Homeland Security agents are scrutinizing the social media site Reddit, and monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans who criticize the agency.
The spying was revealed in an intelligence bulletin prepared by the Border Patrol in January and leaked to me. The subject of the report is a Reddit user”budget-chicken-2425,” who is not a narco-trafficker, gang member or terrorist. Just someone concerned about federal overreach.
The report focuses on Budget-Chicken’s call for a protest near a Border Patrol facility in Edinburg, Texas. Although the report acknowledges that anti-ICE protests across Texas have been “generally lawful” and there is no evidence of any threat posed by budget-chicken calls, it says any kind of protest near a Border Patrol facility “requires continued monitoring.”
To quote directly from the intelligence bulletin:
“At this time, there are no specific reporting of planned violence targeting DHS personnel or facilities associated with this protest call; however, any demonstrations near USBP [United States Border Patrol] RGV [Rio Grande Valley] “Facilities may present operational, security and reputational risks that require constant monitoring.”
Budget-Chicken’s offensive Reddit post was on the r/RioGrandeValley channel. The post, titled “Join me in protesting ICE,” is just a few sentences long, calling on “neighbors, family, and the community” to “witness and spread awareness” of the Border Patrol station protest.
This may seem innocuous, but the Intelligence Bulletin treats it as a threat.
At one point the bulletin inadvertently reveals the “intelligence collection requirements” driving this surveillance — a window into how the federal government justifies this kind of social media spying on Americans. According to these requirements, most tasks are approved under so-called “Force Protection”, a military term for the protection of troops from enemy attack. By reviving this battlefield concept, Homeland Security is treating the Reddit thread like a hostile environment.
But Homeland Security spies are interested in much more than budget-chicken. They are using Reddit extensively to assess the climate of the country and what they think of immigration officials like themselves. (They could just consult public votingWhich recently shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that immigration enforcement has “gone too far.”)
In the section titled “Patterns, Trends and Relationship Analysis,” the bulletin gives a sense of the vast amount of data collected by Homeland Security to generate a big-picture view of what is happening in the country. A specific priority asks: “Which groups or individuals are responsible for, or linked to, border violence and what impact is CBP intended to have?” [Customs and Border Protection] Personnel and operations?” (This ultimately led to the creation of databases and watch lists of objectionable Americans.)
The bulletin said Homeland Security is specifically tracking three social trends:
-
Social media-driven mobilization
-
Symbolic targeting of government facilities
-
A statewide baseline of mobility capability
In other words, the government is building a sociological profile of political discontent. The bulletin states that these protests are “perception-driven” – meaning they are motivated by “generalized concerns about rights” rather than specific incidents. In the national security argument, the lack of a specific trigger makes the public more unpredictable and therefore requires “situational awareness”.
But it is the subtlety of the surveillance that is most absurd. To determine the “threat” posed by Budget-Chicken-2425, analysts did not just look at the protest calls; They examined the user’s entire digital footprint.
The bulletin states that Chicken “often participates in various community discussions,” listing his interests in r/Texans (comparing the team to the Cleveland Browns), r/Movies (discussing the film almost Famous), r/stephenking (sharing book collections), and r/FuckImOld (reminiscent of 1970s television production logos).
The gap between the “legitimate” reality of the protests and the agency’s internal panic is most visible in the “Speak Up” (stay tuned) alerts included in the appendix. Despite the bulletin’s own admission that “there has been no specific reporting of planned violence”, the Rio Grande Valley Sector Operations Center issued the following warning to its agents: “It is recommended that all agents wear their ballistic armor, use long weapons, and work in groups if possible.”
The national security mindset has so infected immigration officials that they now treat four-sentence Reddit posts about “spreading awareness” as if they were secret messages from al Qaeda. It’s a system designed to detect threats everywhere, even if that means finding them in a subreddit of Stephen King novels.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
<a href