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Comment by twobits | Hacker News Reader

Has already been.

I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling.

What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that.

The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.

Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.

There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance. Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) - police CAN request information from the NSA/GCHQ, but it's a torturous and slow process at the moment, and is largely paper based. The forthcoming surveillance state WILL make that available, but it's not happened yet.

GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court cases because it would need to be tested in open court.

They haven't said anything about intelligence provided to law enforcement.

> GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court cases because it would need to be tested in open court.

Yep. And that's the whole reason 'parallel construction' exists at all in the U.S.... even when NSA has solid evidence of actual crimes being conducted, they will not burn intelligence sources & methods to allow for a court prosecution of the same.

So LE has to either find a way to independently arrive at the evidence that they know is there, or go without prosecuting criminals they know to be on the street.

Parallel construction is definitely distasteful but nor is it planting evidence.

From the NSA to a "random" traffic stop: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/paral...

That's a really interesting link, thanks.

I hadn't seen that particular take on it - I don't think we're particularly disagreeing, though, since that parallel construction is still a long way off 'NSA info appearing in police cruiser computers' - it'll happen, it's just not there yet...

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