Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found.

The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI. 

404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program. 

“The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an email. Here Border Patrol seems to be “using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. If we can't meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can't trust them,” he added.

Predictive policing is a highly controversial practice that police departments and federal agencies are increasingly turning to. The practice is designed to find people who may have committed crimes, but at the moment, no evidence of them doing so exists. Broadly, law enforcement may analyze data — such as a person's movements, where they are at a certain time, or the roads they drive — then create or find another pretense to pull them over. 

At around 9:30pm one night in May, Kyle William Olson was driving his black Chevy SUV on Interstate 90, with his dog Ducky in the backseat, according to police reports and an interview Olson gave to 404 Media. In Olson’s vehicle were marijuana edibles, marijuana cuttings, and butane hash oil. He works on a licensed cannabis farm in California, where he had picked up the weed, and was transporting it home to Wisconsin, he told 404 Media.

Olson drove past Sergeant James Beck of the Montana Highway Patrol who was sitting in his police car along with a colleague. When Olson passed, Beck noticed the vehicle’s license plate was obstructed by what he described as a tinted cover and the luggage holder, according to a police report. Beck pulled out, caught up to Olson, and pulled him over.

“Nothing major,” Beck said once he approached the passenger side window and exchanged pleasantries with Olson, according to bodycam footage. Beck said Olson’s license plate was “a little bit obstructed.”

“Just so you know, that’s our reason for stopping you,” Beck said. In the end, the officers demanded Olson step out of the vehicle, they tested his blood and charged him with a DUI. Authorities later charged Olson with possession with intent to distribute because of the marijuana in his vehicle, Olson told 404 Media.

But that wasn’t the real reason for stopping Olson.

During discovery in his case, Olson was provided a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document that explained how Border Patrol instigated his traffic stop. Written by Border Patrol Agent Matthew Phelps, the document said Phelps was assigned to the “Spokane Sector Border Patrol Targeting & Intelligence Division (TID) — Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT).” Olson shared the document with 404 Media.

In his role at the PITT, Phelps wrote he reviews “law enforcement-sensitive databases” to develop intelligence before handing over information to local law enforcement. That intelligence specifically involves reviewing Americans’ financial activity, the document says.

In Olson’s case, Phelps says he observed, “information contained within law enforcement-sensitive systems suggesting financial activity patterns commonly associated with illicit narcotics activity.” The document says Phelps also looked at Olson’s prior arrest and criminal history.

Phelps wrote he then sent over what he found to Sergeant Beck, to “support general interdiction efforts.” Phelps says in the document that his intelligence was not the “sole basis” for the stop.

In his own report detailing the stop, Sergeant Beck wrote, “It was relayed to me by U.S. Border Patrol targeting analyst Matthew Phelps that he had identified a vehicle that had indicators of possible narcotics trafficking.” Beck then pulled over Olson for the obstructed license plate.

The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over. The Associated Press’s investigation found the predictive policing program is also heavily using ALPRs to track potential targets’ movements. 

It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans’ financial activity. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) declined to answer what financial activity the agency was monitoring, and whether it obtained a warrant or not.

A CBP spokesperson told 404 Media in an email: “U.S. Border Patrol uses intelligence-informed analysis and planning to support national security operations, allocate resources, and help identify potential threats and bad actors to public safety. These efforts are conducted consistent with applicable law, policy, privacy protections, and oversight requirements.”

“For operational security reasons, we do not discuss specific analytical methods, data sources, targeting criteria, investigative techniques, system capabilities, or deployment details. Public disclosure of such information could compromise law enforcement operations and investigations as well as creating safety risks for agents and the public,” the statement added.

Border Patrol’s predictive policing program has led to innocent people being pulled over and questioned. In the case of Alek Schott, who was pulled over on Interstate 35 by a Bexar County sheriff’s deputy in 2022, authorities claimed he had drifted between lanes and then tore apart his vehicle. They found nothing, according to the Institute for Justice, which represented Schott.

In the docket for that case is a copy of conversations between law enforcement officials, including Border Patrol agents. Putting one of those participant’s phone numbers into WhatsApp reveals a profile picture of a law enforcement patch. A pawn with wings sits in the center, surrounded by lightning bolts. The patch reads, “Laredo Sector Tech Ops PITT,” indicating there is also a Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team in the Laredo Sector.

Border Patrol operates 20 sectors according to CBP’s website. CBP declined to answer whether any of these other sectors also have Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams.

“The government’s increasing use of mass surveillance — whether that surveillance comes via ALPRs, financial records, or the like — coupled with predictive policing is a recipe for tyranny,” Rob Frommer, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, told 404 Media. “We fought a revolution for the idea that we are citizens, not subjects. Yet schemes like CBP’s Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team treat all Americans as if they are potential suspects. This is not just wrong, it’s unconstitutional, and IJ will keep pushing courts and Congress to end this attack on Americans’ security.”

A new streaming TV channel shows films made with genAI, reports Engadget. "Fairground AI Creator TV" is free — and supported with ads — describing its material as "AI Cinema": "AI-generated" can make it sound as though someone typed a sentence into a machine and came back five minutes later to find a finished movie. Fairground's catalog shows why that description can be too simple. Take Lost Garden: The Awakening of the Lantern Knight. According to its Fairground page, creator Frank Houbre wrote the world, characters, mythology, emotional arc and screenplay himself. AI tools were used mainly for animation and visual production, with other tools helping create voices and music before the episode was assembled in conventional video-editing software. There's still one question, the article notes: "whether viewers actually want an AI-focused TV channel." More than 100 AI creators have contributed to the 24-hour slate of programming, although Variety points out several of them were discovered on social media. The channel was recently profiled in an article by the Guardian. Its headline? "'Nightmare fodder': Roku's AI slop channel is even worse than expected." (And its subheading calls it "a 24/7 channel devoted to low-quality AI content for viewers sick of watching real people move...") What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up... Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it "bottom-of-the-barrel slop"... On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years... However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn't so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you'd see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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In 1999, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett were the final crew to front the long-running movie-riffing series Mystery Science Theater 3000—Nelson as the human test subject of the same name, Murphy as the delightfully pompous Tom Servo, and Corbett as that wily rascal (you know you want him, baby) Crow T. Robot. Having formed a cohesive unit onscreen and behind the scenes on the show’s three Sci-Fi Channel seasons, the trio kept at the unique form of comedy perfected by MST3K following the show’s cancellation. In 2004, they released their first efforts as The Film Crew, before pivoting to (and going audio only as) RiffTrax in 2006.

But in their years of recording humorous commentary tracks for blockbusters and B-movie schlock alike, the Satellite Of Love was never far from their hearts. Their castmates and co-writers Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Jones Nelson (the latter of whom is married to Mike Nelson) eventually joined the RiffTrax fold; Murphy and Corbett reprised the roles of mad-scientist second bananas Professor Bobo and The Observer for the first season of the 2010s MST3K revival headed up by series creator Joel Hodgson. And now they find themselves at the center of the search for the worst movie ever made once more, thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments, the crowd-funded comeback that will subject Mike, Servo, and Crow to four new episodes of cinematic crud this fall. Before the premiere of the first Experiment—a riff of ’60s creature feature Sting Of Death that Fathom Entertainment is bringing to theaters September 9 and 13—Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett spoke to The A.V. Club about returning to MST3K’s not-so-distant future, the parts of the old show they wanted to maintain, and how they’ve managed to keep their creative collaboration going for multiple decades. (It probably has something to do with the way their natural, off-the-cuff banter just sounds and reads like Mike and the Bots going at it.) 

The A.V. Club: When the opportunity to do these episodes presented itself, were you surprised?

Kevin Murphy: I was absolutely surprised, because we were done. 1999, we closed up shop and we all moved on. And so for this to reappear was intriguing. All the stars aligned at the exact same time, and it seemed like, “Well, there’s never going to be another good time to do this.”

Bill Corbett: We didn’t say yes right away. I think it’s fair to say we had to really think “Is this a mistake? On any number of levels?” We just seem like old dogs returning to the farm to the die or something. That’s what they do, old dogs. 

How about you, Mike?

Mike Nelson: It is a weird thing to return to something that was formative in your life, but it was a long time ago. That is an odd thing, but there’s such a joy to it—like, “Wow. Hey, all these people!” It was weirdly, weirdly fun in a way that is hard to describe.

KM: The way I describe it is that we managed to get a big part of the old band back together. Our original director of photography. Two of our favorite prop people. Toolmaster Jef Maynard. Brad Keely, our editor. Beez McKeever, Patrick Brantseg—all these folks had worked in and day out to make this thing happen. We’d write these cockamamie scripts, and these people would just, like, move heaven and earth in order to get the stupid things we put on scripts onto the screen. That was the joy in it, was working with these people who we had such a great connection with.

BC: We’d see some of them here and there, every now and then. But to be getting together every day with all of them and hanging out and having fun was, to me, at least 50% of it—just like a reunion with old pals and compatriots in the puppet trade. [Laughs.] They all get it, and they all not only get the kind of range we can and can’t do, but the sense of humor. They developed it with us. And the visual language of it. Having Trace Beaulieu involved, too, and Frank Conniff—Trace really did put the visual language of the whole show in place back before my time.