Nov. 21 Update: The Border Patrol's Highway Dragnet; Bosnian Sniper Tourism; Border Patrol Gone Wild in SoCal; ICE's TX Gulag; Endangered Species Rollback; Tech's Trump Bump; Rikers Violence Spirals; LAPD Bankrupts LA

A traffic cone conceals a license plate reader near Douglas, AZ. The device is part of the Border Patrol's secret nationwide network that is used to determine 'suspicious' travel patterns.

Zohran Mamdani completed his inexorable ascent to power earlier this month, beating Andrew Cuomo for a second time in six months and becoming the first New York City mayor to win more than a million votes since John Lindsay in 1969. Unlike the White Collar Wasp and media darling, Mamdani comes from a starkly different background, the son of Ugandan-Indian immigrant intellectuals and an avowed Democratic Socialist. While his campaign was remarkable for its intensity and cross-racial appeal that will always be a winning message in the Five Boroughs, his administration faces serious challenges from jump - and the victory is being wildly overblown by the media for national significance. Not every event is a 'bellwether'.

Of far more significance is the departure of the federal Praetorian Guard from Chicago for Charlotte, North Carolina, where Kavanaugh Stops and random arrests of Latino folks regardless of citizenship status began two weeks ago. The feds headed south from Chicago after a chaotic two month deployment there that resulted in rampant racial profiling, almost no arrests of actual 'criminals', and serious reverses in federal court. Now that they've succeeded in pissing off North Carolinians something awful, a great strategy heading into next year's pivotal midterm elections, the olive-shirted Gestapo is bound for Louisiana.

Their time in Chicago, as I've harped on nonstop, was a disaster, with wanton violence inflicted on protesters at at the Broadview detention center north of the city, where hundreds of people are being held without food, water, or properly functioning toilets. ICE also conveniently "lost" days worth of CCTV footage from the immigration jail that happened to include the most violent instances of protest suppression. Judge Sara Ellis, who has issued numerous emergency injunctions on the feds' uses of force (challenged and partially overturned in the 7th Circuit), called DOJ attorneys "simply not credible" while stating that the Border Patrol and ICE's jackbooted tactics "shock the conscience". If you want to immerse yourself in the depravity of Trump's SS, here is the deposition of Border Patrol Sector Chief (El Centro, CA) Greg Bovino, the five-foot-tall Colonel Lockjaw clone who has run BP's street operations in Los Angeles and now Chicago.

Things will get far worse, thanks to that enormous funding boost Congress gave ICE earlier this year. In addition to the unqualified, violent, and booze-sodden recruits joining up in droves, civilian bounty hunters (or "former law enforcement" if you believe the PR) will be tracking and reporting folks suspected of being undocumented for $300 a head. What could go wrong?

It has been a busy month. Three articles of mine published this month, both in WIRED: the first explored the terrorism conviction of an East Bay anarchist who pleaded guilty to torching a UCPD vehicle on Cal's campus in June 2024. Thanks to DOJ pressure on a willing judge, Casey Goonan will now serve a 19.5 year sentence, almost certainly in the Bureau of Prisons' 'little Guantanmo.' The feds are also digging into communications Goonan had with the Transgender Law Center, in what very much looks like part of the feds' effort to establish a trans extremism classification. Also relevant given the State Department's decision today to declare four anti-fascist groups in Italy, Germany and Greece as 'foreign terrorist organizations.'

The second article, published the day after the New York City mayoral election, explores the enormous NYPD surveillance programs and capabilities that Zohran Mamdani will inherit from his predecessors when he takes office in January. We're talking an enormous network of CCTV cameras, gunshot sensors, license plate readers and far more, plus the NYPD's drone program that Eric Adams' cronies expanded and an intelligence division that treats pro-Palestine demonstrations as precursors to terrorism and deploys detectives throughout the world, bankrolled by unaccountable funds. And the current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who Mamdani has controversially decided to keep on, has been heavily involved in these initiatives during her entire time at the NYPD. This is the second of three pieces I'll have on Mamdani and the NYPD: the first ran in The Baffler a week ago, and the second will be in the New York Review of Books come December. That forthcoming piece will deal extensively with Tisch.

The third piece ran earlier today about what appears to be a fishing expedition by Senate Rand Paul into federally funded university research on extremism and counter-terrorism. Unsurprisingly, the targets appear to be institutions that research the American far right, and the scope of the investigation spans the past five years. Guess they touched a nerve with Vanilla Isis and Secretary Kristi's Klan.

Lastly, for paid subscribers, here's the latest episode of BIG TERROR. For our third installment, we explored a unit of the London Metropolitan Police that sent undercover cops to infiltrate activist groups for more than fifty years, fathering numerous children with their investigative targets and turning countless lives upside down. It's sordid stuff. The next episode will most likely focus on torture and extraordinary rendition, from the War on Terror to American cities.

On a related note, Dick Cheney kicked the bucket. While the 'paper of record' may have been busy whitewashing his hideous record, plenty of champagne corks were popped when this sadistic vulture shook loose the mortal coil. Good riddance.

If you're interested in BIG TERROR or any of the other paywalled articles on policing, extremism or whatever else catches my fancy, sign up as a paid member. Or if you're simply interested in supporting my reporting, you can also leave something in the tip jar below.

That's enough of that. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-“Whisper,” “intel” or “wall” stops. Those are the terms Border Patrol agents use for car stops generated by the agency's sprawling, nationwide 'pre-crime' dragnet of license plate readers, which automatically log the plate of each passing vehicle and flag 'suspicious' patterns of travel based on a black-box algorithm. The Associated Press revealed the existence of this program today in one of the most important investigations of 2025. The ALPR dragnet is the sort of 'pre-crime' forecasting program that engendered major backlash in the 2010s when similar programs were rolled out to target 'likely' criminals in cities like Chicago and New Orleans (yes that's my story). Moreover, the Border Patrol program is so sensitive that prosecutors are instructed to junk criminal cases if they would reveal its existence - the sort of 'parallel construction' that characterized the use of National Security Agency surveillance for law enforcement purposes during the Dubya and Obama years. The war comes home...

It looks like Oakland dodged a bullet by declining to sign a contract with Flock, a private ALPR firm whose nationwide databases have been queried repeatedly by ICE and feed into the Border Patrol's predictive network. In California, it is illegal to share ALPR data with out-of-state law enforcement. Of note - the Oakland Police Department also wanted to fold private residential cameras into the Flock system, which would then be also be accessible to the feds. A cautionary tale for any community where this 'public safety' firm operates...

-A wild blast from the past surfaced this month with allegations made to Milan prosecutors about 'sniper tourism' in Bosnia during the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s. Wealthy tourists from Italy, Germany, Russia and other European nations reportedly paid Serbian soldiers stationed in the slopes above Sarajevo during the Bosnian capitol's siege to let them fire on helpless civilians below. Russian Fascist Eduard Limonov was famously filmed firing a belt-fed machine gun into the city from a hillside in 1992.

-A pastor was shot in the face with a less-lethal round at point-blank range in Oakland, California last month during protests against an aborted ICE deployment from Coast Guard Island. Yet local prosecutors have yet to do anything about it. The Oaklandside tackled the glaring question of why - the feds are violating criminal law left and right during their immigration sweeps. State-level criminal statutes apply. The will, it appears, is all that is lacking.

-Isaiah Hodgson, a Border Patrol agent who achieved notoriety earlier this year for brutalizing and arresting citizens during the federal immigration blitz in Southern California earlier this year, died in August from a drug overdose. He was suspended from duty over the summer after catching felony and misdemeanor charges for a drunken rampage in Long Beach this July. The Long Beach Post, a nonprofit local news outlet that consistently does solid work, did a thorough workback on Hodgson's chaotic arrest, obtaining and publishing LBPD bodycamera video of the drunk-as-a-skunk fed fighting the cops with a fully loaded pistol in his waistband. While Hodgson's death is tragic, he is the sort of out-of-control personality that never should've been given law enforcement powers in the first place. There are many, many, many more like him in the ranks of the Border Patrol, ICE and CBP.

-ICE is building out a sprawling detention and deportation network in Texas with the aid of local law enforcement, according to WIRED's Dell Cameron. As always, we're looking at a potential contracting boom for the private security and prison firms that will staff this nonstop network of transports and jails, which will likely be replicated throughout the US as part of that Navy-funded, $10 billion series of massive detention centers currently in the planning stages. And don't think the feds will stop at just locking up undocumented folks in these facilities: once they're built, these concentration camps will need to be filled somehow...

-I'll let this one speak for itself: the Pedophile Reich is dead-set on dismantling wildlife protections in the United States by junking key portions of the Endangered Species Act. We're dealing with all this because the Dems ran a brain-dead centrist and couldn't devise a platform to push back on people longing for their pandemic stimulus checks and pretending the economy was copacetic during Trump's first term. There almost certainly will be titantic battles in court over this plan, and direct action campaigns, but man it's getting late real early.

-We're a long way from the Aughts and 2010s, when Northern California's tech firms hoisted the rainbow flag and aligned themselves firmly with Barack Obama's administration. While the majority of Silicon Valley's workforce remains overwhelmingly Democratic (look at the voting margins and Congressional representatives from that region), the executive class has gone fully MAGA. The East Bay Times took a thorough look at the burgeoning - and most importantly, profitable - relationship between Silicon Valley elites and the Trump Adminstration. Which just might be teetering, given that the Artificial Intelligence bubble is popping as we speak...

-Rikers Island is an outdated, overcrowded hellhole. Conditions on the real Escape From New York island jail are so bad that a federal judge stripped control of the facility from Mayor Eric Adams this May, leaving his successor to hold the bag. Yet violence at the isolated jail is at record heights. And incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani has not articulated any policies or plans on how to address the rising mayhem.

-The LAPD's legal settlement payouts for police misconduct and brutality are effectively bankrupting Los Angeles. $384 million in taxpayer money has been paid since 2019 to settle more than 2,000 claims against the second-largest police department in the US. Independent Joey Scott ran the numbers on the cost of the LAPD's half-decade of brutalizing protesters and residents alike. It's not pretty reading and 100% accurate, no matter how vociferously Mayor Karen Bass protests.

-Turns out the Biden Administration lied through its teeth when they claimed they had not found sufficient evidence of human rights violations by the Israeli Occupation Forces in their two-year long genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Washington Post, or whatever is left of their reporting staff since Bezos decided to turn it into his personal mouthpiece for pro-oligarch propaganda, uncovered information that the State Department documented hundreds of potential human rights abuses by Israel, such as summary executions, the wanton destruction of schools, hospitals and civilian dwellings - essentially, everything the world has watched on a live feed for 24+ months.

FILM - Carlos (2010) is, in my humble opinion, the greatest limited series to come out of the front end of the 'peak television' boom and still stands the test of time unlike some of the other hits of the era - The Wire comes to mind, with its devotion to copaganda and a trainwreck fifth season.

Director Olivier Assayas (Demonlover, The Clouds of Sils Maria) picked a knotty but entirely telegenic topic in the form of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the ostensibly leftist militant who aligned himself with Palestinian militants and Germany's Red Army Fraktione during a wild career of hijackings and assassinations from 1973 to 1985. With phenomenal production values, excellent pacing and a career turn by Edgar Ramirez as "Carlos the Jackal", this three-part masterpiece plumbs the depths of a fascinating and contradictory persona.

BOOK - A number of recent subscribers to Bleeding Edge appear to have come from last month's episode of TrueAnon on 764 and the evolution of the contemporary extreme right. That plus the recently-passed holiday of Samhain are good cues for this week's book, the indispensible Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (2003) by the late NYU professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

It's a little on the expensive side - academic presses will do that to backlisted items - so I'd recommend looking for a used or library copy. But if you want to understand the strains of far right extremism that underpin so much of what the FBI terms "Nihilistic Violent Extremism," there is no better source.

MUSIC - Miles Davis' genius peaked in 1965 with a two-day set right before Christmas at Chicago's now-closed Plugged Nickel nightclub. I first heard these recordings decades ago: a five disc compilation was released in 1995. There's nothing quite like it, and I certainly don't have the vocabulary to describe how this record makes me feel every time I put it on.