Taking homeland security-justified warrantless searches and turning those over to criminal investigations is far beyond unconstitutional.
Except, that it's not.
It's all about how the government comes into possession of information that makes it the fruit (or not) of the "poisonous tree".
Once the government legally learns of some bit of information, there's no requirement by itself that they have to "pretend not to know" something is going on. That's why a third party voluntarily divulging information to the government doesn't cause that evidence to get thrown out of court: There may be a cause for civil or even criminal action against that third party, but that doesn't invalidate the evidence.
Now, Congress has passed statute laws limiting information sharing between intelligence agencies and law enforcement precisely because of the threat of having this all-seeing eye subvert democratic government, but the limits were never complete exclusions, even before 9/11. And the reason statute laws were needed is because there was no barrier to this activity from the judicial side alone.
Parallel construction came in not because evidence was illegally gathered, but because giving the (fully legal!) chain of custody for evidence derived from intelligence sources would have quite naturally have "burned" that source or method, so the NSA would require law enforcement agencies using that data to use alternate (again though, legal) means to make a case in court, in order to protect their intelligence source. It's the old apocryphal dilemma about whether to let Coventry be bombed to protect ULTRA, applied to the post-9/11 world.
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Except, that it's not.
It's all about how the government comes into possession of information that makes it the fruit (or not) of the "poisonous tree".
Once the government legally learns of some bit of information, there's no requirement by itself that they have to "pretend not to know" something is going on. That's why a third party voluntarily divulging information to the government doesn't cause that evidence to get thrown out of court: There may be a cause for civil or even criminal action against that third party, but that doesn't invalidate the evidence.
Now, Congress has passed statute laws limiting information sharing between intelligence agencies and law enforcement precisely because of the threat of having this all-seeing eye subvert democratic government, but the limits were never complete exclusions, even before 9/11. And the reason statute laws were needed is because there was no barrier to this activity from the judicial side alone.
Parallel construction came in not because evidence was illegally gathered, but because giving the (fully legal!) chain of custody for evidence derived from intelligence sources would have quite naturally have "burned" that source or method, so the NSA would require law enforcement agencies using that data to use alternate (again though, legal) means to make a case in court, in order to protect their intelligence source. It's the old apocryphal dilemma about whether to let Coventry be bombed to protect ULTRA, applied to the post-9/11 world.