On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 3:37 AM, ianG <i...@iang.org> wrote: > Hmmm. Thanks, Ethan! Maybe I'm wrong? Maybe the NSA was always allowed to > pass criminal evidence across to the civilian police forces. It's a very > strange world.
No, the doctrine of the fruit of the poisoned tree makes it non-trivial to avoid the requirements of the 4th Amendment regarding search and seizure. The non-triviality is this: LEA must somehow hide the warrant-less wiretapping (search) and produce a plausible path (and chronology) for how they came to the probably cause that they eventually will bring to a judge. This is non-trivial, but not *that* hard either, and in some cases it may well be trivial. And when LEA get caught doing this nothing terribly bad happens to LEA (no officers go to prison, for example). But when the *NSA* does this the risk of method information leaking to the public is very large, which is one reason to prefer that PRISM-type projects, if they exist at all, be and remain forever secret -- their own secrecy is the best and strongest (though even then, not fail-safe) guaranty of non-use for criminal investigations. Ironic, no? We should almost wish we'd never found out. Nico -- _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
