Border Patrol's new 'secretive program'
Okay, sure, you’re doing nothing illegal.
“Not since last month.”
Okay, but currently you’re doing nothing illegal.
“Technically, that would be correct.”
Two weeks ago, Nov. 20, the Associated Press broke a story that carried this opening paragraph:
“The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.”
Anything that has to do with “secretive” and the federal government always grabs my attention, as does a government agency monitoring the movement of people, with surveillance cameras placed along roadways extending all along the southern border from Texas to California.
From the same AP story:
“The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, according to AP, drivers remain unaware of what just happened:
“Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.”
Shades of the most famous slogan from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984: “Big Brother is Watching You.”
According to the Associated Press story, the road surveillance is no longer limited to just the border region:
“Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.”
These surveillance cameras now keep an eye on people in San Antonio, Houston, Chicago, LA, you name it, Border Patrol and its cameras are likely set in place, according to the AP story.
Civil Liberty Concerns
In a perfect world this wouldn’t be a problem.
Monaco, for example, where billionaires go for fun, has surveillance cameras literally all over the place, which may explain the lack of crime there.
Unfortunately, the world isn’t a perfect place.
If there was nothing for the government to worry about, then why was the program kept secret from the public?
It was only thanks to an investigative team from AP, led by reporters Byron Tau and Garance Burke, that this deal was uncovered in the first place.
Even though taxpayers paid for the cam deal, which I’d bet, went to some well-connected company in a no-bid deal.
Just a guess.
It was also with the help of anonymous sources, eight former government officials with intimate knowledge of the secret camera program, that AP was able to piece if all together with the help of thousands of pages of government and court docs, state grants and law enforcement data, and area arrests, etc.
In addition, the Associated Press also interviewed dozens of federal, state, and local officials, lawyers, privacy experts, who had been stopped by law enforcement as a result of the surveillance (Source: AP).
These Individuals stopped by law enforcement and Border Patrol agents often did not learn the actual reason for their detention at the time of the stop.
No, that wouldn’t upset any of us. An Associated Press investigation found that local law enforcement used minor traffic violations as pretext, and internal documents showed instructions to withhold program records from the public and media.
Nice. Transparency.
They’re Offensive
According to multiple civil liberty organizations, the reason the ordinary law-abiding person might find surveillance cameras to be a problem, offensive, include:
# Mass, Unwarranted Surveillance: The system involves a network of cameras that scan and record millions of license plates on public roads, creating a massive digital surveillance network that monitors the ordinary, daily movements of Americans, not just suspected criminals.
# Predictive Intelligence: The Border Patrol uses an algorithm to flag vehicles as “suspicious” based on travel patterns (e.g., origin, destination, route taken). Critics argue this is a form of predictive policing that can lead to innocent people being stopped, questioned, and searched, often without a proper warrant or probable cause, which raises Fourth Amendment concerns.
If you have a U.S. citizen who knows his/her rights, and finds an unwarranted traffic stop offensive, federal agents acting as if they own the land, which they do, things can get ugly, with the upset driver most often pepper sprayed, cuffed, and led off to the gulag.
“Has anyone seen Bob lately?”
# Potential for Misuse and “Mission Creep”: There are fears that technology initially deployed for one purpose (border security) could be expanded for other domestic law enforcement purposes, or even abused for political control, much like the omnipresent “telescreens” in 1984 that served to enforce state power.
And AI is just getting started, with all of the possible negative outcomes tied to that.
# Erosion of Privacy Rights: Civil libertarians argue, rightly so, that such pervasive, large-scale surveillance erodes fundamental privacy rights and sets a dangerous precedent for unchecked government power.
You think?
While the government states that the spy (sorry, surveillance) cameras are used to identify threats and disrupt criminal networks, the concerns about privacy and potential misuse persist.
I know it does for me.
How about you?