Why not use spy satellites and just watch you all the time? Or clever Van Eck, or Wifi micro-disturbances?

Cops are basically plumbers. They are blue collar workers, making mediocre pay and working insane hours. (Plumbers actually make MORE than cops for their 40, cops just work a lot of overtime...) Cops are most likely to just not really chase an investigation versus doing twice the work to use some kind of illegal evidence gathering.

Cops get away with stuff they shouldn’t: details at 11.

That said, I just want to point out that you have no idea whether they believe that or are simply quoting the relevant legal history. What’s with the naive comment?

Every time I see something like this I have to think it contributes to degrading discussion quality here; we can probably assume the general audience of this site are not obtuse on this matter and wade in with a different tone.

> history

thanks that sums my point up in a single cherry picked word.

As long as the material presented in court is acquired via legal methods, no laws are being broken, are they? Now, if officers use legal loopholes to take illegally-acquired evidence and somehow make it legal, that's a practice that should be rooted out and those involved prosecuted. But as long as officers can construct a legal case completely independent of the poisonous tree, what's the issue?

That’s a perfectly logical stance to take, but I think it hinges on :

”Now, if officers use legal loopholes to take illegally-acquired evidence and somehow make it legal, that's a practice that should be rooted out and those involved prosecuted.”

If in practice illegal practices, are not rooted-out or prosecuted, and actually condoned, I think one would need to look askance at the entire concept…

That makes perfect sense. I'm no lawyer and am only discussing this out of idle curiosity, so I'm sure my comments were a naive take. The situation I'm envisioning is an audio recording from a 2-party consent state outlining the existence of evidence. Since that cannot be the legal basis of a warrant, an officer might wander through the neighborhood talking with associated citizens to try and independently establish the need for a warrant based on various witness statements. No evidence has been falsified or created out of thin air, and there's no hope of a conviction if the suspected building doesn't contain damning evidence.

However, I fully recognize how such a process might be abused and the need for a very firm legal hand to avoid accidentally becoming an authoritarian state.

The officer has no probable cause to do what you suggest without the illegally obtained information in the first place.

If they were only able to construct a "legal" case through the knowledge gained by the fruit of a poisonous tree, then the new tree should be treated as tainted as well. But that's not the law.

They can and do violate the law (without consequence) until they find a foothold that allows them to fabricate the appearance of a legally obtained chain of evidence. Then, they fully suppress the evidence about how that information was originally obtained.