I am in drug discovery, and over the last few days I searched for an opiate that hasn't been scheduled yet. The class of compounds that this compound belongs to was investigated 30 - 40 years back, they never made it into the clinic, but you begin encountering them on the streets because the DOJ hasn't prohibited them yet. I am also in an academic environment, and it has happened before that researchers diverted university resources for their own profit. In a previous workplace they fired a grad student over this, in the lab next to mine. I am under no illusions that I have already attracted suspicion from NSA/FBI/CIA/whatnot.

The suspicion is something what I could do wholly without.

The thing is, suspicion is a function not of you being innocent or guilty, but of the knowledge and mental model law enforcement has, so far, of what happened. To prevent suspicion before they get to learn you're innocent, you probably have to eliminate their ability to catch the guilty whatsoever.

Oh, in that case we don't even need parallel construction anymore. Why bother, if it doesn't matter how you got your evidence then any evidence is good.

Just use whatever dragnet method you already have in place and phone it in. Subpoena google for all searches done in all cities and go round up the folks whose searches match the names of the victims.

I'm sure your going to get a fantastic conviction rate.

A society like that already existed: It was called East Germany and petty crime there was nearly non-existent. What crime there was was mostly corruption and went unpunished (who will watch the watchers).

Former East Germans seem to prefer the society they have right now.

The 'absence' of petty crime, such as it was, wasn't because due to mass surveillance.

> So why does the intent of the investigator, to confirm versus discover, matter?

Well you could argue then that they should be allowed to look at everything because if they do they could discover any number of crimes by looking at all communications.

Here's the thing. Lets' say hypothetically there is a crime committed at a high school. Are people generally ok with the police opening every single school locker to see who is a potential suspect for that one crime?

And what if while doing so they discover evidence of another crime? Is that ok and usable? If it is then we get to a point where it's conceivable that the police will then use any reason to say there is a crime to which they need to open school lockers knowing that they will almost certainly find evidence of some crime in one of them.

>> Are people generally ok with the police opening every single school locker...? >>And what if while doing so they discover evidence of another crime? Is that ok and usable?...

Yes, yes, and yes. Police can open any (or all) locker(s) they want for any purpose, though generally they ask for permission from the school administration first, and they can and do use any evidence discovered. Pick your favorite BS legal handwaving, I think it's usually "the lockers belong to the school, and by its good grace allows[/forces] the students to use them"

Bayesian statistics says the opposite. By looking at the history of an entire city, you're giving yourself a highly uninformative prior. This means that it's very difficult to actually draw conclusions from the results. You have to reduce your population size first, and then perform your "test" (looking at search history) on the subset of the population who actually has a reasonable chance of committing the crime even without the search evidence.

It depends on how probative the specific evidence is. If you had a database of everyone's DNA, and wanted to figure out whose blood was on the murder weapon. Your prior is highly uninformative, but the DNA evidence is so highly probative that the resulting identification is probably quite reliable.

> There's no right not to have the government find out you did something wrong...

Did you think this one through? Law is a lagging indicator of what society thinks is acceptable. That works in both directions: sometimes things are legal that shouldn't be, but also things are illegal that should be. Beware a lopsided bias, or you get a ratchet to a totalitarian society.