> By the end of 2019, this third country was sending data to the FBI every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, according to the court document.

> "This data comprises the encrypted messages of all the users of AN0MS with a few exceptions," the document reads.

> Those exceptions included approximately 15 AN0M users in the United States.

Sounds like the FBI got the data of everyone except the US users.

> Those exceptions included approximately 15 AN0M users in the United States.

> The affidavit noted that if any other AN0M handsets "landed in the US" the AFP agreed to monitor them "for any threats to life".

The FBI might not have been the one peeking in the window but they had friends willing to peek on their behalf. A mild inconvenience they can parallel construct around.

Parallel construction is actually quite difficult; it requires an independent chain of evidence not built upon the illegally-acquired evidence.

We hear about the cases where parallel construction worked because those cases are rare, and thus are news. We don't hear about the vast majority of cases where the police couldn't parallel construct their way around 4th Amendment violations.

If the parallel construction worked then we wouldn't know it had occurred. There are multiple officials on record saying parallel construction is a widespread practice and "used every day".

> The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

https://web.archive.org/web/20130809014315/https://www.reute...

Yes, I don't doubt at the federal level that parallel construction works better than it does at the local level, because the feds have jurisdiction over bigger crimes. Drug crimes, involving multinational criminal organizations, generally involve many participants and transactions, and you only need to break 1 participant in a conspiracy to unravel the whole thing. (And more importantly, due to the many overlapping crimes being committed toward the common end, there are simply more options for pursuing parallel construction or even just pursuing different crimes.)

But at the local level where most crimes occur, parallel construction is a fantasy for the overwhelming majority of cases. Cops would absolutely love if they could just parallel their way around tainted evidence, but in most cases, there's only one crime, and only one trail of evidence, and there's no way to parallel around that.

(And I speak from experience; I was a public defender before I went into tax. I've seen many more failed attempts at parallel construction than successful attempts.)

I am continually amazed at HN's ability to reject reality in favor of some imaginary world that doesn't actually exist.

In the real world parallel construction is not common. The cops simply don't have the resources to pursue it in the vast majority of cases at the local level, and many cases get tossed because of tainted evidence. Hell, plenty of manslaughter and gang cases get tossed because of tainted evidence.

At the federal level, parallel construction is more common, because the feds (a) have more resources to pursue alternative avenues of investigation, and (b) have jurisdiction over the types of crimes which lend themselves to having multiple avenues of investigation, like organized crime.

But on an absolute basis, even at the federal level parallel construction is still rare, because it is invariable easier to just pursue different charges. Al Capone, for example, was brought down by tax fraud. More recently, many federal charges against El Chapo were dropped because the evidence was tainted...but it was irrelevant because they just pursued a dozen different crimes instead.

>I am continually amazed at HN's ability to reject reality in favor of some imaginary world that doesn't actually exist

Your claim is just absurd. In a successful use of parallel construction, the defendant and possibly even the prosecution should be unaware that it even occurred. Your experience as a lawyer is not a good reason to expect it isn't happening.

And though I agree that local use alone is likely rare, one of the common methods is for a federal agency to pass information to a smaller law enforcement agency. Additionally, using illegally collected evidence as a justification to pursue someone for an unrelated crime would still be parallel construction.

While the government probably can't do a parallel construction in these cases it gives them the identity of the bad guys even if they have nothing to take to court. Thus they know who to target.

Isn't this the classic Five Eyes loophole? I'll spy on you, you'll spy on me, and we'll exchange notes.

The US is explicitly not getting data on US citizens from foreign spying according to this article? And the article implies that no loophole was needed for Australia to get data on Australians, there was a legal warrant for that in Australia.

So how is this the "classic Five Eyes loophole"?

>It notes while Australia's judicial order "did not allow for the sharing of the content with foreign partners" the AFP "shared generally" with the FBI the nature of the conversations occurring over AN0M.

It was accidentally leaked that the UK GCHQ had provided intelligence about the US perpetrators of the Times Square 2010 car bomb attack, so it probably does happen.

Although the US ANOM data wasn't sent to the FBI, presumably a foreign agency could see that data and tell the FBI which US citizens might be involved in illegal activity so they can be monitored/investigated in other ways.

Indeed, I suppose not, then.

In New Zealand, immigration send details of selected individuals to US Homeland Security for further analysis. The reason it goes to the US is because we (NZ) don't have the resources to do what the US does.

Homeland Security specifically promises to delete any data once they've finished, but it doesn't say anything about the agencies that they presumably share it with.

Basically if the US wants data on particular people from the Five Eyes network, it can be arranged. And once it's in Langley, it can go anywhere.

The article says that Australia would alert the US. "AFP agreed to monitor them "for any threats to life"."

Yes, its a feature not a bug.

That is what it sounds like, but it doesn't actually say that. Additionally, I don't know how this other country could even be expected to sift out American data, even their soft claim only rules out phones in America.

Yes, referring to 4A as a "privacy law" is sort of the jurisprudential equivalent of calling Tim Berners-Lee a "web developer."

More like that they didn't go to a judge. Without court order it is much easier to continue working in the illegal underground.

So they couldn't make arrests of their informants.

Isn't doubly weird that the third country was Romania?

Do you have a link for that? Am curious to see.

From the analysis published a few months ago, believed to be the reason the operation was would up:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210608102417/https://webcache....

All the data was sent to some sever in Bucharest.

I don't understand why that would be weird. Romania had(has?) black sites for the CIA, hosting a server for the FBI isn't strange.

Source?