CBP Uses Whisper Stops to Conduct Fishing Expeditions
America’s Secret Police (Part 25)
As the government has gradually expanded the scope of warrantless mass surveillance it has gradually transformed policing into intel operations and started treating ordinary citizens like enemy combatants in their endless wars on drugs and terrorism. For the past decade, CPB has used their ever expanding network of hidden automated license plate readers, surveillance towers and drones using specific algorithms to judge whether drivers appear “suspicious.” Instead of individualized suspicion of a crime articulated by a CBP agent, CBP uses a predictive policing program that considers driving on backcountry highways, driving a rental car or making short trips to the border region (100 miles from Canada or Mexico), all of which are legal activities, to be suspicion of criminal activity and use state and local police to detain and arrest drivers on fabricated pretexts they make up after receiving the CPB tip. Carrying thousands of dollars in cash on you is now considered probable cause for arrest, not just a preponderance of evidence for crime, even when police have no evidence that it is proceeds of criminal activity. Gutierrez Lugo, who is a driver for a hotshot company, found this out the hard way when he was pulled over by municipal police in Texas, at the request of CBP, just because he happened to be driving a truck and trailer on a back-country highway that heads to the border. Police arrested him for having a few thousand dollars in cash in the truck accusing him of money laundering without actual evidence of money laundering. Even though he was never charged with a crime the arrest and impoundment of his vehicle ended up costing his company $20,000 in legal fees. Three years ago, Alek Schott was also stopped on I35 in San Antonio on a CBP tip of “suspiciously” traveling between oilfields in South Texas and his home in Houston on the fabricated pretext that he had drifted lanes. After the officer who detained him asked him extensive and personal questions about his life he called a k9 unit to the scene to fabricate probable cause for a search (they train the dogs to always alert them). They ultimately found nothing wasting everyone’s time and violating Schott’s 4th amendment right against arbitrary searches and seizures. As I noted in (Part 9), the FBI also uses state and local LEOs to gather intel on watch-listed citizens without alerting them to the fact that the FBI told the local or state LEO to stop and detain the target (i.e. whisper stop) so they also fabricate pretexts for detention. Deeming innocent people’s travel patterns suspicious just because it coincides with those used by criminals isn’t individualized suspicion of crime itself but is very likely to devolve into fishing expeditions, harassment, and gangstalking if that is the primary criteria used to judge suspicion. Predictive policing (i.e. minority report style pre-crime programs) has already been used to harass the families of children that one Florida sheriff declared “at risk youth” based not on juvenile crime itself but on academic performance. Police in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and New Orleans also used predictive policing programs provided by Palantir to monitor people included in their secret gang databases. And when you combine warrantless mass surveillance of the entire population with algorithmically drive predictive policing that provides risk or threat assessment scores for everyone you get the basic operational framework for a totalitarian social credit system that punishes political dissent, from the establishment prescribed overton window, with financial and travel choke points.