One last thing, let's talk about Parallel Construction

From the standpoint of due process, perhaps the most unsettling aspect of NSA activity so far is how it's bad processes have spread like a virus, corrupting agencies that have potentially much more positive and useful missions like the FBI. "Parallel Construction" is a practice recommended by the NSA to investigative agencies like the FBI and investigative arms of administrative agencies like the IRS, which entails the use of illegal evidence to discover suspects and directs investigators to fabricate a legal chain of evidence in order to obtain a legal conviction on U.S. soil in a U.S. court of law.

I was recently contacted by a young person who wanted me to help him breach a Facebook account belonging to his mother, believing that she was about to remarry her current boyfriend. The young man believed he would be able to discern his mother's suitor by stealing her private messages. I told him exactly what I tell everyone who asks me to violate someone's privacy, which is no, but I also told him something that I hadn't told anyone before.

"If I were to violate your mother's privacy and steal her messages so you could confront her with the identity of her suitor, she would certainly suspect that the information was obtained by surreptitiously intercepting her messages. That means that you have done wrong, while she has simply chosen to remarry, which is her right and privelege. Doing this is a violation of her trust on your part, which damages your position before you even get a chance to make it. It is better to be honest."

Activities like Parallel Construction undermine the confidence that law-abiding, honest Americans have in the ability of law enforcement, which is compounded by the problem which makes it possible, that any evidence collected in the course of a computer crime investigation comes under the control of an agency that has a vested interest in conceal any practice of Parallel construction. In short, confidence in the very notion of a chain of evidence for cybercrime is rightly shattered and requires an engineering solution.