Border Patrol agent spills the beans on 'watchlists' used to track Americans
A Border Patrol agent recently spilled the beans about more than a dozen 'secret and obscure watchlists' that President Donald Trump's administration has created to monitor Americans, according to a new report.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on Wednesday that a source inside Customs and Border Patrol spoke to him about a list of "aggressive protesters" that the administration has cobbled together using multiple existing government databases. The protesters the administration cares about most are anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian protesters, the report said. Some of the codenames of the lists are Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta, it added.
"Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States. Slipstream is a classified social media repository," Klippenstein reported. "Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking."
Klippenstein added that the federal government has used all kinds of watchlists following the 9/11 attacks. They are used to process the "Niagara of information" that the government collects about suspicious individuals, even though courts have thrown cold water on the idea of watchlists altogether.
"Now, the national security community has developed an interlocking set of lists and applications that are secret not just to the public but opaque to most who toil in the federal agencies themselves," Klippenstein reported. "Asked about the watchlists, a Border Patrol agent recounted to me how they punch their data into their own proprietary application, not really knowing what happens after that."
"Again, these watchlists aren’t the all-seeing eye of Sauron that many imagine," he added. "They’re more like the compound eye of a fly, a fragmented array of lenses (over 3,000 per eye in the common housefly!) that collectively form a mosaic. That mosaic—the ability to unify all the disparate lists into one master picture—doesn’t yet exist, sources tell me. That, however, is the direction we’re going, especially with software packages like Palantir that can be customized to aggregate all that is collected."