Recent reporting has uncovered that the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been collecting financial records of American citizens to evaluate them and supply municipal police forces with alerts regarding prospective offenders. This practice, known as predictive policing, is fundamentally authoritarian. It relies entirely on pervasive surveillance to gather and scrutinize sufficient data to decide whether an individual might be viewed as an offender by the state.
The fundamental issue here is that data conveys a narrative and reflects whatever the narrator intends, which is subsequently leveraged to justify ensuing actions. The state, acting as the gatherer of your personal information, serves as the author of your narrative. It selects which connections are established and what portrait is constructed concerning your person. Such a mechanism is inherently vulnerable to exploitation since any entity can amass vast quantities of data and selectively curate it to project any narrative they desire before taking action.
In the words of Cardinal Richelieu, “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
Regarding predictive policing, law enforcement monitors your every action to evaluate if you might be a transgressor and subsequently targets you on that basis. In the present scenario, this predictive policing partly stems from the financial monitoring of American citizens, implying that your transaction history is essentially handled as evidence prior to any infraction being committed. This approach is profoundly un-American and unconstitutional. Under this framework, you are far from innocent until proven guilty; rather, you remain a perpetual suspect whom the state is continually prepared to prosecute.
The most transparent illustration involves Kyle William Olson, whose traffic stop in Montana was initiated by a Border Patrol Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT). A DHS memorandum generated for his legal proceeding and disclosed to 404 Media stated that the team identified “financial activity patterns commonly associated with illicit narcotics activity,” though it failed to clarify which records were reviewed or the method used to acquire them. Officers eventually discovered marijuana inside Olson’s automobile, yet that outcome fails to address the underlying question: why was the government secretly analyzing his finances prior to law enforcement identifying a specific offense?
Furthermore, the additional illustrations furnished by 404 Media demonstrate this reality effectively. American citizens are pulled over and interrogated based on intelligence supplied to local police units by the DHS. One of the affected individuals, Alek Schott, was pulled over for alleged lane drifting and had his truck searched for narcotics, although none were discovered. The Associated Press reported that federal personnel tracked Schott’s travel routes through license-plate scanning devices and alternative monitoring technologies. Schott is currently suing Bexar County, alongside the sheriff and specific deputies, for infringements upon his Fourth Amendment guarantees—and rightly so.
As articulated by the Institute of Justice, “Police must have a fact-based suspicion of a crime before making a stop, a valid reason to extend that stop, and either a warrant, consent, or an objective reason to believe there’s contraband inside to search a vehicle. In Alek’s case, the deputy failed to meet any of these criteria and instead used an unjustified traffic stop to probe into crimes Alek hadn’t committed.”
These pair of incidents generate several inquiries. Where did law enforcement acquire these suspicions of unlawful conduct? Similar to alternative stops documented by 404 Media, evidence points to DHS Border Patrol as the instigator of these stops. Additionally, how does the DHS secure diverse categories of data regarding these Americans in the first instance?
Concerning financial information, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)—the bureau inside the Department of the Treasury responsible for supervising adherence to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA)—might be the source. The BSA mandates financial institutions to maintain records and report specific large or unusual transactions to the authorities to uncover and prevent money laundering alongside related unlawful activities. FinCEN subsequently distributes this data to alternative federal divisions to execute regulatory duties, which likely explains how the DHS acquired this intelligence.
Moreover, the scope of this data is extensive. Financial institutions exhibit a tendency toward over-reporting to mitigate any exposure to non-compliance penalties. Consequently, suspicious activity reporting is widespread, and FinCEN accumulates a massive volume of intelligence concerning the financial behaviors of Americans.
Nevertheless, these methodologies do not enhance the security of Americans. Quite the contrary. Financial transactions function as involuntary confessions regarding your beliefs, affiliations, and preferences—private details that frequently serve as the motivation for discrimination. This is not a theoretical concern. Financial monitoring and censorship have long persisted within both Western democracies and authoritarian states to identify and muzzle political dissidents.
In the year 2022, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leveraged emergency powers to freeze the personal and corporate bank accounts of protestors, defending his actions under the pretext of safety and security. Canada operates as a self-described liberal democracy yet behaved identically to China during that exact timeframe, where WeChat banned the accounts of protestors, representing a deeply integrated payment and messaging platform.
The United States is no exception. Our financial architecture has repeatedly demonstrated susceptibility to weaponization directed against political adversaries and dissidents. In the aftermath of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol, a 2024 Congressional report illustrated how financial institutions faced pressure from FinCEN and the FBI to uncover “extremism” by scanning for spending patterns indicating conservative perspectives, such as acquiring “religious texts.” Our purpose here is not to litigate the specifics of the riots themselves, but rather to highlight that penalizing Americans based on what their expenditure patterns reveal regarding their political leanings constitutes an abuse of our monetary infrastructure. Merely exhibiting conservative viewpoints grounded on one’s spending habits within the Washington, D.C. vicinity should not trigger reporting citizens to law enforcement agencies.
Furthermore, these measures are not restricted to any single political faction. In 2025, President Trump enacted an Executive Order classifying Antifa as a domestic terrorist entity. The White House subsequently issued a memo directing law enforcement personnel to “identify and disrupt financial networks that fund” domestic terrorism and political violence. Again, our objective is not to debate whether Antifa represents a threat to the U.S., but to emphasize that this represents the identical targeting strategy previously deployed against conservatives following January 6th. As the CATO Institute correctly noted, to what extent will financial institutions go to ensure compliance? While certain financial transactions clearly signal terrorist operations, at what point do personal political opinions factor into the equation? Will “onboarding documents include a questionnaire about a customer’s feelings about fascism?”
Although these instances are politically driven and primarily derive from financial monitoring, information can be exploited and abused across diverse contexts and from numerous origins. Consider Sacramento, California, where municipal police were acquiring data regarding residents’ energy consumption to pinpoint individuals engaged in the unlawful cultivation of marijuana. Predictably, this resulted in the harassment of blameless residents by law enforcement officers, perfectly exemplifying the hazards associated with placing excessive data into the possession of police authorities.
Predictive policing is fundamentally flawed, yet it originates from the enduring surveillance of the American populace. These diverse monitoring apparatuses have empowered the state to target any individual for any reason, even before an offense is committed—assuming an offense was ever contemplated. Consequently, the DHS should terminate PITT’s utilization of financial intelligence and auxiliary data for predictive policing initiatives. Congress ought to instruct the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to execute an independent audit concerning the data sources, selection criteria, retention protocols, false-positive metrics, and information-sharing practices of the DHS, alongside evaluating the program’s adherence to the Fourth Amendment and related statutory provisions. The GAO must be mandated to publish its findings to facilitate subsequent remediation.
Congress must guarantee that federal agencies remain incapable of circumventing Fourth Amendment protections by employing covert profiles to fabricate suspicion. Judicial authorization should be rendered mandatory prior to the DHS utilizing sensitive financial dossiers during inquiries into specific suspected crimes, alongside full transparency whenever federal data analytics instigate a traffic stop.
Surveillance subjects all of us to the absolute discretion and mercy of the state, where our daily activities, personal associations, or core beliefs can readily be classified as criminal—or potentially criminal—leaving us entirely devoid of defensive recourse. This reality is deeply un-American. The state should not leverage information to determine whether an individual might be a transgressor and subsequently tip off municipal police based on those assessments. The American public deserves the freedom to exist authentically and with dignity, entirely unburdened by the apprehension of wrongful prosecution. Such protections are embedded within our constitutional rights, and the federal government must be reminded of this imperative.
Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2026/09/18/dhs-s-predictive-policing-is-unconstitutional-un-american-and-should-be-stopped.
