What Is Parallel Construction?
In my previous article, I discussed the long history of electronic spying on ordinary citizens without warrant by the American Government and others. Here I will discuss how the fruits of such illegal surveillance are laundered in order to legitimise them. This is something called parallel construction.
That and more is covered in this half hour plus interview by Jimmy Dore with a man who knows a thing or two about state surveillance. William Binney was an NSA security officer and a highly qualified cryptologist. He was also a precursor of Edward Snowden, and after he blew the whistle on the NSA’s illegal practices, he was subjected to the same rough, over-the-top treatment by the FBI as are Trump supporters at the moment.
Imagine the NSA overhear a telephone call or read an e-mail concerning drug trafficking. A dealer is planning to deliver two kilogrammes of cocaine the following day to a buyer twenty miles away. The NSA tip off the local police who find a pretext to stop the vehicle on the freeway. In the UK and many other countries, when the police stop a vehicle, they can search it on any pretext or none. In the USA, there is the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and Mapp v Ohio. With certain exceptions, like the community caretaker principle, these can be barriers to searching a home, but in order to search a vehicle, all a police officer has to do is utter those three magic words: “I smell pot”.
The police can then find the cocaine by chance and write up a report about how they got lucky. There are endless variations on this scenario, but the bottom line is that the true story cannot be presented in court.
When you hear the FBI or some other agency in the United States or elsewhere refuse to give details of something in particular or general to an oversight committee because to do so would compromise “sources and methods”, you can bet your last dime that they are covering for parallel construction or some other illegal procedure.
In the UK, the term used for covering this up is called Public Interest Immunity. There can be valid reasons for using this, and most people would agree that thwarting terrorist attacks is one of them, but apart from the assault on our privacy there are other reasons such surveillance should be curtailed or at least severely limited. The main one is that this mass spying is largely ineffective. The 9/11 attacks and the October 7 Massacre were the two greatest terror outrages of the Twenty-First Century. The latter involved hundreds of terrorists and was months if not years in the planning. The cost of the operation must have been staggering, yet no one including the Israelis and the Americans had any inkling of what was coming.
If mass surveillance is largely a failure, what is the alternative? Obviously, focusing attention where it is most needed. Just because “signals” are picked up that indicate something big is about to go down doesn’t mean it will. Like the FBI, terrorist outfits and hostile governments are adept at sending out fake messages to distract law enforcement and security agencies from their real plans.