actually investigative work
no subpoena's, no user profile aggregators
its the most acceptable use of public resources and is hardly news in 2020 but its nice to read that public servants will do some basic stuff like this.
basic human investigative work that anyone could do just like we pay them to do, or this high tech unnecessary other thing for someone on film with identifying information.
It if were parallel construction, the intent would be for the forward construction to seem more logical to you.
In this case, you could be proving the efficacy of the tactic.
or it was easy and took 20 minutes?
ya'll never done this before? it doesn't take training. find someone's username and then google their username to see what other services they use, find an email address and check haveibeenpwned to see what other services that has been on, cross link, cross reference, and ideally find some erotic photos from their modeling days and then ask the photographer if there were any more because its attractive
and really the only reason thats an interesting public service announcement is by thinking this kind of googling in this article was complicated at all.
the "forward construction" is so easy that you should just assume anyone in any agency is competent enough to do this.
anybody that has looked up a friend from high school, or a potential date, or needed a way to contact someone, should have been inspired enough to do this before. and if you weren't, now you are.
Yeah I agree that when parallel construction happens they make the parallel case a logical one. But that involves making a parallel case. You're saying that the shirt -> Etsy -> Poshmark -> Linkedin chain was not created in that order and was created in some other order. I don't see how it's logical that it could be created in some other order, even with illegal evidence.
Beyond this specific case, I think the point of parallel construction is an interesting one because it makes it really difficult to know the "truth" where law enforcement have significant control over the flow of information.
Sometimes traditional or other media can help with the information asymmetry but sometimes, perhaps, not.
This is as opposed to say a police officer pulling over a drug dealer's car full drugs for failing to use a turn signal. If we assume illegal evidence was involved there, it's most logical the police were given some heads-up that there would be a drug dealer with a car full of drugs in the area to pull over, and the failing to signal on a turn was just used as a convenient excuse.