Department of Homeland Security is analyzing Americans’ financial activity and prompting police stops

Somewhere between your bank account and a highway patrol car, there’s a Border Patrol analyst deciding whether your spending patterns look suspicious enough to get you pulled over. That’s the finding from a 404 Media investigation into a program most Americans have never heard of, and almost certainly never consented to. The program is called the Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams, or PITT. It operates under the Department of Homeland Security, and its job is to sift through the financial records of Americans, flag activity that matches patterns associated with narcotics trafficking, and pass those names along to local law enforcement. The result, in at least one documented case, was a traffic stop. How a cannabis farmer in Montana became a test case The mechanics of PITT came into public view through the case of Kyle Olson, a licensed cannabis farmer in Montana. An analyst named Matthew Phelps flagged Olson’s financial activity for patterns that the unit associated with drug-related behavior. That intelligence was then shared with the Montana Highway Patrol, which stopped Olson. He ended up facing DUI charges. Worth noting: Olson is a legal cannabis operator. The financial pa...