> unlike national security-related demands, law enforcement won't be able to keep their successes or failures at demanding access to this data a secret.
The thing is, parallel construction won't work out unless there's another legitimate path which exists anyways.
Scream it all you want, but if there's no other way to the conclusion, there's still no way to use the evidence short of outright lying and falsifying evidence.
I don't think parallel construction is nearly as big of a threat as people seem to make it out to be. It gives law enforcement nothing more than a hint and some unusable evidence. There still needs to be a path that works legally.
And that's not even getting into the fact that iOS is heavily reverse engineered, often searching for backdoors and cryptographic vulnerabilities and Android is open source and publicly reviewable. I've reviewed some of the key derivation code myself as I was curious if it was being done properly.
I'm all for paranoia, it just need to be useful paranoia under a given threat model. Beyond that, it's nothing more than speculation and a waste of time.
It's not about the rules of evidence. It's about the rule of law. Parallel construction is an unconstitutional and dangerous abuse of law-enforcement power that cannot be tolerated.
They can and they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction