revealing details of their capabilities is of benefit to their adversaries.

The story around DPR getting caught started in him making posts that had personally identifiable information from his anonymous accounts in the very beginning, not from illegal searches.

That's just a really long scraping / pattern-matching exercise of publicly available data, and the reminder that even particularly clever people won't be on point 100% of the time.

Or they did find him illegally and found later on the public pattern-matching exercise to justify their findings. Which is exactly the point of parallel construction.

We cannot know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com