Homeland security field agents are scouring the social media site Reddit, monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans critical of the agency.
The spying is revealed in a January intelligence bulletin produced by the Border Patrol and leaked to me. The subject of the report is Reddit user “Budget-Chicken-2425,” who is not a narco-trafficker, gang member, or terrorist. Just someone concerned about federal overreach.
The report centers on Budget-Chicken’s call for a protest near a Border Patrol facility in Edinburg, Texas. Though the report acknowledges that anti-ICE protests throughout Texas have been “generally lawful” and that there’s no evidence of any threat posed by Budget-Chicken’s call, any protest whatsoever near the border patrol facility is said to “warrant continued monitoring.”
To quote directly from the intelligence bulletin:
“At this time, there is no specific reporting of planned violence targeting DHS personnel or facilities linked to this protest call; however, any demonstration in proximity to USBP [United States Border Patrol] RGV [Rio Grande Valley] facilities may present operational, safety, and reputational risks that warrant continued monitoring.”
Budget-Chicken’s offending Reddit post was on the r/RioGrandeValley channel. Titled “Join me in protest against ICE,” the post is just a few sentences long, calling on “neighbors, family and community” to “be witnesses and to spread awareness” by protesting a Border Patrol station.
Innocuous as this may seem, it is what the intelligence bulletin regards 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 snooping on Americans. According to these requirements, much of the work is sanctioned under so-called “Force Protection,” a military term for safeguarding troops from enemy attack. By repurposing this battlefield concept, homeland security is treating a Reddit thread like a hostile environment.
But the homeland security spies are interested in more than just Budget-Chicken. They are using Reddit to gauge the vibe of the country at large and what they think of immigration authorities like themselves. (They could simply consult public polling, which most recently suggests that almost two-thirds of Americans believe immigration enforcement has “gone too far.”)
In a section titled “Pattern, Trend, and Relationship Analysis,” the bulletin gives a sense of the sheer volume of data homeland security collects to generate a big-picture view of what’s going on in the country. One specific priority asks: “What groups or individuals are responsible for, or are associated with, border violence and what is the intended impact to CBP [Customs and Border Protection] personnel and operations?” (That ultimately feeds into the creation of databases and watchlists of offending Americans.)
The bulletin says homeland security is tracking three social trendsf in particular:
Social Media-Driven Mobilization
Symbolic Targeting of Government Facilities
A Statewide Baseline of Mobilization Potential
In other words, the government is building a sociological profile of political discontent. The bulletin notes that these protests are “perception-driven”—meaning they are motivated by “generalized concerns about rights” rather than specific incidents. In the logic of national security, a lack of a specific trigger makes the public more unpredictable and therefore calls for “situational awareness.”
But it’s the granularity of the monitoring that is most absurd. To determine the “threat” posed by Budget-Chicken-2425, analysts didn’t just look at the protest call; they scoured the user’s entire digital footprint.
The bulletin notes that Chicken “frequently participates in various community discussions,” listing their 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 (reminiscing about 1970s television production logos).
The disconnect between the “lawful” reality of the protest and the agency’s internal panic is most visible in a “BOLO” (Be On The Look Out) alert included in the appendix. Despite the bulletin’s own admission that there is “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, utilize long arms, and if possible, work in groups.”
National security brain has so infected the immigration authorities that they now treat a four-sentence Reddit post about “spreading awareness” as though it were the secret messages of al Qaeda. It is a system designed to find threats everywhere, even if it has to look for them in a subreddit about Stephen King novels.
— Edited by William M. Arkin