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This impact is not limited to criminal defendants. If government agents can potentially create privacy-violating, discriminatory, or otherwise unlawful programs or patterns of behavior in secret and without facing any negative consequences, the rights of every member of the public are in jeopardy. Taken to its worst logical conclusion, parallel construction risks creating a country in which people and communities are perpetually vulnerable to investigations based on prejudice, vast illegal operations, or official misconduct, but have no means of learning about these problems and holding agents to account.aspecuk Of particular concern is the potential use of parallel construction to hide intelligence surveillance programs. Modern US intelligence surveillance is as sweeping as it is secretive, and a lack of disclosure of the use of such surveillance in criminal investigations means wide-ranging or acute civil liberties violations may go unnoticed. Parallel construction also means judges may never evaluate whether government uses of constantly evolving surveillance techniques adhere to the US Constitution and laws adopted by Congress, as is their role in the US system. For example, if the government were to identify a suspect in a robbery by scrutinizing a store’s security video using a new but flawed facial recognition technology it does not want to reveal, it could send an informant to talk to the suspect and report what he said—then suggest in court records that this conversation was how the investigation began. Such possible uses of parallel construction are especially troubling in human rights terms because new technologies may be inaccurate (including, in the case of facial recognition software, for people of certain racial or ethnic groups) or raise new legal concerns. Unless judges are aware that such new technology has been used, they will not be able to assess whether the technology violates rights. Virginia-based defense attorney Jessica Carmichael, who has represented a client in a case that gave rise to concerns about potential parallel construction, told Human Rights Watch the practice “flies in the face of everything that our justice system stands for.” Referring to the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is intended to protect the population against abusive searches and seizures by the authorities, she continued, “Essentially, this practice is an attempt to circumvent that. It’s a way that defendants can’t challenge the evidence and the way that it was obtained.” Other defense attorneys told Human Rights Watch that parallel construction “encourages law enforcement to be duplicitous” and risks destroying the essence of Fourth Amendment protections.