Border Patrol is spying on you using a national driver surveillance program

Imagine changing your normal routine by driving an alternate route to get to work when you are suddenly pulled over by the police and interrogated because you’re displaying “suspicious” activity. Well, imagine no longer because under a national Border Patrol license plate surveillance program, millions of American drivers across America are being spied on by Big Brother and detained for displaying travel patterns deemed to be suspicious.

The program uses AI technology to permit agents to monitor domestic travelers, pull over drivers for “suspicious” travel patterns, and detain not just illegal immigrants, but U.S. citizens as well (via Technocracy News and Trends):

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.

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.

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.

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.

The result is a mass surveillance network with a particularly American focus: cars. (Emphasis mine)

“They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know … engaging in dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities,” said Nicole Ozer, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, about the Border Patrol nationwide driver surveillance system.

As I warned when he first launched his border control agenda just days after beginning his second term, Trump is using immigration as a precursor to declare martial law, so using the Border Patrol in this manner fits perfectly as he takes another step in that direction.

The foundation for this program was laid nearly ten years ago under Obama with help from the Republican-controlled Congress. In January 2015, the duopoly empowered the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to create a national database of license plates and driving habits of Americans. Though originally created to combat drug trafficking, the program was being expanded to track other “criminals” and was even made available to state-level law enforcement agencies.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party that took it up a notch when in January 2018 — they had full control of Washington at the time — they gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database in the name of immigration control. And in October 2019, they pushed a bill that would create a real-time national driver surveillance program known as the “Safe Drivers Act” (SDA), a bill designed to make everything a motorist has done available to law enforcement NATIONWIDE available to law enforcement at the click of a button.

When Trump lost in 2020, portions of the surveillance program were put on hold, but they were picked up again when Republican frauds and liars joined hands with Democrats to pass Joe Biden’s Infrastructure and Jobs Act — a provision in the law allowed for the development of a system that would allow government to track every mile of every trip you take.

Specifically, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill included obscure language requiring the Department of Transportation to test the feasibility of taxing drivers for the number of miles they travel. The tax is broad enough to target any “passenger motor vehicles,” including light and medium-to-heavy-duty trucks. The brain trust behind this new tax was then-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg who said that the idea showed “a lot of promise.”

After receiving some backlash, Buttigieg reversed his stance a few days later once infrastructure debates got under way, and he assured Americans that a miles-driven tax would not be included in the legislation. “That’s not part of the conversation about this infrastructure bill, so just want to make sure that’s really clear,” Buttigieg said in a CNN interview. Despite Buttigieg’s assurances, a pilot program to create a miles-driven tax and a national surveillance program was included in the final version of the legislation.

Concerning the current national driver surveillance program, the Border Patrol has its own definition of what qualifies a drivers’ behavior as suspicious, stopping people for anything from driving on backcountry roads, being in a rental car or making short trips to the border region. The agency’s network of cameras now extends along the southern border in Texas, Arizona and California, and also monitors drivers traveling near the US-Canada border. It also reaches far into interior states, impacting residents of major metropolitan areas and people driving to and from large cities such as Chicago and Detroit, as well as from Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Houston to and from the Mexican border region.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, said they use the license plate surveillance program to help identify threats and disrupt criminal networks while “governed by a stringent, multi-layered policy framework, as well as federal law and constitutional protections, to ensure the technology is applied responsibly and for clearly defined security purposes.”

“For national security reasons, we do not detail the specific operational applications,” the agency said. While the U.S. Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 miles of the border, it is legally allowed “to operate anywhere in the United States,” the agency added.

Today, predictive surveillance systems are embedded into America’s roadways.

When it comes to the assault on our constitutional rights, Donald Trump and the Republican Party rarely launch a full-blown frontal attack because their intentions would be too obvious. Instead, the strategy they most often use is one that mirrors the advice Screwtape gave his nephew Wormword in the C.S. Lewis novel, The Screwtape Letters.

“Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

One liberty-killing program that’s been on the safe and gradual road to Hell for several years now has been the Border Patrol national license plate surveillance program. And while it’s easy for so-called conservatives to point a finger at Democrats and the Far-Left for our loss of liberty, the reality is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have worked hand-in-hand with them to lead us down the road to tyrannical hell.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.

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