The Associated Press is shocked, shocked, to discover that Customs and Border Protection has expanded their surveillance network beyond the “100 miles inland from every border” as authorized in the Patriot Act.
Worse yet is their stunned research showing license plate readers (APLR’s) are being connected to various other public and private sector mechanisms to identify travel patterns of U.S. citizens and collate them to facial recognition software applications.
Both the AP and CBS begin reporting on this domestic surveillance system as something quite new, it’s not. We have previously outlined the construct as it was assembled HERE and HERE and HERE.
This is the part of the performance where past and present DC officials, including many that you personally support (Nunes), say the risk is now too great to worry about the 4th Amendment. With borders unsecured by Obama and Biden, there is now no way to mitigate the risk from criminal aliens against the concern with privacy and the 4th Amendment.
In the bigger picture, this is why DC justifies extending FISA-702 reauthorization now. The argument says, ‘If we do not support and create the surveillance state, we cannot capture and remove all the criminal aliens.’
WASHINGTON DC – 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.
The Border Patrol’s predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested.
[…] The Border Patrol has recently grown even more powerful through collaborations with other agencies, drawing information from license plate readers nationwide run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, private companies and, increasingly, local law enforcement programs funded through federal grants. Texas law enforcement agencies have asked the Border Patrol to use facial recognition to identify drivers, documents show.
This active role beyond the borders is part of the quiet transformation of its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, into something more akin to a domestic intelligence operation. Under the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement efforts, CBP is now poised to get more than $2.7 billion to build out border surveillance systems such as the license plate reader program by layering in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. (read more)
The entire article is actually good; it’s just frustrating and annoying to see media pretending they didn’t know about this stuff until Trump.
CTH has been writing about this surveillance issue for well over a decade. The introduction of Palantir facial recognition, to the overall database of social media information and private identity information, now makes it very easy for the government to simply point a camera at your face and get every scintilla of information about us.
Almost all of the privacy advocates have given up trying to resist the outcome. However, I am not one of them. All it will take is a small mistake in the AI development programming, and people will see quickly just how dangerous this is.
