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The FBI Is Building an AI to Find "Radicals": You're next! · The Overlap

0:00
Maher Ar was thirty two years old.
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Software engineer, Canadian citizen,
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a wife, two children, a really rich and robust life in Ottawa.
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In two thousand two he was changing planes at JFK Airport
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in New York City, coming home from a family vacation,
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that's it. That's the whole crime.
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Except there was no crime. Somebody somewhere had put his name on a list.
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The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had passed along some bad information,
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basically saying he was an Islamic extremist and that he had ties to Al Qaeda.
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None of it's true. None of it was tested.
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None of it was something that a court had ever looked at.
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But it was on a list. And the list doesn't really ask questions.
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So American agents detained him and then they didn't.
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didn't just send him home to Canada,
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they put him on a plane to Syria,
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a country he was not a citizen of,
1:01
and in Syria he was thrown into an underground cell about the size of a grave,
1:06
that he later said, and he was tortured for almost a year for a name on a list.
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Here's the part that should keep you up at night.
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In 2006, the Canadian government ran a full public inquiry,
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cleared him completely.
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No offense, no security risk, nothing.
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Canada apologized and paid him over ten million dollars.
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I assume that's Canadian. And the United States,
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well, they refused to apologize.
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They refused to pay him a dime.
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They fought his lawsuit and won on national security grounds,
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but the Supreme Court wouldn't even hear it.
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And this is the line, this is the one that really gets me.
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He's still on the list to this day.
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A man his own investigators cleared,
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a man who was tortured because of a clerical error,
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he still can't enter the United States because once you're on the list,
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there is no off the list. Now imagine a machine that builds that list faster,
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bigger, before you've done anything at all.
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Hi, I'm Joshua, and this is The Overlap,
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a show about power and labor and the machinery of American injustice.
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The parts of it that kind of hum along quietly while everyone
2:38
is looking somewhere else. Quick note before we get into it my co producer Will
2:43
is off this week, so here's why we're doing this now.
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On July twenty eighth, twenty twenty six,
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Reason magazine ran a story with the headline that sounds like a movie pitch.
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Minority Report. FBI seeks AI for political watch list.
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And your first instinct, I mean my first instinct,
3:03
is to kind of roll your eyes, right?
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Because that's the kind of headline that gets written every couple
3:08
of years and usually the reality underneath it is more boring,
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more bureaucratic, less cinematic.
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and if you have any experience with Reason magazine,
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they're a clearly libertarian,
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weird kind of group of people and
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In some cases it reads a little bit like you know Alex Jones show.
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But not this time. This time the reality is actually worse than the reason headline.
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Because back in March, the FBI's threat screening center,
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now that's the agency that runs the terrorist watch list,
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the weird list that has no due process or way to get off of it,
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quietly posted a procurement notice.
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Now a source is sought notice,
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looking for a vendor to build them an AI system.
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And I want to read you the actual language because I I couldn't have written
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it more chilling if I tried. They want a system that can analyze quote similarity,
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pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records
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to predict where additional relevant information may be derived from.
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Across federated systems. Predict.
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That's the word. Predict where more information can be found
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on you before anything happens.
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This is precrime, right? Thought crime.
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Federal policy out in the open on a government website with
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a request for proposals attached.
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And here's the thing.
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If this were just a technology story,
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I would tell it as a tech story,
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but it isn't because we've seen this exact machine before.
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We've seen what the FBI does when it gets to build a list of dangerous Americans
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or non-Americans with no evidence and no oversight.
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We have the files, we have the names,
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and there is a body count. So today we're gonna do two things.
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We're gonna go back.
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To a program that ran for about 15 years in total secrecy that opened nearly
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a million investigations on regular Americans,
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charged almost none of them. And then we're gonna come forward to the contracts,
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the dollar amounts, the men signing them,
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and a State Department report that reads like a targeting list because
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the history isn't background here.
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The history is the instruction manual.
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They already ran this program once,
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now they wanted to run it again at language learning speed with nobody watching.
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So let's go.
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nineteen fifty six is where this actually all starts.
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J Ed Ger Hoover at is now the director of the FBI,
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right? He is the director since nineteen twenty four.
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He will be the director until he dies in nineteen seventy two.
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Nobody fires Hoover. Presidents are afraid of Hoover because Hoover has files.
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And everybody knows Hoover has files.
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He survived eight presidents, like eight of them.
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He outlasted administrations that hated him and
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Men who wanted him gone, because the the files made him untouchable.
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That's what a secret list does for the person holding the list.
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It's not just a record of other people's vulnerabilities,
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it's a personal insurance policy.
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And in 1956, Hoover starts a program.
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A name that's basically a contraction,
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right? It's it's Cointel Pro, the Counterintelligence Program.
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And the stated purpose, the thing that they said out loud,
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is they were trying to disrupt the Communist Party of the United States.
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Foreign subversion, Soviet influence,
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the time the Cold War is on, and this is the enemy,
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right? That's the pitch. And then here's what it actually became.
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Because a program that starts by targeting communists does not stay pointed
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at communists. It never does.
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This is the pattern, and I want you to to recognize it because we're gonna
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see it again in about 20 minutes,
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wearing a completely different mask.
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Pre crime surveillance always expands from its stated target
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to encompass political dissent.
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Always. It's the most reliable law in American history that nobody teaches
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you in school. So COINtel Pro expands.
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What does it expand to?
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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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Now that's Martin Luther King's organization.
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The FBI wiretapped King, bugged his hotel rooms,
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they had informants in his inner circle,
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people he trusted, people who attended strategy meetings and then filed reports.
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The FBI opened a file on King in nineteen fifty seven.
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By the early nineteen sixties,
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they had declared him, internally in their own documents,
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the most dangerous.
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Quote Negro in America. That phrase is in the file,
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like that's a real designation that actual FBI agents put on paper and pass
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it up the chain to J Hoover, who approved the surveillance expansion.
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And then, this is documented, this is not conspiracy,
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this is in the congressional record,
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they mailed him a package, recordings they'd made in his hotel rooms,
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plus an anonymous letter. And the letter told him to kill himself.
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It told him he had thirty four days before they exposed him,
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and there was quote only one thing left for you to do.
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The letter arrived just before he was scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
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The FBI sent a suicide letter to Martin Luther King,
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a Nobel laureate, an American citizen,
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a preacher because they didn't like his politics.
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That's the agency, so that's that's who we're talking about.
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And it expands to the Black Panther Party,
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and here I want to name two people because the pattern always comes down
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to specific people with specific lives that get destroyed.
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Geronimo G Jaga, known as Geronimo Pratt,
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a decorated Vietnam veteran, a panther leader in Los Angeles.
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The FBI helped frame him for a murder they had evidence that he didn't commit.
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They had him under surveillance in another city when the killing happened
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and they buried it.
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The wiretap records that would have proven his alibi,
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well, they said they didn't exist.
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They lied about the records. He spent twenty seven years in prison.
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Eight of those were in solitary confinement.
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His conviction was finally vacated in nineteen ninety seven.
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After a judge found that the prosecution had withheld exactly the evidence,
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the FBI said that it did not happen.
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Next is Daruba Ben Wahad, another Panther,
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nineteen years in prison before the FBI's own COINTELPRO documents surfaced
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in litigation that blew his conviction apart.
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Nineteen years for a man whose trial turned on evidence
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the Bureau had deliberately hidden.
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It expands to the anti war movement,
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to the women's liberation movement,
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to socialist organizations, to the young patriots,
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to the
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Puerto Rican independence movement to and I mean this literally,
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virtually any domestic political movement that Hoover decided he didn't like.
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The tactics were infiltration,
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informants embedded at chapter level,
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sometimes rising to leadership positions within activist organizations,
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forged letters designed to start like fights,
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written in the voice of one activist leader accusing another,
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designed to kind of fracture coalitions from the inside.
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Anonymous tips to employers to get people fired,
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warrantless break ins, they called them black bag jobs,
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to photograph documents and plant listening devices,
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like straight up harassment, threatening phone calls,
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and in some cases coordination with local police that ended with people dead.
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Fred Hampton is one of those sleeping in his bed shot by Chicago police
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in a raid that the FBI's Chicago field office had materially assisted.
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Between nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy four,
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the FBI ran more than five hundred thousand separate investigations
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of Americans under the heading of subversion.
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In nineteen seventy two alone,
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they opened sixty five thousand new domestic intelligence files.
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By the end of it, headquarters was sitting on files covering roughly
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a million people, like American citizens.
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And here's the number that matters Zero.
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That's how many convictions? Not a low number,
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not like a disappointing number,
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but zero. Half a million investigations of American citizens for subversion
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of their own government, and not one of them produced a criminal conviction.
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But that's because the point really wasn't about the charges.
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The point was never really about a trial or evidence or a court.
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The point was the list. The point was to know.
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Who the dangerous people were,
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and to make their lives harder and smaller and more frightened.
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Disruption is the product. Fear is the product.
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And they used the list as the engine to get there.
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Now, did anyone stop them? Did the system have any sort of check or balance?
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No. And that's the real horror of it because for fifteen years this
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ran in a secret room.
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Somewhere inside the FBI headquarters.
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There was no congressional oversight of FBI domestic intelligence,
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worth the name, no judge signing off on individual targets,
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no inspector general looking at the files.
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The oversight infrastructure didn't exist,
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and Hoover liked it that way. He had actively cultivated its absence for decades.
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How did that turn out? Not through the system.
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The system obviously would never have caught it.
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It came out because eight people broke into a building.
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March eighth, nineteen seventy one,
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Media Pennsylvania, it's a small town outside of Philadelphia,
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eight anti war activists, they call themselves the Citizens Commission
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to investigate the FBI, picked the night of the big Muhammad Ali Joe Frasier fight.
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Because they figured everybody,
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including the Night Watchman, would be listening to the radio.
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And they broke into a small FBI field office and they took everything,
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every file in the place, every single piece of paper.
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They hauled it out in bags and briefcases,
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and then they drove it away and laid it all out on one big table,
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and then they started mailing those files to newspapers.
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That's literally how America found out.
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Not from some oversight body or a Senate hearing,
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not from a whistleblower inside the bureau,
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but literally a burglary.
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And the only reason we know now that COINtel Pro even existed is that eight private
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people committed a crime to expose a much bigger crime.
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They weren't identified until twenty fourteen,
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when several of them actually went public voluntarily ~ more than forty years later,
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because the FBI never caught them.
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So the self-correcting mechanism for the most powerful law enforcement agency
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in the country was a break-in by eight people who were never caught.
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So once the files were out, the dam broke.
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And in 1975, the Senate finally did its job.
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The church committee, named for Senator Frank Church of Idaho,
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not like the church, launched a full investigation.
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Eleven senators, months of hearings,
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hundreds of witnesses.
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And what they find is it's pretty staggering,
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not just COINTELPRO, but assassination plots against foreign leaders,
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domestic mail opening programs that ran for decades,
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the NSA reading Americans' telegrams through a program called Shamrock,
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in which a major telegraph company handed over copies of international cables.
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Now that doesn't seem really important as of this day,
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but I I mean these were these were the internet of the time.
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A whole shadow of
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Architecture of domestic spying that had been running quietly
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and illegally since before most of those 11 senators were actually even in office.
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And the church committee has this phrase for what the FBI has been doing.
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They called it thought policing.
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Policing people, not for what they did,
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but for what they believed, for who they were associated with,
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for what movement they belonged to.
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For the ideas they held. And out of that investigation came reforms,
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like real ones for a while. You have the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
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FISA or FISA, and that was in nineteen seventy eight,
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which said basically if you want to spy on people domestically
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for intelligence purposes, you have to go to a court,
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a special secret court, but still a court,
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still a judge.
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Attorney General Guidelines, the the Levi Guidelines,
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named for Attorney General Edward Levi,
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that actually limited what the FBI could open as far as
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a domestic intelligence investigation.
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You needed like a factual predicate.
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You needed a real reason. Later,
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oversight bodies were built. The idea,
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the the whole idea was never again.
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Never again do we let secret police build secret lists of American citizens.
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Based upon their politics and their associations.
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Do you see where this is going?
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And that was the promise in 1976.
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And here's the bridge to today.
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And look, I mean I I I think you can honestly see where this is going.
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Every single one of those reforms has been erased,
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eroded. Systematically, deliberately,
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piece by piece.
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Mostly to be fair, mostly after nine eleven,
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right? When when the emergency kind of gave cover for a generation of rollbacks.
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The wall that FISA has been ~ basically drilled full of holes.
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Section seven hundred two alone turned it from a a targeted surveillance tool into
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a mass collection authority. The Levi guidelines p actually got loosened
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and then replaced with the Mukesey guidelines in two thousand eight.
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Which basically expanded what the FBI could investigate and how,
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and and the oversight was entirely hollowed out.
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The inspector general is gone,
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the PCLOB is paralyzed, the the internal audit office is kind of a ghost.
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So when the FBI posts a notice in 2026 asking for
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a machine that predicts dangerous Americans before they've done anything.
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Understand that we are not at the beginning of this story.
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This is like part two. The the FBI returns and the sequel has better technology
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and fewer people watching. So let's talk about what that looks like right now.
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So the terrorist watch list, right,
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the modern version is a nine eleven baby.
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December two thousand three, a presidential directive creates
18:35
the terrorist screening center.
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Inside the FBI's security branch.
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It takes a bunch of scattered lists,
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the State Department's tip off list,
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the FBI's own terrorist files,
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various agency databases, and consolidates them into one giant database called
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the TSDB, the terrorist screening database.
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And from day one, from the very like beginning,
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here is the standard to get on it.
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Suspicion. Not evidence, not a charge,
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not a conviction, suspicion. Reasonable suspicion is what they say,
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but reasonable to whom and decided by whom,
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reviewable by whom, well, nobody you'll ever meet.
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It's a completely secret process.
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You don't get told you're on it.
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You don't get to see the evidence,
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you don't get a hearing, you find out at an airport,
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usually in handcuffs, when an agent pulls you out of the boarding line
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and you have no idea why. And there's no number to call,
19:38
there's no form to file that will reliably get you out of this situation.
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That's the machine as it exists now for what?
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twenty years? A little more than twenty.
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Now watch what happens to it in the last eighteen months.
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I wonder what happened eighteen months ago.
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March twenty seventh, twenty twenty six,
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the Threat Screening Center,
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same outfit, slightly renamed,
20:04
posts the procurement notice FBI T S C A
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I E Threat Screening Center AI Enhancement.
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And they want the predictive engine,
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the similarity and pattern alignment machine.
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They want a system that can reach across what they call federated systems,
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meaning multiple government databases,
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potentially commercial data sources,
20:30
potentially anything that they can buy or access,
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like flock cameras, and find connections that human analysts would miss
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or really never have time to look for,
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or were so big.
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That no individual human being could ever really see the alignment
20:49
of these disparate things. Responses were actually due April 10th.
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And they cite in the document a twenty seventeen Intelligence Sharing Directive
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N SPM seven as part of the legal scaffolding for why this is authorized.
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That's the request. Let's talk about who's cashing in.
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June seventeenth.
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twenty twenty six, a company called Agile Defense,
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through a subsidiary named Intelaware Systems,
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gets awarded a one hundred and forty five million dollar contract,
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single award, sole source, to support threat screening center intelligence analysis
21:31
services. And the language in their own press release is beautiful.
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In the way that, you know, like a slick brochure for something terrible
21:41
is beautiful. They they say it supports the TSCs,
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quote, expanded all threats mission.
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Expanded all threats mission.
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Listen to that for a second.
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Expanded from what? Expanded to what?
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All threats. Who defines a threat?
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I mean that phrase is doing a lot of load bearing work for a press release.
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And nobody in the trade press really stopped to pull on it,
22:08
right? Like the mainstream media hasn't really talked about this one.
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And look, that's not the only check.
22:14
Back in September twenty twenty five,
22:16
BAE systems, or the British American Arms Giant
22:20
One of the largest defense contractors on the planet got a separate contract
22:25
for TSC analysis services. $128 million.
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There's a couple a little bit of change in there.
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$670,000 more. So $128,678,000
22:39
for five years. So you're looking at at just north of
22:43
a quarter billion dollars just in these two contracts,
22:48
flowing into private companies.
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To help the FBI run and modernize its watch list operation.
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And those are just the contracts that showed up in like public procurement records.
23:00
So keep in mind that's the floor,
23:03
not the ceiling. There's your labor angle,
23:05
right? Like there's your who profits,
23:07
the the men signing these deals,
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Rick Wagner, the CEO of Agile Defense,
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Jesse Levine, their executive vice president of national security
23:16
and law enforcement. Now these are not like you know.
23:19
villains twirling their little mustaches,
23:22
right? These are contractors. This is a business.
23:25
There are pitch decks and sales cycles and quarterly earnings attached to this.
23:29
Pre-crime is now a growth industry,
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and the growth is funded by your taxes.
23:35
And the product is a list of your neighbors and possibly you.
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Now who's running the FBI while this happens?
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Well, Cash Patel. I want to be careful and precise here.
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Because everything I'm about to say is from the public record.
23:51
Patel abolished the FBI's Office of Internal Auditing.
23:57
That was the FBI's primary internal compliance mechanism for FISA,
24:04
Section seven hundred two, which is the main procedural check on whether agents were
24:09
legally authorized to search through Americans' communications and data.
24:16
And it was it's gone.
24:18
Just gone, abolished by Director Kash Patel.
24:21
At the same time, the G DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz,
24:27
the independent watchdog whose office has produced some of
24:30
the most important accountability reports on FBI surveillance abusers
24:35
in the last decade, he's out. And President Trump fired all three Democratic members
24:42
of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board,
24:45
the PCLOB.
24:47
I talked about them earlier. That's a five-member board that requires three members
24:52
for a quorum. Remove three members,
24:54
and the board cannot vote. They cannot issue reports.
24:58
They cannot subpoena. They cannot function.
25:01
The single federal body, specially designed to watch the watchers,
25:06
is flipped off like a light switch.
25:09
Not abolished, just paralyzed.
25:12
Which is actually more useful.
25:15
To them because a a paralyzed board still exists on paper.
25:18
Which means you can point to that as an evidence,
25:22
you know, that that oversight is still happening,
25:25
technically. It still exists. So do you see this this pattern,
25:30
right? The oversight structure gets dismantled exactly when
25:34
the surveillance powers get expanded.
25:36
Not by accident, not as a coincidence of of timing,
25:40
at the exact same moment.
25:43
That the sequencing is really too clean to be accidental.
25:47
And Patel, well, he's not shy about what he's building.
25:50
He has confirmed publicly that the FBI buys Americans' location data from commercial
25:57
data brokers without a warrant,
25:59
or just purchases it on the open market,
26:01
right? Because the legal theory is that a warrant is required when
26:06
the government takes your data.
26:07
Apparently, if a private company collects it,
26:11
and sells it to a broker and the FBI buys it from that broker,
26:14
the Fourth Amendment takes the afternoon off.
26:18
And he's he's actually bragged about double digit increases
26:22
in the TSC's biometric capabilities,
26:26
which you aren't aware of this yet.
26:28
It's facial recognition, gait analysis.
26:32
That means like literally watching how you walk and analyzing that as
26:36
a pattern to use for recognition.
26:39
The works. He said, and this is a real quote that every major tech company
26:44
in the world is embedded in the FBI.
26:48
Helping build AI counter terrorism capabilities.
26:52
Every major tech company in the world embedded in the FBI.
26:59
And the auditing office has been decapitated.
27:03
Meanwhile, FBI searches you know Americans under Section
27:10
702 went up thirty-five percent in a single year.
27:13
Now they were about ~ fifty five hundred to over seventy-four hundred
27:20
documented searches. And Congress,
27:23
there's a bill, HR
27:25
eighty thirty five to extend seven two authority to twenty twenty seven with
27:31
no new warrant requirement for searching Americans data.
27:35
That means the back door is wide open and they want to write it into
27:39
law and just call it done. So that's the machine and the money
27:45
and the missing brakes. Here's the part where we kind of have to
27:49
ask the question that I always end up asking myself in the middle of this research.
27:55
Like, why does this keep happening?
27:56
We know how it went last time.
27:59
We have the church committee report.
28:00
It's public. You can download it.
28:02
Everyone in that building, every single person in the Hoover building
28:07
on Pennsylvania Avenue knows what COINTELPRO was.
28:11
It's taught in law schools, it's in the history books.
28:14
So why are we building the exact same thing again
28:20
and removing it from the hands of people and
28:23
Putting it on a system. And look,
28:25
here's the honest answer. And it makes me pissed every time I think about it.
28:31
Because the last time the punishment was nothing.
28:35
Nobody went to prison for COINTELPRO.
28:38
Hoover died in office in 1972 with full honors,
28:42
celebrated as the founder of modern federal law enforcement.
28:46
His name was on the building for decades.
28:49
The Bureau got some new rules and waited them out,
28:52
and the men who ran the program retired with full pensions.
28:56
There was no cost, the list of consequences for building a secret police that sent
29:02
a suicide letter to Martin Luther King was a committee,
29:05
a report, some guidelines, and eventually a quieter version of the same program.
29:11
So of course they built it again.
29:14
You don't stop doing a thing that
29:17
got you power and cost you nothing.
29:20
Now here is, you know, the 2026 problem of all about all of this.
29:25
July twenty-first of this year,
29:28
not too long ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publishes a 100-page report.
29:35
You can download this. The title is Cuba,
29:38
the Capital of Twenty-First Century Communism.
29:42
Inside it, the report names at least 43 living American politicians.
29:48
Journalists, labor leaders, and organizations as alleged agents
29:54
of Cuban subversion. Who's on it?
29:57
Well, Representative Ilion Omar.
30:00
The mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani,
30:03
the layer the mayor of Los Angeles,
30:06
Karen Bass, Representative Ayana Presley,
30:10
Christian Smalls. You might not know who that is.
30:14
He
30:15
Organized the first successful union election at an Amazon warehouse,
30:19
the first one ever in American history.
30:21
A journalist, Amy Goodman, Ben Cohen,
30:25
as in like Ben from Ben and Jerry's,
30:27
the Ice Cream Man, is on a federal subversion list.
30:31
This report came out right after Rubio had attended this international
30:37
su summit of like sixty plus countries on what the State Department calls.
30:43
Left wing political terrorism.
30:46
And critics said plainly, what it looks like is this
30:52
a targeting list. It's a map. Here are the people,
30:55
here are their names, here are their affiliations.
30:57
Now put the two things together.
30:59
A State Department that publishes a list of forty-three dissident Americans
31:04
and calls them foreign agents.
31:06
And an FBI that's building an AI designed to
31:09
ingest records and predict who might be a threat by correlating patterns
31:14
of association and behavior. What do you think feeds the machine?
31:18
What do you think that training data actually looks like?
31:22
And look, that's not that's not a slippery slope argument,
31:25
right? Like that's just the slope.
31:27
We're on it. And we're like halfway down it.
31:29
Now, we have to talk about what this does to actual human beings.
31:34
I told you about Maher Arrar at the top.
31:37
Let me let me stay with him for a minute because I kind of rushed past
31:41
the worst of it that he really deserves better than just a headline.
31:46
He he wasn't a suspect in any American investigation.
31:49
He was just a like a transit passenger,
31:51
changing planes at JFK, connecting from Zurich to Montreal.
31:56
~ the information
31:59
that doomed him came from Canada.
32:01
I mean, to be fair, from the RCMP,
32:04
and it was just garbage. It was a mischaracterization of a causal association with
32:09
a man who himself never was charged with anything.
32:12
In a normal system, in a system with checks,
32:15
that that thin, secondhand, untested claim gets tested.
32:20
Somebody looks at it, a judge,
32:22
a lawyer, a magistrate, anybody with legal authority and independent review.
32:27
Can look at the claim before it destroys a person's life.
32:30
In the watch list system, it doesn't get tested.
32:34
It just gets acted on. So they held him,
32:37
they interrogated him for hours,
32:39
and then the United States did something called extraordinary rendition.
32:44
Which is a bureaucratic phrase for literally kidnapping someone and shipping them
32:50
to a country that will torture them because they're not legally allowed to.
32:55
They flew him to Syria on a private jet,
32:57
and for close to a year he lived in a hole in the ground.
33:01
He described it himself as the size of a grave.
33:04
That's roughly the dimensions of a coffin dug into the ground,
33:08
and he was beaten with cables.
33:10
He was deprived of sleep, and he gave a false confession because that's what torture
33:15
creates. Not truth. False confessions,
33:19
which is the entire reason torture is useless and
33:22
As an intelligence tool, as well as evil as a moral matter,
33:27
if we're being honest. Every professional interrogator will tell you this.
33:32
The FBI's own behavioral science experts will tell you this,
33:37
and yet a year. For a name on a list.
33:40
And when Canada finally exonerated him completely,
33:44
conducted a full judicial inquiry,
33:47
published the findings.
33:49
And paid him a settlement, the United States refused.
33:52
Refused to even acknowledge that anything improper had occurred.
33:56
And even still, his name is on the list.
34:00
He's still on it. I'm gonna keep saying that because it's the tell.
34:04
It reveals what this list actually is,
34:06
not a tool for finding truth. If this were a truth-finding tool,
34:11
the the truth would get you off of it.
34:13
I mean, right?
34:14
And a full judicial inquiry from an allied nation,
34:17
they're one of the six eyes, finding him completely innocent and paying
34:21
him ten million dollars in compensation would certainly qualify as truth.
34:26
It's not a truth finding tool,
34:28
it's a tool for maintaining suspicion forever,
34:32
regardless of the truth. Once you're in,
34:35
you're in. The machine does not have like a reverse gear.
34:39
And there is no one with the authority to
34:42
Or the will, apparently, to put one in.
34:44
So a raw is not a glitch.
34:47
It's the system working like it was specifically designed to.
34:51
And there is a class action. So in twenty nineteen,
34:53
the Council on American Islamic Relations,
34:56
or CARE, CAIR, brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of thousands
35:01
of American Muslims who had been placed on the watch list.
35:05
Not one man, thousands. All of them American citizens.
35:10
Their claim was that the process amounted to a broad dragnet targeting Muslims
35:15
as a religious and ethnic category.
35:17
No specific threat required.
35:19
No concrete individualized facts required,
35:21
a secret administrative process,
35:23
no notice, no meaningful pathway out.
35:26
And what did being on it mean for their daily lives?
35:29
Pulled from airport lines, secondary screening at every border crossing,
35:35
every international flight, every reentry into the country where they were born
35:40
and raised. Invasive searches,
35:43
missed flights, missed business trips,
35:46
Missed family events, missed medical appointments,
35:48
years of this, because of a designation that they were never shown
35:53
and never given the opportunity to contest.
35:56
A federal judge, Anthony Tringa,
35:59
in the Eastern District of Virginia,
36:01
agreed with them on the constitutional question.
36:04
Basically ruled that the watch list process actually violates constitutional
36:09
due process. And in plain language,
36:12
it says that you cannot
36:14
Brand Americans as suspected terrorists in secret without notice,
36:19
without a meaningful opportunity to see the basis for the designation
36:24
and then fight it. The secret no notice process was constitutionally deficient.
36:31
A federal judge said that on the record in 2019.
36:34
And then in 2021, the Fourth Circuit threw it out.
36:38
Not on the merits.
36:40
On standing for my legal friends out there.
36:42
The appeals court said the plaintiffs hadn't shown the kind of injury that gets
36:47
you into federal court in the first place.
36:49
So the constitutional question never got answered.
36:53
Think about what that means. A federal judge looked at the process
36:57
and said it violates due process.
36:59
And the higher court's response,
37:02
essentially, was that these people lacked the standing to ask.
37:07
The watch lists.
37:08
survived judicial review without ever having to justify itself.
37:12
That means the machine is still running bigger.
37:15
And now they're gonna bolt AI onto it.
37:18
And look, here's who catches even when it just means matching names.
37:25
Senator Edward Kennedy. Ted Kennedy.
37:29
The the senior senator from Massachusetts for nearly 50 years,
37:32
yeah. The lion of the Senate was repeatedly flagged and delayed at airports
37:36
Because his name matched a name on the watch list.
37:39
Not him. Someone else named T.
37:42
Kennedy, Representative John Lewis.
37:44
You know, John Lewis, the civil rights arc icon,
37:47
the man who was beaten unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
37:51
in nineteen sixty five, whose skull was fractured by a state trooper's billy club,
37:56
flagged by the terrorist watch list,
37:59
repeatedly, like over and over and over and had to be cleared repeatedly
38:03
by airline staff who just recognized him.
38:06
Now, they got cleared, because of course they did,
38:09
right? They were a senator and a congressman.
38:11
They had staff and phones and the institutional power to make a call
38:15
and make it stop. Which tells you two things at the same time.
38:19
First, if the list can't distinguish between a civil rights icon and a terrorist,
38:24
that it's not an intelligence tool,
38:27
it's a dragnet. A GAO report found that the vast majority of positive matches
38:33
at airports had
38:34
end with the person being released.
38:36
Meaning the list's positive match rate is dominated by false positives.
38:40
Meaning most people it identifies as potential threats are really just innocent
38:44
people with similar names or similar data profiles.
38:48
And second, most people are not Ted Kennedy.
38:51
Most people don't have a Senate office and a chief of staff.
38:54
Most people are Meher Arar. Most people are a Muslim American family trying
39:00
to get home for the holidays.
39:01
They get the secondary screening and the handcuffs and the questions,
39:06
and they have no one to call. And they have no idea why.
39:09
And the answer they get when they ask is nothing.
39:12
We can neither confirm nor deny.
39:14
Now imagine the version of that that doesn't wait for a name to match at an airport.
39:19
A version that runs constantly in the background on everyone,
39:23
using pattern alignment and attribute correlation.
39:28
A machine that decides you resemble a threat profile based upon
39:33
who you follow online, or where your phone has been,
39:36
or what you've said in texts purchased from a data broker,
39:39
which political rally you attended,
39:42
or which labor organizer you sent money to,
39:44
and adds you to the file before you've done a single illegal thing.
39:49
John Lewis got flagged for having a name.
39:52
What happens when the flag is generated by an algorithm trained on records?
39:57
The government bought without a warrant,
40:00
curated by contractors, earning one hundred and forty five million dollars,
40:05
with the inspector general gone and the oversight board effectively neutered.
40:09
I think you already know. We met him at the top of the episode.
40:13
His name is Maher Arrar, and he's still on the list.
40:17
So
40:17
Let me tell you the whole thread through,
40:20
because this is where it stops being a collection of alarming facts
40:24
and becomes a single argument.
40:26
There are three patterns, and they're not separate stories,
40:30
they're the same pattern wearing three different masks.
40:33
Pattern one, surveillance always expands.
40:37
Yes, even you right wingers who support this stuff,
40:41
it will eventually expand to include you.
40:44
Pattern two.
40:46
Oversight is always dismantled at the moment of expansion.
40:50
Not after, not before,
40:53
the exact same thing that puts the expansion into place dismantles
41:00
the oversight. And pattern three secrecy and obfuscation
41:05
is the mechanism of persecution.
41:08
So let's take them one at a time.
41:09
Surveillance always expands. COINTELPRO said communists and meant civil rights
41:14
leaders, anti-war activists, feminists,
41:16
labor organizers, everybody Hoomer feared or hated
41:19
or found politically inconvenient.
41:21
The watch list said Islamic terrorists.
41:23
And now it's turning toward domestic political dissent,
41:27
with a State Department report naming sitting mayors,
41:30
members of Congress, a union organizer,
41:32
and an ice cream entrepreneur as foreign agents.
41:36
The stated target is always the acceptable enemy.
41:39
The one that you can say out loud and people just kind of nod along.
41:44
Like from the musical Chicago.
41:46
The real target is always the inconvenient citizen.
41:50
It's the one pattern that has never once failed to reproduce itself.
41:56
Oversight is dismantled at the moment of expansion.
41:58
COINTELPRO ran for fifteen years because nobody was watching.
42:03
And it was exposed by a burglary rather than any system built to catch it.
42:08
And right now the internal audit office is abolished,
42:11
the inspector general is removed,
42:13
the privacy board stripped of its quorum,
42:15
702 extended without a warrant requirement,
42:18
all of it landing at the exact moment they're procuring an AI model.
42:25
That's not sloppiness, that's just a sequence.
42:28
If you remove the smoke detectors before you start the fire.
42:32
There's a pattern of behavior here.
42:34
And secrecy is the mechanism. The no notice,
42:37
no evidence required process is the ideal instrument
42:40
of political persecution because you cannot fight what you cannot see,
42:44
cannot name, cannot challenge.
42:46
R couldn't. The care plaintiffs had to sue for years just to establish that they
42:52
had a right to due process before being called terrorists.
42:55
They won that argument at trial.
42:58
Then an appeals court took it away on standing.
43:01
And the machine kept running. Now there's a specific danger the Cato Institute gave
43:05
a name to. And I love the name because it's precise in a way that legal language
43:10
almost never is. Predicate laundering.
43:13
Here's what it means. The old rule that to open a national security investigation,
43:19
you needed a predicate, a factual basis,
43:21
like an individualized reason to believe that a specific person is
43:26
a threat to national security.
43:29
Yeah. Predicate laundering is when you use AI to create
43:35
a list of a hundred individually innocuous data queries into
43:41
an aggregate profile that no single oversight node ever sees as a whole.
43:45
A purchase here, a location ping here,
43:49
a social media follow, a a political donation,
43:53
a a name in someone else's contact list.
43:56
Every query is legal.
43:59
Every piece of data is lawfully obtained or purchased or scraped,
44:03
and no judge sees the whole picture because no judge is ever asked to
44:08
see the whole picture. What comes out the other end is a surveillance dossier
44:14
on a person who's done nothing.
44:16
Generated by a machine that launders the absence of a predicate through pattern
44:22
matching until it comes out looking like a lead.
44:25
That's the game.
44:27
And the machine makes it frictionless at a scale no human could ever achieve.
44:32
So stack the three the three you know masks.
44:36
A power that always expands from acceptable enemies to political dissidents,
44:40
oversight removed at the exact moment the power expands,
44:43
and a process engineered to be invisible and permanent.
44:46
And then hand all of that to an AI operating system at a scale no COINtel
44:52
pro agent with a filing cabinet could ever have imagined.
44:55
Hoover opened more than 500,000 investigations by hand with paper files
45:01
and human informants and physical surveillance.
45:04
This machine can correlate a million records before you finish your coffee.
45:09
Never file one piece of paper anyone can subpoena and generate a flag
45:14
no human reviewer will have the time to scrutinize.
45:18
Now it matters beyond this episode because
45:21
Beyond the show, beyond this particular moment in 2026,
45:25
because the foundational promise of the American legal system,
45:29
at least the one we tell ourselves,
45:31
the one carved into buildings and recited at school,
45:34
is that you are punished for what you do.
45:37
Not for who you are or what you might do someday.
45:42
That's the whole point. That's the presumption of innocence.
45:45
That's due process. That's the Fourth Amendment's protection of persons.
45:50
Not just property. Precrime is the deletion of that promise at the level of code.
45:56
It doesn't actually repeal the Fourth Amendment,
45:59
it just makes the Fourth Amendment irrelevant by operating in spaces
46:03
the amendment's authors could never have imagined.
46:06
AI. There's no way Benjamin Franklin was considering this.
46:11
And the human cost is not hypothetical.
46:13
We've already run the beta test.
46:15
Geronimo Pratt lost 27 years of his life.
46:19
Daruba bin Wahad lost nineteen.
46:21
Maher Arar lost a year in a cell the size of a grave in the ground,
46:26
and the rest of his life to a list that he can't leave.
46:30
Thousands of American Muslims lost the simple,
46:33
ordinary freedom of just getting on a plane and going home without handcuffs.
46:37
That's the machine at nineteen fifty speed.
46:40
At paper speed, at one agent with a typewriter speed.
46:46
Now we're building the next version at machine speed.
46:49
No brakes, and a list of forty three names already sitting at
46:53
the Secretary of State's desk waiting to be ingested.
46:56
They ran this program once and it cost them nothing.
46:59
So they're running it again. And this time the filing cabinets in the cloud
47:03
and the night watchman's gone and
47:05
And the eight people who might break in and steal the files would have
47:08
to somehow exfiltrate a database that lives on servers they'll never physically
47:14
enter.
47:15
One thing before you go, it's not the AI.
47:17
Everybody's gonna watch the AI.
47:19
The scary robot, the minority report of all of it,
47:21
that's the magic trick. That's the the hand they want you looking at,
47:24
right? Watch the other one, the boring stuff,
47:26
the audit office, the inspector general,
47:28
the oversight board. Still exists,
47:30
can't vote. Because a surveillance power is only as dangerous as
47:34
its missing check or balance. COINTELPRO wasn't evil because Hoover had files.
47:40
It was evil because no one could make him stop.
47:43
The technology is not the story here.
47:45
The missing breaks of the story.
47:47
So when the next new power gets announced,
47:50
and it will, don't ask what it can do.
47:53
Ask who can turn it off. Then go find out if that person still has a job.
47:58
The only reason we know COINTELPRO existed is that eight people broke into that
48:01
FBI office in 1971 and stole it.
48:03
That's it. That's the mechanism.
48:05
No court found it, no committee caught it,
48:07
no inspector general filed a report.
48:09
It took a burglary. And it took those eight people getting away with
48:13
it for 40 years. That was the system's self-correction.
48:16
A crime. And in 2026,
48:20
we have rebuilt that exact condition on purpose.
48:22
Same year they expanded the power.
48:25
They took the watchdogs apart one at a time,
48:27
fifty years of smoke detectors pulled off the ceiling,
48:29
and somebody lit up the stove.
48:32
They didn't forget COINTELPRO,
48:33
they studied it. And the lesson they took was not don't do this,
48:37
it was don't get caught. And this time,
48:40
you remove the thing that catches you first,
48:42
and then you build the machine.
48:43
That should make you angry. Stay angry.
48:46
Angry is useful. Despair is what they're counting on.
48:49
So two things. One, assume the file exists,
48:51
not as paranoia.
48:53
Every location ping, every broker purchase,
48:55
it's already sitting somewhere and it's already for sale.
48:58
So stop treating your metadata like it's private and start treating
49:01
it like it's testimony. Move the real organizing off the platforms.
49:05
Signal in person, paper, those eight people won because they went analog
49:12
on the night of a boxing match.
49:13
Analog still works. A conversation between two people in a park with
49:16
no phones is the one thing that this machine cannot eat.
49:20
Two
49:21
Figure out how to file a FOIA request.
49:23
Jesus. It's easy. I mean, on yourself,
49:26
on your local fusion center, on your police department contracts with these veters,
49:30
your city, they will stall, they will redact,
49:33
and they will answer badly. File it anyway.
49:35
Every request demands a response.
49:37
Every response leaves a trail.
49:39
Every trail is ammunition for the next journalist,
49:42
the next lawsuit, the next podcast host.
49:45
Bureaucracies hate friction. Just be friction.
49:49
You're not powerless, you are unorganized.
49:51
Those are different problems. And only one of them is permanent.
49:54
Everything else we do is at FOF.foundation.
49:56
You can check us out there. We're on Apple Podcasts,
49:59
Spotify. I'm Joshua. My other co-host who hasn't been with us for a bit is Will.
50:05
Meher Arrar is still on the list.
50:09
So remember his name because the machine has already forgot he's innocent.
50:13
Take care of each other, and I'll talk to you next time.
50:16
Bye.