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Comment by fsk | Hacker News Reader

You still don't know that's the reason he got caught. The real reason could be something else, and this is just "parallel reconstruction".

"Parallel reconstruction" means that you catch someone using an "illegal" information source. You then monitor him, wait for him to make a mistake, and then that's the "official" excuse for how you caught him.

The police who testify in the case aren't even lying, because they only have the "parallel reconstucted" evidence and not the illegal evidence that was the original lead.

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Sorry to see you were downvoted. Parallel reconstruction has completely undermined my faith in what the police say was their procedure for gathering evidence.

It is abuse for someone to use "downvote" to mean "I disagree".

Inappropriate? yes.

Rude? yes.

Indicative of churlish immaturity? yes.

Abuse? Nope.

You also have to examine the evidence used. It's possible the police got lucky with Silk Road's 1 Ross Ulbricht's deleted traceable email address, but that I don't believe, and strongly believe parallel reconstruction.

The USPS logging IP addresses on a webservice they run?

Absolutely believable.

Why does it matter if this is really why he was caught? The facts are that he was caught, and there was a legal way for him to have been caught. That's why parallel reconstruction is acceptable in the first place.

>>That's why parallel reconstruction is acceptable in the first place.

That's news to me. Does anyone find parallel reconstruction acceptable in any situation whatsoever? HN gave me the impression that it's never good and a strong indicator of corruption and/or lying. Am I wrong?

All the rules of evidence ultimately stem from two goals: to discourage law enforcement officers from harassing members of the public by violating their freedoms and privacy, and to discourage law enforcement officers from unfairly or prematurely narrowing the field of suspects by focusing on the first piece of suspicious evidence they can get their hands on. (More generally: don't punish wrong guy, and do punish right guy.) But once the deterrent has failed and the evidence has been collected, you end up with a known criminal you are unable to prosecute and that's a bitter pill to swallow, especially if the criminal is very dangerous and the cops' mistake was minor. The deterrence will never be 100% effective no matter how we blindly cling to that tactic.

The ideal course of action would probably be to admit all the evidence and then prosecute both the suspect and the bad cops for their respective crimes, but that's cost-prohibitive and for minor offenses even being prosecuted in the first place is often too much punishment. So as usual we end up with the courts accruing increasingly complex justifications to strike a compromise where one is needed, but the compromise the courts manage to justify isn't always a good or sensible compromise.

The problem in our system is that, when the police break the rules and get caught, the only penalty is that the evidence is excluded. "Parallel reconstruction" lets police evade even that tiny penalty for breaking the rules of evidence.

Really, there should be some personal liability for the police when they do something illegal to catch a criminal. That change isn't going to happen.

Also, "Making and selling certain chemicals." is something that shouldn't be illegal in the first place.

Uhh no. Using illegal methods to catch bad guys is bad. So no, parallel construction isn't acceptable. At all.

Using illegal methods is bad. Catching bad guys is good. Using illegal methods to catch bad guys? That's a much more complicated question than you make it out to be.

Yeah, I'm also surprised at the amount of dislike and hatred for parallel construction as a methodology.

When it's Alan Turing and stopping the Germans from realising an Enigma message has been read by the global surveillance apparatus of the Allies and been broken, by sending out a Catalina to look for a U-Boat at just the right time, that's great and an uplifting exemplar of the way things should be.

When it's an email that's been read by the NSA surveilling Internet data, that is then used to tell the DEA to go and stop a car at just the right time to catch a cartel drug courier and murderer, that's not?

No it's not. It's bad. Plain and simple. The ends do not justify the means.

Only if they catch themselves for being bad guys as well and are fairly punishing under the laws they broke as a non-LEO related individual would've been.

I hope your reasoning is a minority sentiment.

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