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Researchers Ask Federal Court To Unseal Years of Surveillance Records (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two lawyers and legal researchers based at Stanford University have formally asked a federal court in San Francisco to unseal numerous records of surveillance-related cases, as a way to better understand how authorities seek such powers from judges. This courthouse is responsible for the entire Northern District of California, which includes the region where tech companies such as Twitter, Apple, and Google, are based. According to the petition, Jennifer Granick and Riana Pfefferkorn were partly inspired by a number of high-profile privacy cases that have unfolded in recent years, ranging from Lavabit to Apple's battle with the Department of Justice. In their 45-page petition, they specifically say that they don't need all sealed surveillance records, simply those that should have been unsealed -- which, unfortunately, doesn't always happen automatically. The researchers wrote in their Wednesday filing: "Most surveillance orders are sealed, however. Therefore, the public does not have a strong understanding of what technical assistance courts may order private entities to provide to law enforcement. There are at least 70 cases, many under seal, in which courts have mandated that Apple and Google unlock mobile phones and potentially many more. The Lavabit district court may not be the only court to have ordered companies to turn over private encryption keys to law enforcement based on novel interpretations of law. Courts today may be granting orders forcing private companies to turn on microphones or cameras in cars, laptops, mobile phones, smart TVs, or other audio- and video-enabled Internet-connected devices in order to conduct wiretapping or visual surveillance. This pervasive sealing cripples public discussion of whether these judicial orders are lawful and appropriate."
The issue at hand is that such things are being done without a warrant.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/06/16/house-blocks-ban-warrantless-surveillance-americans/85988494/
Take your example, and lets speculate that over a period of time in a specific geographical area such a scenario was executed 100 times and resulted in 2 or 3 occurrences in which the suspected crime was actually being planned. Now lets say the other 96 or so were false alarms or misinformation, but during the investigations, 20 lead to unrelated but others crimes, which in turn led to several convictions. And lets say that the specific knowledge on how the investigators actually discovered their evidence was never revealed to the court, but rather they gloss over and more or less say they discovered a crime in progress due to a tip off or some such. That is called parallel construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
It's generally an accepted method of investigation, but technology has surely amplified the message as well as the noise.
So here are the questions to consider:
Is it ethical and/or legal to use evidence in a prosecution that legally would require a warrant to be admissible in court in nearly every other circumstance?
Is it ethical and/or legal to withhold evidence on how evidence leading to a conviction was obtained?
Is it ethical and/or legal to conduct surveillance without judicial oversight on innocent citizens based solely on secret evidence?
This is the murky territory we now find ourselves in. A good defense and/or bad prosecution would get the charges dismissed, as nobody wants to let on how the game is actually played. Realistically, most accused will take a plea in which case these questions simply never get brought up. But occasionally you might have someone who fights well and wins, or loses. That we are talking about it leads to the conclusion that these scenarios have likely occurred many many many times.