 Imagine you get pulled over, a police officer walks up to your window and asks: “Did you know your taillight is broken?” -or- “I pulled you over because you were weaving between lanes.” -or- “You didn’t come to a complete stop at the stop sign.” -But never- “I pulled you over because the federal government, which monitors your financial transactions, wonders if you might be engaged in illicit activity and wanted me to come up with a BS excuse to pull you over and find a reason to search your car.” We’ve long reported that federal agents are mining our private financial information to identify Americans for investigation – even when they are not suspected of any particular crime. In a disturbing investigation for 404 Media, Joseph Cox reveals that secretive predictive-policing units within the U.S. Border Patrol are analyzing Americans’ financial activity and other data. Federal agents pass their suspicions to local police, who then spot the targeted Americans in their cars and look for traffic violations and other opportunities to obtain consent to search their vehicles. This arrangement turns financial surveillance into a backdoor predicate for police encounters. Federal agents need not begin with evidence that someone committed a crime. An algorithm or analyst merely decides that a person’s spending or other activities look interesting. Police officers can then look for a broken taillight, an improper lane change, or some equally flimsy excuse to pull that person over. This practice reverses the constitutional order. Under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement is supposed to begin with individualized suspicion and obtain a warrant when a search requires one. Predictive policing begins with mass data, generates an opaque hunch, and then goes looking for a violation to justify an investigation that is secretly already underway. These reported abuses demonstrate why financial privacy cannot be dismissed on the theory that bank records are merely business records. Financial data can provide the government with a detailed map of a person’s life. When combined with location information – perhaps from automated license plate readers like those provided by Flock Safety – purchased commercial databases, and other digital records, financial information provides the raw material for suspicionless surveillance. The partnership between federal analysts and local police adds another layer of abuse by obscuring the true origin of an investigation. Courts, defense attorneys, and defendants may see only a routine traffic stop, never knowing about the federal data dragnet operating behind it. Congress should demand full disclosure of these units’ sources, methods, targeting criteria, and coordination with local police. It should also require warrants for Americans’ sensitive financial information and prohibit federal agencies from laundering suspicionless surveillance through pretextual stops. Credit to Joseph Cox and 404 Media for exposing this machinery. Comments are closed.
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