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

Maher Ar was thirty two years old.

Software engineer, Canadian citizen,

a wife, two children, a really rich and robust life in Ottawa.

In two thousand two he was changing planes at JFK Airport

in New York City, coming home from a family vacation,

that's it. That's the whole crime.

Except there was no crime. Somebody somewhere had put his name on a list.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had passed along some bad information,

basically saying he was an Islamic extremist and that he had ties to Al Qaeda.

None of it's true. None of it was tested.

None of it was something that a court had ever looked at.

But it was on a list. And the list doesn't really ask questions.

So American agents detained him and then they didn't.

didn't just send him home to Canada,

they put him on a plane to Syria,

a country he was not a citizen of,

and in Syria he was thrown into an underground cell about the size of a grave,

that he later said, and he was tortured for almost a year for a name on a list.

Here's the part that should keep you up at night.

In 2006, the Canadian government ran a full public inquiry,

cleared him completely.

No offense, no security risk, nothing.

Canada apologized and paid him over ten million dollars.

I assume that's Canadian. And the United States,

well, they refused to apologize.

They refused to pay him a dime.

They fought his lawsuit and won on national security grounds,

but the Supreme Court wouldn't even hear it.

And this is the line, this is the one that really gets me.

He's still on the list to this day.

A man his own investigators cleared,

a man who was tortured because of a clerical error,

he still can't enter the United States because once you're on the list,

there is no off the list. Now imagine a machine that builds that list faster,

bigger, before you've done anything at all.

Hi, I'm Joshua, and this is The Overlap,

a show about power and labor and the machinery of American injustice.

The parts of it that kind of hum along quietly while everyone

is looking somewhere else. Quick note before we get into it my co producer Will

is off this week, so here's why we're doing this now.

On July twenty eighth, twenty twenty six,

Reason magazine ran a story with the headline that sounds like a movie pitch.

Minority Report. FBI seeks AI for political watch list.

And your first instinct, I mean my first instinct,

is to kind of roll your eyes, right?

Because that's the kind of headline that gets written every couple

of years and usually the reality underneath it is more boring,

more bureaucratic, less cinematic.

and if you have any experience with Reason magazine,

they're a clearly libertarian,

weird kind of group of people and

In some cases it reads a little bit like you know Alex Jones show.

But not this time. This time the reality is actually worse than the reason headline.

Because back in March, the FBI's threat screening center,

now that's the agency that runs the terrorist watch list,

the weird list that has no due process or way to get off of it,

quietly posted a procurement notice.

Now a source is sought notice,

looking for a vendor to build them an AI system.

And I want to read you the actual language because I I couldn't have written

it more chilling if I tried. They want a system that can analyze quote similarity,

pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records

to predict where additional relevant information may be derived from.

Across federated systems. Predict.

That's the word. Predict where more information can be found

on you before anything happens.

This is precrime, right? Thought crime.

Federal policy out in the open on a government website with

a request for proposals attached.

And here's the thing.

If this were just a technology story,

I would tell it as a tech story,

but it isn't because we've seen this exact machine before.

We've seen what the FBI does when it gets to build a list of dangerous Americans

or non-Americans with no evidence and no oversight.

We have the files, we have the names,

and there is a body count. So today we're gonna do two things.

We're gonna go back.

To a program that ran for about 15 years in total secrecy that opened nearly

a million investigations on regular Americans,

charged almost none of them. And then we're gonna come forward to the contracts,

the dollar amounts, the men signing them,

and a State Department report that reads like a targeting list because

the history isn't background here.

The history is the instruction manual.

They already ran this program once,

now they wanted to run it again at language learning speed with nobody watching.

So let's go.

nineteen fifty six is where this actually all starts.

J Ed Ger Hoover at is now the director of the FBI,

right? He is the director since nineteen twenty four.

He will be the director until he dies in nineteen seventy two.

Nobody fires Hoover. Presidents are afraid of Hoover because Hoover has files.

And everybody knows Hoover has files.

He survived eight presidents, like eight of them.

He outlasted administrations that hated him and

Men who wanted him gone, because the the files made him untouchable.

That's what a secret list does for the person holding the list.

It's not just a record of other people's vulnerabilities,

it's a personal insurance policy.

And in 1956, Hoover starts a program.

A name that's basically a contraction,

right? It's it's Cointel Pro, the Counterintelligence Program.

And the stated purpose, the thing that they said out loud,

is they were trying to disrupt the Communist Party of the United States.

Foreign subversion, Soviet influence,

the time the Cold War is on, and this is the enemy,

right? That's the pitch. And then here's what it actually became.

Because a program that starts by targeting communists does not stay pointed

at communists. It never does.

This is the pattern, and I want you to to recognize it because we're gonna

see it again in about 20 minutes,

wearing a completely different mask.

Pre crime surveillance always expands from its stated target

to encompass political dissent.

Always. It's the most reliable law in American history that nobody teaches

you in school. So COINtel Pro expands.

What does it expand to?

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Now that's Martin Luther King's organization.

The FBI wiretapped King, bugged his hotel rooms,

they had informants in his inner circle,

people he trusted, people who attended strategy meetings and then filed reports.

The FBI opened a file on King in nineteen fifty seven.

By the early nineteen sixties,

they had declared him, internally in their own documents,

the most dangerous.

Quote Negro in America. That phrase is in the file,

like that's a real designation that actual FBI agents put on paper and pass

it up the chain to J Hoover, who approved the surveillance expansion.

And then, this is documented, this is not conspiracy,

this is in the congressional record,

they mailed him a package, recordings they'd made in his hotel rooms,

plus an anonymous letter. And the letter told him to kill himself.

It told him he had thirty four days before they exposed him,

and there was quote only one thing left for you to do.

The letter arrived just before he was scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

The FBI sent a suicide letter to Martin Luther King,

a Nobel laureate, an American citizen,

a preacher because they didn't like his politics.

That's the agency, so that's that's who we're talking about.

And it expands to the Black Panther Party,

and here I want to name two people because the pattern always comes down

to specific people with specific lives that get destroyed.

Geronimo G Jaga, known as Geronimo Pratt,

a decorated Vietnam veteran, a panther leader in Los Angeles.

The FBI helped frame him for a murder they had evidence that he didn't commit.

They had him under surveillance in another city when the killing happened

and they buried it.

The wiretap records that would have proven his alibi,

well, they said they didn't exist.

They lied about the records. He spent twenty seven years in prison.

Eight of those were in solitary confinement.

His conviction was finally vacated in nineteen ninety seven.

After a judge found that the prosecution had withheld exactly the evidence,

the FBI said that it did not happen.

Next is Daruba Ben Wahad, another Panther,

nineteen years in prison before the FBI's own COINTELPRO documents surfaced

in litigation that blew his conviction apart.

Nineteen years for a man whose trial turned on evidence

the Bureau had deliberately hidden.

It expands to the anti war movement,

to the women's liberation movement,

to socialist organizations, to the young patriots,

to the

Puerto Rican independence movement to and I mean this literally,

virtually any domestic political movement that Hoover decided he didn't like.

The tactics were infiltration,

informants embedded at chapter level,

sometimes rising to leadership positions within activist organizations,

forged letters designed to start like fights,

written in the voice of one activist leader accusing another,

designed to kind of fracture coalitions from the inside.

Anonymous tips to employers to get people fired,

warrantless break ins, they called them black bag jobs,

to photograph documents and plant listening devices,

like straight up harassment, threatening phone calls,

and in some cases coordination with local police that ended with people dead.

Fred Hampton is one of those sleeping in his bed shot by Chicago police

in a raid that the FBI's Chicago field office had materially assisted.

Between nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy four,

the FBI ran more than five hundred thousand separate investigations

of Americans under the heading of subversion.

In nineteen seventy two alone,

they opened sixty five thousand new domestic intelligence files.

By the end of it, headquarters was sitting on files covering roughly

a million people, like American citizens.

And here's the number that matters Zero.

That's how many convictions? Not a low number,

not like a disappointing number,

but zero. Half a million investigations of American citizens for subversion

of their own government, and not one of them produced a criminal conviction.

But that's because the point really wasn't about the charges.

The point was never really about a trial or evidence or a court.

The point was the list. The point was to know.

Who the dangerous people were,

and to make their lives harder and smaller and more frightened.

Disruption is the product. Fear is the product.

And they used the list as the engine to get there.

Now, did anyone stop them? Did the system have any sort of check or balance?

No. And that's the real horror of it because for fifteen years this

ran in a secret room.

Somewhere inside the FBI headquarters.

There was no congressional oversight of FBI domestic intelligence,

worth the name, no judge signing off on individual targets,

no inspector general looking at the files.

The oversight infrastructure didn't exist,

and Hoover liked it that way. He had actively cultivated its absence for decades.

How did that turn out? Not through the system.

The system obviously would never have caught it.

It came out because eight people broke into a building.

March eighth, nineteen seventy one,

Media Pennsylvania, it's a small town outside of Philadelphia,

eight anti war activists, they call themselves the Citizens Commission

to investigate the FBI, picked the night of the big Muhammad Ali Joe Frasier fight.

Because they figured everybody,

including the Night Watchman, would be listening to the radio.

And they broke into a small FBI field office and they took everything,

every file in the place, every single piece of paper.

They hauled it out in bags and briefcases,

and then they drove it away and laid it all out on one big table,

and then they started mailing those files to newspapers.

That's literally how America found out.

Not from some oversight body or a Senate hearing,

not from a whistleblower inside the bureau,

but literally a burglary.

And the only reason we know now that COINtel Pro even existed is that eight private

people committed a crime to expose a much bigger crime.

They weren't identified until twenty fourteen,

when several of them actually went public voluntarily ~ more than forty years later,

because the FBI never caught them.

So the self-correcting mechanism for the most powerful law enforcement agency

in the country was a break-in by eight people who were never caught.

So once the files were out, the dam broke.

And in 1975, the Senate finally did its job.

The church committee, named for Senator Frank Church of Idaho,

not like the church, launched a full investigation.

Eleven senators, months of hearings,

hundreds of witnesses.

And what they find is it's pretty staggering,

not just COINTELPRO, but assassination plots against foreign leaders,

domestic mail opening programs that ran for decades,

the NSA reading Americans' telegrams through a program called Shamrock,

in which a major telegraph company handed over copies of international cables.

Now that doesn't seem really important as of this day,

but I I mean these were these were the internet of the time.

A whole shadow of

Architecture of domestic spying that had been running quietly

and illegally since before most of those 11 senators were actually even in office.

And the church committee has this phrase for what the FBI has been doing.

They called it thought policing.

Policing people, not for what they did,

but for what they believed, for who they were associated with,

for what movement they belonged to.

For the ideas they held. And out of that investigation came reforms,

like real ones for a while. You have the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,

FISA or FISA, and that was in nineteen seventy eight,

which said basically if you want to spy on people domestically

for intelligence purposes, you have to go to a court,

a special secret court, but still a court,

still a judge.

Attorney General Guidelines, the the Levi Guidelines,

named for Attorney General Edward Levi,

that actually limited what the FBI could open as far as

a domestic intelligence investigation.

You needed like a factual predicate.

You needed a real reason. Later,

oversight bodies were built. The idea,

the the whole idea was never again.

Never again do we let secret police build secret lists of American citizens.

Based upon their politics and their associations.

Do you see where this is going?

And that was the promise in 1976.

And here's the bridge to today.

And look, I mean I I I think you can honestly see where this is going.

Every single one of those reforms has been erased,

eroded. Systematically, deliberately,

piece by piece.

Mostly to be fair, mostly after nine eleven,

right? When when the emergency kind of gave cover for a generation of rollbacks.

The wall that FISA has been ~ basically drilled full of holes.

Section seven hundred two alone turned it from a a targeted surveillance tool into

a mass collection authority. The Levi guidelines p actually got loosened

and then replaced with the Mukesey guidelines in two thousand eight.

Which basically expanded what the FBI could investigate and how,

and and the oversight was entirely hollowed out.

The inspector general is gone,

the PCLOB is paralyzed, the the internal audit office is kind of a ghost.

So when the FBI posts a notice in 2026 asking for

a machine that predicts dangerous Americans before they've done anything.

Understand that we are not at the beginning of this story.

This is like part two. The the FBI returns and the sequel has better technology

and fewer people watching. So let's talk about what that looks like right now.

So the terrorist watch list, right,

the modern version is a nine eleven baby.

December two thousand three, a presidential directive creates

the terrorist screening center.

Inside the FBI's security branch.

It takes a bunch of scattered lists,

the State Department's tip off list,

the FBI's own terrorist files,

various agency databases, and consolidates them into one giant database called

the TSDB, the terrorist screening database.

And from day one, from the very like beginning,

here is the standard to get on it.

Suspicion. Not evidence, not a charge,

not a conviction, suspicion. Reasonable suspicion is what they say,

but reasonable to whom and decided by whom,

reviewable by whom, well, nobody you'll ever meet.

It's a completely secret process.

You don't get told you're on it.

You don't get to see the evidence,

you don't get a hearing, you find out at an airport,

usually in handcuffs, when an agent pulls you out of the boarding line

and you have no idea why. And there's no number to call,

there's no form to file that will reliably get you out of this situation.

That's the machine as it exists now for what?

twenty years? A little more than twenty.

Now watch what happens to it in the last eighteen months.

I wonder what happened eighteen months ago.

March twenty seventh, twenty twenty six,

the Threat Screening Center,

same outfit, slightly renamed,

posts the procurement notice FBI T S C A

I E Threat Screening Center AI Enhancement.

And they want the predictive engine,

the similarity and pattern alignment machine.

They want a system that can reach across what they call federated systems,

meaning multiple government databases,

potentially commercial data sources,

potentially anything that they can buy or access,

like flock cameras, and find connections that human analysts would miss

or really never have time to look for,

or were so big.

That no individual human being could ever really see the alignment

of these disparate things. Responses were actually due April 10th.

And they cite in the document a twenty seventeen Intelligence Sharing Directive

N SPM seven as part of the legal scaffolding for why this is authorized.

That's the request. Let's talk about who's cashing in.

June seventeenth.

twenty twenty six, a company called Agile Defense,

through a subsidiary named Intelaware Systems,

gets awarded a one hundred and forty five million dollar contract,

single award, sole source, to support threat screening center intelligence analysis

services. And the language in their own press release is beautiful.

In the way that, you know, like a slick brochure for something terrible

is beautiful. They they say it supports the TSCs,

quote, expanded all threats mission.

Expanded all threats mission.

Listen to that for a second.

Expanded from what? Expanded to what?

All threats. Who defines a threat?

I mean that phrase is doing a lot of load bearing work for a press release.

And nobody in the trade press really stopped to pull on it,

right? Like the mainstream media hasn't really talked about this one.

And look, that's not the only check.

Back in September twenty twenty five,

BAE systems, or the British American Arms Giant

One of the largest defense contractors on the planet got a separate contract

for TSC analysis services. $128 million.

There's a couple a little bit of change in there.

$670,000 more. So $128,678,000

for five years. So you're looking at at just north of

a quarter billion dollars just in these two contracts,

flowing into private companies.

To help the FBI run and modernize its watch list operation.

And those are just the contracts that showed up in like public procurement records.

So keep in mind that's the floor,

not the ceiling. There's your labor angle,

right? Like there's your who profits,

the the men signing these deals,

Rick Wagner, the CEO of Agile Defense,

Jesse Levine, their executive vice president of national security

and law enforcement. Now these are not like you know.

villains twirling their little mustaches,

right? These are contractors. This is a business.

There are pitch decks and sales cycles and quarterly earnings attached to this.

Pre-crime is now a growth industry,

and the growth is funded by your taxes.

And the product is a list of your neighbors and possibly you.

Now who's running the FBI while this happens?

Well, Cash Patel. I want to be careful and precise here.

Because everything I'm about to say is from the public record.

Patel abolished the FBI's Office of Internal Auditing.

That was the FBI's primary internal compliance mechanism for FISA,

Section seven hundred two, which is the main procedural check on whether agents were

legally authorized to search through Americans' communications and data.

And it was it's gone.

Just gone, abolished by Director Kash Patel.

At the same time, the G DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz,

the independent watchdog whose office has produced some of

the most important accountability reports on FBI surveillance abusers

in the last decade, he's out. And President Trump fired all three Democratic members

of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board,

the PCLOB.

I talked about them earlier. That's a five-member board that requires three members

for a quorum. Remove three members,

and the board cannot vote. They cannot issue reports.

They cannot subpoena. They cannot function.

The single federal body, specially designed to watch the watchers,

is flipped off like a light switch.

Not abolished, just paralyzed.

Which is actually more useful.

To them because a a paralyzed board still exists on paper.

Which means you can point to that as an evidence,

you know, that that oversight is still happening,

technically. It still exists. So do you see this this pattern,

right? The oversight structure gets dismantled exactly when

the surveillance powers get expanded.

Not by accident, not as a coincidence of of timing,

at the exact same moment.

That the sequencing is really too clean to be accidental.

And Patel, well, he's not shy about what he's building.

He has confirmed publicly that the FBI buys Americans' location data from commercial

data brokers without a warrant,

or just purchases it on the open market,

right? Because the legal theory is that a warrant is required when

the government takes your data.

Apparently, if a private company collects it,

and sells it to a broker and the FBI buys it from that broker,

the Fourth Amendment takes the afternoon off.

And he's he's actually bragged about double digit increases

in the TSC's biometric capabilities,

which you aren't aware of this yet.

It's facial recognition, gait analysis.

That means like literally watching how you walk and analyzing that as

a pattern to use for recognition.

The works. He said, and this is a real quote that every major tech company

in the world is embedded in the FBI.

Helping build AI counter terrorism capabilities.

Every major tech company in the world embedded in the FBI.

And the auditing office has been decapitated.

Meanwhile, FBI searches you know Americans under Section

702 went up thirty-five percent in a single year.

Now they were about ~ fifty five hundred to over seventy-four hundred

documented searches. And Congress,

there's a bill, HR

eighty thirty five to extend seven two authority to twenty twenty seven with

no new warrant requirement for searching Americans data.

That means the back door is wide open and they want to write it into

law and just call it done. So that's the machine and the money

and the missing brakes. Here's the part where we kind of have to

ask the question that I always end up asking myself in the middle of this research.

Like, why does this keep happening?

We know how it went last time.

We have the church committee report.

It's public. You can download it.

Everyone in that building, every single person in the Hoover building

on Pennsylvania Avenue knows what COINTELPRO was.

It's taught in law schools, it's in the history books.

So why are we building the exact same thing again

and removing it from the hands of people and

Putting it on a system. And look,

here's the honest answer. And it makes me pissed every time I think about it.

Because the last time the punishment was nothing.

Nobody went to prison for COINTELPRO.

Hoover died in office in 1972 with full honors,

celebrated as the founder of modern federal law enforcement.

His name was on the building for decades.

The Bureau got some new rules and waited them out,

and the men who ran the program retired with full pensions.

There was no cost, the list of consequences for building a secret police that sent

a suicide letter to Martin Luther King was a committee,

a report, some guidelines, and eventually a quieter version of the same program.

So of course they built it again.

You don't stop doing a thing that

got you power and cost you nothing.

Now here is, you know, the 2026 problem of all about all of this.

July twenty-first of this year,

not too long ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publishes a 100-page report.

You can download this. The title is Cuba,

the Capital of Twenty-First Century Communism.

Inside it, the report names at least 43 living American politicians.

Journalists, labor leaders, and organizations as alleged agents

of Cuban subversion. Who's on it?

Well, Representative Ilion Omar.

The mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani,

the layer the mayor of Los Angeles,

Karen Bass, Representative Ayana Presley,

Christian Smalls. You might not know who that is.

He

Organized the first successful union election at an Amazon warehouse,

the first one ever in American history.

A journalist, Amy Goodman, Ben Cohen,

as in like Ben from Ben and Jerry's,

the Ice Cream Man, is on a federal subversion list.

This report came out right after Rubio had attended this international

su summit of like sixty plus countries on what the State Department calls.

Left wing political terrorism.

And critics said plainly, what it looks like is this

a targeting list. It's a map. Here are the people,

here are their names, here are their affiliations.

Now put the two things together.

A State Department that publishes a list of forty-three dissident Americans

and calls them foreign agents.

And an FBI that's building an AI designed to

ingest records and predict who might be a threat by correlating patterns

of association and behavior. What do you think feeds the machine?

What do you think that training data actually looks like?

And look, that's not that's not a slippery slope argument,

right? Like that's just the slope.

We're on it. And we're like halfway down it.

Now, we have to talk about what this does to actual human beings.

I told you about Maher Arrar at the top.

Let me let me stay with him for a minute because I kind of rushed past

the worst of it that he really deserves better than just a headline.

He he wasn't a suspect in any American investigation.

He was just a like a transit passenger,

changing planes at JFK, connecting from Zurich to Montreal.

~ the information

that doomed him came from Canada.

I mean, to be fair, from the RCMP,

and it was just garbage. It was a mischaracterization of a causal association with

a man who himself never was charged with anything.

In a normal system, in a system with checks,

that that thin, secondhand, untested claim gets tested.

Somebody looks at it, a judge,

a lawyer, a magistrate, anybody with legal authority and independent review.

Can look at the claim before it destroys a person's life.

In the watch list system, it doesn't get tested.

It just gets acted on. So they held him,

they interrogated him for hours,

and then the United States did something called extraordinary rendition.

Which is a bureaucratic phrase for literally kidnapping someone and shipping them

to a country that will torture them because they're not legally allowed to.

They flew him to Syria on a private jet,

and for close to a year he lived in a hole in the ground.

He described it himself as the size of a grave.

That's roughly the dimensions of a coffin dug into the ground,

and he was beaten with cables.

He was deprived of sleep, and he gave a false confession because that's what torture

creates. Not truth. False confessions,

which is the entire reason torture is useless and

As an intelligence tool, as well as evil as a moral matter,

if we're being honest. Every professional interrogator will tell you this.

The FBI's own behavioral science experts will tell you this,

and yet a year. For a name on a list.

And when Canada finally exonerated him completely,

conducted a full judicial inquiry,

published the findings.

And paid him a settlement, the United States refused.

Refused to even acknowledge that anything improper had occurred.

And even still, his name is on the list.

He's still on it. I'm gonna keep saying that because it's the tell.

It reveals what this list actually is,

not a tool for finding truth. If this were a truth-finding tool,

the the truth would get you off of it.

I mean, right?

And a full judicial inquiry from an allied nation,

they're one of the six eyes, finding him completely innocent and paying

him ten million dollars in compensation would certainly qualify as truth.

It's not a truth finding tool,

it's a tool for maintaining suspicion forever,

regardless of the truth. Once you're in,

you're in. The machine does not have like a reverse gear.

And there is no one with the authority to

Or the will, apparently, to put one in.

So a raw is not a glitch.

It's the system working like it was specifically designed to.

And there is a class action. So in twenty nineteen,

the Council on American Islamic Relations,

or CARE, CAIR, brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of thousands

of American Muslims who had been placed on the watch list.

Not one man, thousands. All of them American citizens.

Their claim was that the process amounted to a broad dragnet targeting Muslims

as a religious and ethnic category.

No specific threat required.

No concrete individualized facts required,

a secret administrative process,

no notice, no meaningful pathway out.

And what did being on it mean for their daily lives?

Pulled from airport lines, secondary screening at every border crossing,

every international flight, every reentry into the country where they were born

and raised. Invasive searches,

missed flights, missed business trips,

Missed family events, missed medical appointments,

years of this, because of a designation that they were never shown

and never given the opportunity to contest.

A federal judge, Anthony Tringa,

in the Eastern District of Virginia,

agreed with them on the constitutional question.

Basically ruled that the watch list process actually violates constitutional

due process. And in plain language,

it says that you cannot

Brand Americans as suspected terrorists in secret without notice,

without a meaningful opportunity to see the basis for the designation

and then fight it. The secret no notice process was constitutionally deficient.

A federal judge said that on the record in 2019.

And then in 2021, the Fourth Circuit threw it out.

Not on the merits.

On standing for my legal friends out there.

The appeals court said the plaintiffs hadn't shown the kind of injury that gets

you into federal court in the first place.

So the constitutional question never got answered.

Think about what that means. A federal judge looked at the process

and said it violates due process.

And the higher court's response,

essentially, was that these people lacked the standing to ask.

The watch lists.

survived judicial review without ever having to justify itself.

That means the machine is still running bigger.

And now they're gonna bolt AI onto it.

And look, here's who catches even when it just means matching names.

Senator Edward Kennedy. Ted Kennedy.

The the senior senator from Massachusetts for nearly 50 years,

yeah. The lion of the Senate was repeatedly flagged and delayed at airports

Because his name matched a name on the watch list.

Not him. Someone else named T.

Kennedy, Representative John Lewis.

You know, John Lewis, the civil rights arc icon,

the man who was beaten unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge

in nineteen sixty five, whose skull was fractured by a state trooper's billy club,

flagged by the terrorist watch list,

repeatedly, like over and over and over and had to be cleared repeatedly

by airline staff who just recognized him.

Now, they got cleared, because of course they did,

right? They were a senator and a congressman.

They had staff and phones and the institutional power to make a call

and make it stop. Which tells you two things at the same time.

First, if the list can't distinguish between a civil rights icon and a terrorist,

that it's not an intelligence tool,

it's a dragnet. A GAO report found that the vast majority of positive matches

at airports had

end with the person being released.

Meaning the list's positive match rate is dominated by false positives.

Meaning most people it identifies as potential threats are really just innocent

people with similar names or similar data profiles.

And second, most people are not Ted Kennedy.

Most people don't have a Senate office and a chief of staff.

Most people are Meher Arar. Most people are a Muslim American family trying

to get home for the holidays.

They get the secondary screening and the handcuffs and the questions,

and they have no one to call. And they have no idea why.

And the answer they get when they ask is nothing.

We can neither confirm nor deny.

Now imagine the version of that that doesn't wait for a name to match at an airport.

A version that runs constantly in the background on everyone,

using pattern alignment and attribute correlation.

A machine that decides you resemble a threat profile based upon

who you follow online, or where your phone has been,

or what you've said in texts purchased from a data broker,

which political rally you attended,

or which labor organizer you sent money to,

and adds you to the file before you've done a single illegal thing.

John Lewis got flagged for having a name.

What happens when the flag is generated by an algorithm trained on records?

The government bought without a warrant,

curated by contractors, earning one hundred and forty five million dollars,

with the inspector general gone and the oversight board effectively neutered.

I think you already know. We met him at the top of the episode.

His name is Maher Arrar, and he's still on the list.

So

Let me tell you the whole thread through,

because this is where it stops being a collection of alarming facts

and becomes a single argument.

There are three patterns, and they're not separate stories,

they're the same pattern wearing three different masks.

Pattern one, surveillance always expands.

Yes, even you right wingers who support this stuff,

it will eventually expand to include you.

Pattern two.

Oversight is always dismantled at the moment of expansion.

Not after, not before,

the exact same thing that puts the expansion into place dismantles

the oversight. And pattern three secrecy and obfuscation

is the mechanism of persecution.

So let's take them one at a time.

Surveillance always expands. COINTELPRO said communists and meant civil rights

leaders, anti-war activists, feminists,

labor organizers, everybody Hoomer feared or hated

or found politically inconvenient.

The watch list said Islamic terrorists.

And now it's turning toward domestic political dissent,

with a State Department report naming sitting mayors,

members of Congress, a union organizer,

and an ice cream entrepreneur as foreign agents.

The stated target is always the acceptable enemy.

The one that you can say out loud and people just kind of nod along.

Like from the musical Chicago.

The real target is always the inconvenient citizen.

It's the one pattern that has never once failed to reproduce itself.

Oversight is dismantled at the moment of expansion.

COINTELPRO ran for fifteen years because nobody was watching.

And it was exposed by a burglary rather than any system built to catch it.

And right now the internal audit office is abolished,

the inspector general is removed,

the privacy board stripped of its quorum,

702 extended without a warrant requirement,

all of it landing at the exact moment they're procuring an AI model.

That's not sloppiness, that's just a sequence.

If you remove the smoke detectors before you start the fire.

There's a pattern of behavior here.

And secrecy is the mechanism. The no notice,

no evidence required process is the ideal instrument

of political persecution because you cannot fight what you cannot see,

cannot name, cannot challenge.

R couldn't. The care plaintiffs had to sue for years just to establish that they

had a right to due process before being called terrorists.

They won that argument at trial.

Then an appeals court took it away on standing.

And the machine kept running. Now there's a specific danger the Cato Institute gave

a name to. And I love the name because it's precise in a way that legal language

almost never is. Predicate laundering.

Here's what it means. The old rule that to open a national security investigation,

you needed a predicate, a factual basis,

like an individualized reason to believe that a specific person is

a threat to national security.

Yeah. Predicate laundering is when you use AI to create

a list of a hundred individually innocuous data queries into

an aggregate profile that no single oversight node ever sees as a whole.

A purchase here, a location ping here,

a social media follow, a a political donation,

a a name in someone else's contact list.

Every query is legal.

Every piece of data is lawfully obtained or purchased or scraped,

and no judge sees the whole picture because no judge is ever asked to

see the whole picture. What comes out the other end is a surveillance dossier

on a person who's done nothing.

Generated by a machine that launders the absence of a predicate through pattern

matching until it comes out looking like a lead.

That's the game.

And the machine makes it frictionless at a scale no human could ever achieve.

So stack the three the three you know masks.

A power that always expands from acceptable enemies to political dissidents,

oversight removed at the exact moment the power expands,

and a process engineered to be invisible and permanent.

And then hand all of that to an AI operating system at a scale no COINtel

pro agent with a filing cabinet could ever have imagined.

Hoover opened more than 500,000 investigations by hand with paper files

and human informants and physical surveillance.

This machine can correlate a million records before you finish your coffee.

Never file one piece of paper anyone can subpoena and generate a flag

no human reviewer will have the time to scrutinize.

Now it matters beyond this episode because

Beyond the show, beyond this particular moment in 2026,

because the foundational promise of the American legal system,

at least the one we tell ourselves,

the one carved into buildings and recited at school,

is that you are punished for what you do.

Not for who you are or what you might do someday.

That's the whole point. That's the presumption of innocence.

That's due process. That's the Fourth Amendment's protection of persons.

Not just property. Precrime is the deletion of that promise at the level of code.

It doesn't actually repeal the Fourth Amendment,

it just makes the Fourth Amendment irrelevant by operating in spaces

the amendment's authors could never have imagined.

AI. There's no way Benjamin Franklin was considering this.

And the human cost is not hypothetical.

We've already run the beta test.

Geronimo Pratt lost 27 years of his life.

Daruba bin Wahad lost nineteen.

Maher Arar lost a year in a cell the size of a grave in the ground,

and the rest of his life to a list that he can't leave.

Thousands of American Muslims lost the simple,

ordinary freedom of just getting on a plane and going home without handcuffs.

That's the machine at nineteen fifty speed.

At paper speed, at one agent with a typewriter speed.

Now we're building the next version at machine speed.

No brakes, and a list of forty three names already sitting at

the Secretary of State's desk waiting to be ingested.

They ran this program once and it cost them nothing.

So they're running it again. And this time the filing cabinets in the cloud

and the night watchman's gone and

And the eight people who might break in and steal the files would have

to somehow exfiltrate a database that lives on servers they'll never physically

enter.

One thing before you go, it's not the AI.

Everybody's gonna watch the AI.

The scary robot, the minority report of all of it,

that's the magic trick. That's the the hand they want you looking at,

right? Watch the other one, the boring stuff,

the audit office, the inspector general,

the oversight board. Still exists,

can't vote. Because a surveillance power is only as dangerous as

its missing check or balance. COINTELPRO wasn't evil because Hoover had files.

It was evil because no one could make him stop.

The technology is not the story here.

The missing breaks of the story.

So when the next new power gets announced,

and it will, don't ask what it can do.

Ask who can turn it off. Then go find out if that person still has a job.

The only reason we know COINTELPRO existed is that eight people broke into that

FBI office in 1971 and stole it.

That's it. That's the mechanism.

No court found it, no committee caught it,

no inspector general filed a report.

It took a burglary. And it took those eight people getting away with

it for 40 years. That was the system's self-correction.

A crime. And in 2026,

we have rebuilt that exact condition on purpose.

Same year they expanded the power.

They took the watchdogs apart one at a time,

fifty years of smoke detectors pulled off the ceiling,

and somebody lit up the stove.

They didn't forget COINTELPRO,

they studied it. And the lesson they took was not don't do this,

it was don't get caught. And this time,

you remove the thing that catches you first,

and then you build the machine.

That should make you angry. Stay angry.

Angry is useful. Despair is what they're counting on.

So two things. One, assume the file exists,

not as paranoia.

Every location ping, every broker purchase,

it's already sitting somewhere and it's already for sale.

So stop treating your metadata like it's private and start treating

it like it's testimony. Move the real organizing off the platforms.

Signal in person, paper, those eight people won because they went analog

on the night of a boxing match.

Analog still works. A conversation between two people in a park with

no phones is the one thing that this machine cannot eat.

Two

Figure out how to file a FOIA request.

Jesus. It's easy. I mean, on yourself,

on your local fusion center, on your police department contracts with these veters,

your city, they will stall, they will redact,

and they will answer badly. File it anyway.

Every request demands a response.

Every response leaves a trail.

Every trail is ammunition for the next journalist,

the next lawsuit, the next podcast host.

Bureaucracies hate friction. Just be friction.

You're not powerless, you are unorganized.

Those are different problems. And only one of them is permanent.

Everything else we do is at FOF.foundation.

You can check us out there. We're on Apple Podcasts,

Spotify. I'm Joshua. My other co-host who hasn't been with us for a bit is Will.

Meher Arrar is still on the list.

So remember his name because the machine has already forgot he's innocent.

Take care of each other, and I'll talk to you next time.

Bye.