Such a long way to go on this issue, these documents only emphasize telling the truth under oath, they don't talk about warrants and evidence. I really can't see how parallel construction can be performed either legally or in a way that would still make that evidence admissible in a court.

When the debate about the existence of domestic surveillance was hot, one of the counter-arguments against those who believed there to be a large-scale network was a Fermi-like "If it exists, then where is it?" since signs that such a network exists, such as evidence gathered by it appearing in court documents, were not appearing. The counter-argument was parallel reconstruction, but I recall a further point made by a lawyer who said they would be stupid to do that, since all the reconstructed evidence would be thrown out of court.

Wiretaps, search warrants, indictments etc. are all legal and sworn documents made by officers where they are required to disclose everything. I'm no means an expert, but i'd imagine a good defense lawyer (heck, or even a judge) would argue that the sworn statements were not entirely true and were compromised by using a surveillance system that is a black box and not open to court oversight. Search warrants get compromised for simple things such as showing up 5 minutes late, or taking something from the property that wasn't covered (these rules are there for a reason, to protect us from all-knowing and over-reaching police forces).

As an aside, there was a case of parallel reconstruction in a mainstream news story last week. In the News Limited trials in the UK where former editors and journalists are being prosecuted for phone hacking one of the private detectives who was hired to hack phones for News spent an entire day in the witness seat talking about his methods and what they did.

In one of his stories, he had hacked the phone of Daniel Craig (an actor) and retrieved a voicemail left to him by Sienna Miller - an actress who is married to another famous actor - which indicated they were having an affair. He played the message for the editor of the News of the World who jumped up in excitement and said they had their new front page story. One problem: how will they reveal the source of the message since it was legal? Simple, the editor instructed the PI to place a recording of the tape into a brown paper bag and to drop it off to the front desk of the newspaper office while nobody was there. It would be an 'anonymous tip'. It worked - the story said 'an anonymous source, believed to be somebody close to the pair', etc.

During the entire decade long phone hacking scandal there were all sorts of new 'anonymous' sources popping up in news stories that it drove the celebrities mad. One actor spent tens of thousands of dollars sweeping his entire house for recording devices, another cut off contact with all friends because he couldn't trust anybody anymore and another had all their staff undergo intense security checks to make sure they weren't leaking.

In one case it led to someone being fired. The manager of a famous model was fired because a story leaked about how that model had been having an affair (or something) and even through the real source was a phone hack, the paper attributed it to a 'close source'. The model fired her manager after a few stories - blaming her, and only found out years later that it was phone hacking. The manager is now suing both News Corp and the model.

If the DEA are practicing parallel reconstruction to the extent as many believe they are, one can only imagine the scope of similar unintended consequences. The stakes would be much higher: suspected snitches being murdered or disappeared by paranoid drug bosses.