How the CIA Bypassed the Constitution

Transcript

So, this is the CIA. They gather intelligence on America's foreign enemies, ideally preventing wars before they even start. They can't spy on American citizens, and they can't conduct operations here on US soil. Problem is, they'll probably make their job a whole lot easier if they could. So, what do they do? They could find a startup company, fund that company, and then teach them how to make tools that support the CIA's mission, and then have that company use those tools on their behalf.

And that's exactly what they do. Now, the CIA knows you can't exactly go around funding private corporate spy agencies. It's a bad look. So what they did in 1999 is started a venture capital firm called InQel and its sole mission was investing in tech startups whose innovations could enhance national security. And one of those startups they found was Palunteer.

>> Palunteer came in and said look we can take all of this information that you're collecting. And the defense department collects a whole lot on the battlefield and integrate it in a database and help you spot bad actors, spot terrorists. >> We built this killchain, the digital kill chain. How do you defend your country and kill your enemies? Our product is used on occasion to kill people. >> We have gotten to the place where where a lot of people think something's gone wrong.

>> Founded in 2003 by Peter Teal after he sold PayPal. He described it as a missionoriented company. Now, that's pretty vague, but its original mission was to apply software similar to PayPal's fraud detection systems to help reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties. And they delivered. The idea was is that a PayPal where where Peter had started and sold Payball before and I was an intern at PayPal and the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all of our money.

And so we had to figure out how to stop the bad guys. >> They're tracking battlefield threats, preventing terrorist attacks in real time and even unraveling Bernie Maidoff's Ponzi scheme. I mean, their software even helped find Osama bin Laden. >> The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. >> But here's what they don't want you to know.

That same company building surveillance infrastructure for military operations overseas is simultaneously building comprehensive databases of American citizens here at home. So what happens when a company partially owned by the CIA decides that they want to become the operating system for the entire US government? Now Palanteer started off with a pretty patriotic mission. They wanted to prevent terrorism. They saw the intelligence gaps that led to al-Qaeda being able to attack us on 9/11. and they knew that their software could help make a difference in preventing future attacks.

What their software does is collect mind-blowing amounts of data. We're talking satellite images, fingerprints, bank records, phone records, social media data, and a whole lot more. The result of all that data collection is that it lets users spot hidden relationships, patterns, criminal networks, uncover terrorist activity. They say it can even predict attacks. Now, intel agencies have always collected data.

That's nothing new, but they had analysts drowning in data from a thousand different sources. Palanteer flipped that. Instead of humans sorting through data, the software automatically gathers it, analyzes it, and serves up actionable intel to its users, all on a super easy to use platform. And thanks to this efficient, easy to use intel analyst dream machine, they're able to land clients inside the government beyond the CIA. We're talking about the FBI, the NSA, Department of Defense, Special Operations Command, Marine Corps, Air Force, and that's just naming a few of them.

And it makes sense that all these agencies are sharing intelligence and talking to one another when we're fighting wars overseas and trying to prevent another terrorist attack. But here's the question. Once you build the perfect surveillance tool for tracking foreign terrorists, what happens when that same tool starts seeing enemies everywhere? By 2010, the war on terror was entering a different phase. And so was Palanteer. The same algorithms tracking insurgents in Afghanistan are now tracking immigrants for ICE.

Activists for the FBI and potential criminals for police departments all across America. Look at New Orleans, Los Angeles, and New York City. These are cities where Palunteers's predictive policing software claims that it can identify who's going to commit crimes before they even commit them. Now, I know that sounds a lot like pre-rime from the movie Minority Report, but this isn't science fiction at all. This is happening right now.

Just look at Los Angeles. In 2011, LAPD launched something called Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration, or Operation Laser for short. And guess who's right at the center of it? You got it. Palanteer. Their Gotham software made it easier and faster for the department to create chronic offender bulletins and put together information from all different types of sources on people that they believed were likely to commit a crime.

So, here's how it works. Police would target an area and that generates more field reports, more traffic stops, more arrests. Then, they'd feed that data back into Palunteer's algorithm. When police target an area generates more crime reports, more arrests and more stops in that area. And the subsequent crime data would lead the algorithm to direct police back to the same exact area.

It's a perfect feedback loop. More you surveil, more criminals you find. More surveillance you can justify. And before you know it, everyone in that area is a potential criminal. Officers ordered to fill out field interview cards with as much information as they could possibly get every time they stop somebody.

The program's architect admitted he knew most of the time the cards didn't lead to anything, but it was the data that went into the system. And that's what I wanted. They're collecting data on innocent people just to feed the machine. That sound familiar? Because it should. It's the same data collection obsession that led to 780 people being locked in Guantanamo Bay, where over 95% of them were eventually released without any charges at all.

Those are the people that survived the interrogation. And if you're thinking, "Those are just some random people in the Middle East. Why should I care?" You're kind of missing the point. The same algorithms are now targeting American citizens in American cities. But Palanteer wasn't just predicting who would commit crimes.

They were predicting who would commit the ultimate crime. And that's questioning the government's official narrative. In 2018, while everyone was focused on Facebook harvesting data to manipulate elections, guess who was providing the back-end analysis? Palanteer wasn't just watching, they're learning how to weaponize personal data for political control. The same behavioral prediction models they used to identify potential criminals in Los Angeles are now being used to identify potential dissident online. And when Wikileaks started publishing classified documents that exposed war crimes and government lies, Palanteer didn't just track down sources.

They helped develop strategies to discredit and suppress the stories themselves. Now notice the evolution. First, they used data to predict terrorism, then to predict crime, then to predict political opposition. Initially, Palanteer started off with a pretty reasonable mission. But once the intel community customers realized what was possible, together they created something unprecedented.

A system that could neutralize disscent before it ever formed. The algorithm that flagged a teenager in Cshaw as a future gang member could now flag a journalist as a security threat or peace activists as a foreign influence operation. So we know Palanteer's business model. Collect as much data as you possibly can on an individual and use that data to form an opinion on what they are, who they are, and what they might do in the future. And the ones buying the products are the biggest, most powerful entities on the planet.

They got all our financial data thanks to customers like Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan, multiple hedge funds, and even the IRS. Think about what that means. Every transaction, every loan application, every investment, every tax return, they know who's struggling financially, who's purchasing what, who's making cash withdrawals. They have access to all of our medical data thanks to their contracts with Medicare and Medicaid. And major insurance companies are following suit all the time.

Your prescriptions, your diagnosis, your mental health records, your genetic information, if you've ever had that testing done. With their integration into Doge, they're positioned to access every single thing the federal government knows about you, plus all the data they can purchase from brokers worldwide. Your browsing history, your location data, your shopping habits, your social media connections. Now, imagine Palanteer's algorithm putting those dots together. You visit a therapist, fill a prescription for anxiety medication, make several cash withdrawals.

Their system flags you as psychologically unstable with access to untraceable funds, or you donate to a certain political cause or search for information about government programs, and your medical records show you've been prescribed pain medication. Suddenly, you're flagged as a potential domestic extremist with possible substance issues. What kind of conclusions are they going to start drawing about each and every one of us? And more importantly, what happens when those conclusions determine whether you get a job, a loan, medical treatment, or insurance, or they determine you're guilty of committing a crime before you've done a single thing wrong? We're not just talking about surveillance anymore. We're talking about algorithmic control of the American life. And it's powered by the most comprehensive database, human behavior ever assembled.

So, in the end, the CIA got exactly what they wanted. They can't spy on Americans, but they don't have to. Palanteer does it for them. Then, they sell that intelligence back to every single government agency that wants it. The restrictions on domestic surveillance didn't disappear, it just got privatized.

In the words of legal scholar Jack Balin, because the Constitution does not reach private parties, the government has increasing incentives to rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it, thus circumventing constitutional guarantees. God bless America.