The surveillance state is trying out a new tactic: pocket watching.
404 Media reports on how secretive “predictive policing” units in the US Border Patrol are analyzing Americans’ financial activity and using it as a pretext to pull them over — even if they’re not suspected of a specific crime.
Predictive policing, the practice of identifying possible criminal activity by analyzing broader patterns in absence of direct evidence, is highly controversial. Delving into individual citizens’ financial data represents a significant escalation of these tactics.
According to the investigation, the Border Patrol units in question are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). Rather than conducting stops themselves, PITT units feed their findings to local law enforcement.
This was the case with a man driving across Montana, who was apprehended by local police after they received a tip-off from a PITT unit that analyzed his financial data. The man, Kyle William Olson, was stopped under the completely unrelated pretense, however, of an obstructed license plate. He was charged with a DUI and an intent to distribute narcotics. Olson had cannabis products like edibles in his car, which he got from a licensed cannabis farm in California where he worked, he told 404.
A memorandum of investigation document that Olson was provided and shared with 404 outlines how Border Patrol agent Matthew Phelps, who identifies himself as assigned to a PITT team in neighboring Spokane, Washington, observed “information contained within law enforcement-sensitive systems suggesting financial activity patterns commonly associated with illicit narcotics activity” when looking into Olson.
Experts criticized how PITT is disguising the dubious predictive techniques it’s using to apprehend Americans.
“The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy and Technology, told 404. Border Patrol, he added, is “using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy.”
“If we can’t meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can’t trust them,” Laperruque said.
It remains unclear what mechanisms Border Patrol is using to keep tabs on Americans’ financial activity.
In a statement to 404, the agency said it “uses intelligence-informed analysis and planning to support national security operations, allocate resources, and help identify potential threats and bad actors to public safety,” but insisted it would not discuss its specific methods, sources of information, and other details, for “operational security reasons.”
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