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Show Notes
Do you ever feel like you're being watched? Just asking questions.
We're told modern surveillance tech will track criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists while protecting the privacy of innocent Americans. You've got nothing to worry about if you've got nothing bad to hide.
Today's guest says that's not true. His latest book, The Triumph of Fear, documents the history of the modern surveillance state and the ways in which it's been leveraged since its inception to target not just terrorists and criminals, but political dissidents.
Patrick Eddington was a CIA analyst from 1988 to 1996, but resigned and wrote Gassed in the Gulf, a book alleging that the agency helped cover up the existence of Gulf War syndrome, caused by exposure to chemical weapons.
He joins Just Asking Questions today to talk about the power and reach of the modern surveillance state, the growing influence of the AI-powered data firm Palantir—cofounded by Peter Thiel—in the Trump administration, and what can be done to "tyranny-proof" America.
Mentioned in this episode:
"Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos," The White House
Palantir contract modification with ICE
"The Scouring of the Shire," an open letter by a Palantir ex-employee
"Palantir Is Not a Data Company," by Palantir
"American Big Brother," by the Cato Institute
"The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression From McKinley to Eisenhower," by Patrick Eddington
Alex Karp, director of Palantir, address to the Economic Club of Chicago on May 22, 2025
"Why This Palantir Cofounder Left California for Texas," The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie
"Purpose-Based Access Controls at Palantir (Part 1)," by Palantir
Davos 2023: A conversation with Palantir's Alex Karp
Chapters:
0:00—Introduction
2:20—President Donald Trump's executive order "eliminating information silos" is paving the way for a national, unified surveillance database
3:58—Did the Department of Government Efficiency have a "hidden motive"?
12:08—Why the surveillance bureaucracy keeps expanding with little resistance
14:04—Ex-employees have signed an open letter against Palantir. What does it mean?
25:34—What does Palantir actually do?
27:55—Could Palantir actually protect civil liberties?
29:02—What could happen if Palantir's tools fall into the wrong hands?
37:52—Why creating a centralized database is a civil liberties nightmare
42:53—Palantir's CEO Alex Karp on why they defend the West
47:00—Why Eddington wants to take federal law enforcement out of the executive branch
50:32 - Why federal law enforcement has always been politicized
55:17 - The lessons of COINTELPRO's surveillance of activists
55:17 - What was "total information awareness"?
1:10:28 - What is a question Patrick Eddington thinks more people should be asking?
Transcript:
This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.
Zach Weissmueller: Do you ever feel like you're being watched? Just Asking Questions. The ostensible purpose of DOGE was to cut waste, fraud, and abuse in government. But what if there was also another purpose hidden in plain sight—to make it easier to track your every move?
Of course, our government would never outright say that. We're told modern surveillance tech will track criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists while protecting the privacy of innocent Americans. You've got nothing to worry about if you've got something bad to hide.
Today's guest says that's not quite true.
His latest book, The Triumph of Fear, documents the history of the modern surveillance state and the ways in which it's been leveraged since its inception to target not just terrorists and criminals, but political dissidents. Patrick G. Eddington was a CIA analyst from 1988 to 1996 but resigned and wrote another book, Gassed in the Gulf, alleging the agency helped cover up the existence of Gulf War Syndrome caused by exposure to chemical weapons.
He joins us today to talk about the power and reach of the modern surveillance state, the increasingly prominent role that AI-powered data management firm Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, is playing in the Trump administration, and to offer some ideas about what should be done to tyranny-proof America.
Patrick, thank you for coming on the show.
Patrick Eddington: It's my pleasure.
Zach Weissmueller: Trump issued a curious executive order, and I'm gonna read a little bit about that. The aim seems to be to create a kind of unified national database. It says here that the goal, the purpose, is removing unnecessary barriers to federal employees accessing government data and promoting inter-agency data sharing.
The name of this executive order was Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos. It goes on to say about these information silos, "agency heads should take all necessary steps to ensure federal officials have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems. This includes authorizing and facilitating both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records."
It says that, "this is to ensure the federal government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all state programs." So it also is kind of going into the states and saying that the federal government should have unfettered access to state programs that receive federal funding. So I'm trying to put all this disparate data in one place. What kind of problems do you foresee with this approach?
Patrick Eddington: "One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." I'm a big Tolkien guy, in addition to being a big Star Wars guy, so I just can't help but bring that kind of thing into it.
Yeah, look, I do think it's really fascinating that, given the fact that the Inspector General Act was passed in 1978—that's almost four decades ago, right—and we have literally years' worth, decades' worth of recommendations from these different inspectors general as well as the Government Accountability Office on where the waste, fraud, and abuse has been in the government.
It just seemed to me, and I think to a lot of other observers, that this entire effort by Mr. Musk at the behest of the administration was really designed to try to gather as much data as possible. And, you know, on the surface, that EO sounds kind of cool. It's like, "Yeah, sure, there ought to be—you know, they should be able to—the left hand should know what the right hand is doing and all the rest of that". And they also say unclassified data. And it's like, "Well, what's wrong with that?"
Well, you can take an awful lot of unclassified data—data from automated license plate readers, data from cellphone tracking-type stuff, geolocation data, all the rest of that—and you can get an excellent idea of how people live their lives. If you're able to get purchase history, if you can buy that, essentially, buy that kind of data, it can give you enormous insights into what people are doing.
Now of course, the regime tries to sell this entire concept, essentially, as being about finding illegals and making sure that they're not on the public dole and so on and so forth. And as a theoretical matter, does that sound like a common-sense kind of policy thing? Sure. But I think it's fairly obvious at this point that it goes well beyond that and that they have a desire to basically try to gather as much data as they possibly can on anybody that they're interested in.
And I think that it's really also very telling that when Ed Martin, who was temporarily the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—when it became clear that he had even less than a snowball's chance in hell of being permanently confirmed to the position—that they moved him over to DOJ to basically engage in this so-called anti-weaponization program or whatever. And they were gonna be calling out regime critics and shaming them and all the rest of that. Which is not an appropriate role for government in any way, shape, or form. It never has been.
But if you want to call people out, even if you don't plan to prosecute them, having as much data as you can to try to muddy the waters on folks that's helpful, right? If that's what your fundamental intent is.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, you know, as pertains to DOGE, I mean, coming from a libertarian perspective, there were a lot of things to like about it on the surface. It obviously—to a degree—it kind of embarrasses the government for wasteful spending. That's a good thing, and transparency.
At the end of the day, it didn't cut much money. And, you know, Elon Musk kind of washed his hands of it and walked away. But yeah, I have always wondered about the sort of getting-into-the-systems aspect of it, and if there were two layers operating at the same time. It sounds like you believe that there's evidence that that is the case. That there was more, that there was the kind of surface story and then something going on underneath the surface.
Patrick Eddington: Yeah, and I do think there's been a fair amount of press reporting on this, and not just from legacy media outlets by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, Wired, ProPublica, some other outlets, and I think even Reason has done some work on this particular topic as well.
And again, I want to come back to this issue of unclassified or otherwise publicly available data, because this is, in a lot of respects, how the Peter Thiels of the world and some others have been making just gobs of money at the end of the day. You collect all this data, you package it up, and then you offer it up to federal law enforcement or the intelligence community or whatever, and it becomes—and it is, has been—a very lucrative business for him.
And the thing about this kind of data brokerage, if you will, is that—and I'll just use the FBI because they're my favorite target. If you're gonna have a bad day with federal law—at least in the pre-Trump era for the most part—if you're gonna have a bad day with federal law enforcement it was probably gonna be with the FBI. Because unless you were a fairly frequent foreign,international traveler or all the rest of that, you were going to be more likely to encounter an FBI agent than you would be almost any other kind of federal law-enforcement official.
And in September of 2008, in one of his last major official acts as attorney general, Michael Mukasey modified the attorney general guidelines for FBI domestic investigations to create an entirely new category of de facto investigative tool. It was called an assessment. It is called an assessment.
And the thing about assessments is they can open one on you, me, they can open one on Reason, they can open one on Cato, and they don't need a criminal predicate to do it. It can just be for an official purpose or an authorized purpose. Well, guess who gets to decide what that authorized purpose is? Well, that's the DOJ and FBI. It's a great gig if you can get it. It's like the ultimate make-work program for government federal agents.
And the thing about assessments is, because you don't need a criminal predicate, you can literally go and get this kind of commercially available data and use it. You can also search classified databases like the FISA Section 702 database. You can run confidential informants against you, me, Reason, Cato, et cetera. And you can also conduct physical surveillance of individuals or entire groups of people that are affiliated with a given organization.
And again, none of that requires going before a judge. So it's an incredibly powerful, surprisingly invasive tool that has been extensively used by the FBI. And we've been in court for over 5 years now—close to 5 years now—trying to shake loose essentially a bunch of these so-called assessments.
And we started out wanting them all. And the FBI came back in their official court affidavit and said, "Ok, well, that would take almost 2,000 years." For real, that's what they said. So we said, "Ok, look, we're going to be super reasonable here. We're going to just ask for all of the closed sensitive investigative matter—or SEM—assessments." And those particular kinds of assessments are the ones that implicate First Amendment–protected activities.
So whether you're an academic, a journalist, somebody in a public policy organization like ours—our two organizations—we just want those. And we were relatively narrowly scoped in terms of timeframe and all the rest of that. It worked out to be about 1,100 or so—just slightly under 1,100—of these assessments.
And they still came back in yet another court affidavit and said, "Ok, well, that's going to be about 219 years." So we're still going back and forth, trying to get essentially a federal judge to force them to cough this up.
And I want to make the point that this is a bureaucratic mentality. This goes way beyond whether it happened under Obama, under Trump 1, under Biden, under Trump 2. This is the professional bureaucracy, most of which is still left. I mean, this regime shaved off the entire top of the FBI. And I don't just mean the political appointees down to the assistant attorney general level. I mean, they went after the SES—or the Senior Executive Service—folks as well.
And from what I can tell, they also maybe have gone down to the GS-15 supervisory special agent level. And those are the folks—or special agents in charge, I should say—who actually run FBI field offices. But even with that, there's still the kind of core culture that is there, that's resident at the FBI, that continues to drive this kind of thing. So just absolute, complete, obstinate resistance to making public any of this stuff.
And again, we really did scope it down to say, "Ok, give us First Amendment–implicated investigations," essentially. And they're still just fighting us tooth and nail.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. I mean, what worries me particularly at this moment about that is the asymmetry, where the bureaucracy will grind things to a halt and say, "Unless you're getting radical life-extension technology, you're never going to live to see these documents. But on the other hand, we're going to make the means of collecting all this data much more efficient, and we're going to start injecting AI into the system—so in the collection—and we're really gonna put this into overdrive." But nothing's gonna change on the other side of the equation in terms of making it easier to access the information that you're using against, well, who knows who?
And I guess that's where Palantir comes into the conversation. You mentioned The Lord of the Rings in your opening statement there. And creepy enough, Palantir is named after the Palantíri stones in The Lord of the Rings, which are basically these all-seeing stones that can see into, I guess, the past and future and then construct what is gonna…
So, I mean, the fact that you would name your company after that is kind of interesting. But there have been some employees that have come out in recent years. They signed an open letter that I'm going to pull up on screen here. It's called Scouring the Shire: A Letter from Concerned Palantir Alumni to the Tech Workers of Silicon Valley, and it mentions the legend of the Palantíri at the beginning here.
It says that:
The myth of the powerful seeing stones warned of great dangers when wielded by those without wisdom or a moral compass, as they could be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. Similarly, Palantir Technologies' platform grants immense power to its users, helping control the data, decisions, and outcomes that determine the future of governments, businesses, and institutions—and by extension, all of us.
A code of conduct was crafted to uphold democracy, preserve the spirit of free scientific inquiry, and ensure responsible AI development within Palantir.
And these former employees are saying that the principles have now been violated and are rapidly being dismantled at Palantir Technologies and across Silicon Valley.
They've grown hostile to diversity, equity, and inclusion. They employ inflammatory language, sow confusion, invite controversy, going as far as to threaten critics with violence.
They mention threats again related to biometric data collection on immigrant children, journalists being targeted, science programs being defunded, and key allies like Ukraine sidelined.
Trump's administration has sought to greatly expand executive powers while alluding to monarchy. Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs.
We must resist this trend.
I wanted to read that list of their grievances just so everyone can get a sense of it. You know, it does sound like a kind of left-leaning progressive group of people, but that doesn't mean that there's not some validity to some of their concerns. Before we get into—we're going to explain exactly what it is Palantir does—give us the overview reacting to that letter. Do you share any of those concerns about this technology?
Patrick Eddington: Well, I mean, I think throwing the whole DEI thing in there just muddies the water at the end of the day, right? I mean, this is about the ability to collect data on anybody—any organization—all the rest of that. And making those tools available essentially for a premium, I'm sure, to any law enforcement organization.
And it's not just federal, right? I mean, this is stuff that they, I'm sure, hope to be able to sell to state and locals as well. State and locals—especially locals—are not going to have quite the same line-item budget capacity to afford the premium packages and all the rest of that.
But then when you start talking about things like state fusion centers—and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee… yeah, sure. So the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is responsible essentially for conducting oversight of the Department of Homeland Security and also kind of looking more broadly at how a lot of these kinds of things—like Palantir's technology, other technologies, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, automated license plate readers—all those kinds of things, the technologies, but also the structures.
And it was when the late Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma was the chairman of that committee that the committee conducted a look-see at all these fusion centers—these state-level fusion centers that were created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Again, as a mechanism of putting federal agents in the same building with state and local law enforcement people on a state-by-state basis, ostensibly for counterterrorism purposes.
Now, of course, they've morphed way beyond that. They're into drug war stuff and all the rest of that kind of nonsense, as you would expect them to ultimately be, unfortunately. But what Sen. Coburn and his staff found—and this was 13 years ago now—was that these fusion centers are essentially just Fourth Amendment violation factories. That's really what they boiled down to.
The Missouri fusion center got caught essentially going after people who had, like, Ron Paul bumper stickers on their cars—when Mr. Paul was actually running for president all those years ago, right? And I think for people like me, and I'm sure you and a lot of other folks who work at Reason and elsewhere across the liberty movement, that's exactly the kind of thing that terrifies us and that we want to find a way to shut down, if at all possible.
So when I see—and I think it's great that they did the letter, I think it's great that they were sending up a five–red star cluster alarm about all the rest of this—but I get concerned when anybody on the left or the right tries to put this in purely partisan political terms or issues a statement that is inevitably going to be interpreted if you use charged language or language that pushes people's buttons to a certain degree—when it comes to some stuff.
The very act of collecting this data, regardless of who they're going after, is itself the thing that we need to be concerned about.
And I should say that this isn't just about Palantir, right? I mean, they're just one example here of the kind of capacity that's out there. I mean, Google has enormous reach in terms of the kind of data that they can provide. And that's one of the reasons why I use my—I have a Gmail account, but I use it incredibly sparingly because they scan all that stuff, right? And at the end of the day, all that kind of stuff can be—and often is—made available to law enforcement and other entities for a price.
And that's the reason that one of the few truly useful bipartisan things that's actually happened in the last 5 years or so is this partnership between Rep. Warren Davidson, Republican of Ohio, and Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, with a bill called the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. That bill actually passed the House of Representatives in the last session, and unfortunately, the Senate didn't take it up.
And the core of the bill is really very simple. It essentially says that, "If you, a law enforcement organization or agent, want to get this data, you need to get a warrant for it." That's it. The entire idea is to close that loophole, because this ability to buy the data right now—as long as the budget line item is available to do it—is what is giving them the ability to, in large measure, circumvent the Fourth Amendment.
And then when you combine it with, in the case of the FBI at least, you combine it with that assessment authority—where you don't actually have to have a criminal predicate to open an investigation on somebody—you can just keep that running for years.
I mean, I've got a lot of the stuff that we have managed to get released. It's not a huge quantity of material, but some of the stuff we have been able to get released on assessments shows that one particular organization, for example—the Muslim Justice League up in Massachusetts—the FBI had an assessment opened on them for years. I mean literally years. And this is an organization composed, I think, entirely of American citizens—Arab Americans, Muslim Americans—with absolutely no evidence of a connection to terrorism, anything like that. And it just keeps running.
But it doesn't just happen to that kind of a group. I mean, Concerned Women for America has been around for 40-plus years. They're a staunchly pro-life organization. And in July of 2015—literally almost exactly 10 years ago—at least one Washington field office FBI agent opened an assessment, a so-called "charity assessment."
I'd never seen that before, and I've been doing this for a while. Opened the so-called charity assessment on Concerned Women for America. There was no predicate. Nobody had come to the FBI—no former or current employee had come and said, "Hey, there's embezzlement going on here, "other kinds of violations of federal law," or "electioneering," or whatever. No, none of that.
That gets to my biggest hobby horse, probably, which is bureaucratic incentives, right? How does somebody who's a GS-12—a General Schedule 12 in the federal employee rating and pay system—if they're an FBI agent, how do they get from GS-12 to GS-13?
"Well, how many assessments did you open, agent? How many preliminary investigations did you open? How many full-field investigations? How many enterprise investigations? How many sources are you running?"
It becomes a numbers game. And the more you incentivize people to do this, the more you're going to be likely to have massive rights violations. And of course, in the current context, with respect to the Trump regime's attempt to essentially kick every immigrant out of the country—every illegal immigrant out of the country—they've managed to deport at least 70 U.S. citizens, according to the GAO, in the process.
And that's another reason we need to be skeptical about these large datasets. They're not necessarily accurate.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. So what I am hearing you say there is that this kind of relates to an argument that I've heard the founders of Palantir make. Which is that really, they are offering a technology layer. They're not the ones going out and collecting the data. They're not the ones using the data.
And really what you need to look at if you want to protect civil liberties are these issues that you're raising—like requiring a warrant or changing the bureaucratic incentives so that you don't get rewarded just based on how much data you collect against an organization or an individual. And it makes a lot of sense to me.
I wanted to make sure that our audience understands what this technology actually does and how it might interface with these current incentives and the current state of the law. So Palantir—you mentioned ICE. It was reported by The New York Times that they just got a $30 million contract with ICE. And what Palantir says—they had a response to The New York Times article and put up a bunch of slides—and they emphasized, "We are not a data company."
And here they have it kind of visualized—what they do. You see kind of the fragmented data, they connect it, and then they organize it. And I actually pulled a clip from their YouTube channel that, in a condensed manner, explains in a straightforward way what it is they do. I'm going to play that real quick, and then we can talk about how agencies might actually use this technology.
(Palantir Clip):
Palantir Foundry is a software platform that allows organizations to bring their data together and then enables their users to conduct sophisticated analytics and operations on top of the unified data.
Access to the platform does not necessarily mean access to all of the data it contains. First, an operational decision-maker proposes a purpose. If this purpose is approved as legitimate by information governance officials, the purpose gets a secure, access-controlled space in the Foundry platform. No users or data can enter this space yet.
Then, data that has been approved as necessary and proportionate for this work is added to the space. Finally, users can apply for access to the space if they've been tasked to work on this purpose.
At each step of the process, a rich history of why any given approval has been made is recorded.
Zach Weissmueller: So what they look to be saying there is that not only are they kind of segregating the data so that there can be this big pool of data, but they can then track who is accessing the data. So, in a sense, they're kind of saying, "We are watching the watchers, because we can track very easily who has access to what data"—perhaps preventing a Snowden-like situation where an outside contractor is getting access to data where they don't see.
Nick Gillespie spoke with Joe Lonsdale, who's one of the co-founders of Palantir, and that's why he made the case to Nick—that this technology could actually, in a sense, be civil liberties–protecting. I want to play that clip as well and then ask you a question about how it might actually be applied.
So here's Joe Lonsdale.
(Gillespie Lonsdale Clip):
Joe Lonsdale: So the whole core of Palantir was basically a civil liberties engine from the start. It's what data are you allowed to see in what context? And how do we bring that together to show you only what you're allowed to see to let you get your job done, right?
The problem is, I think a lot of these guys—maybe they think they're Jack Bauer in the show 24. I don't know if that's a dated reference now, but—someone who's in charge of catching the bad guys, and so they're going to break the rules. And they're going to break the rule to find the bad guy.
And we don't want you to be able to break the rules if you're not supposed to break them, but we want you to get the bad guys anyway. That's the whole point of this. And so it's actually a really hard data problem—what are you legally allowed to see, and what's the policy?
We don't set the policy, but we would make it so it was very transparent.
Zach Weissmueller: So, taking all that into account, what do you think the implications of this technology are, since the federal government is clearly doubling down on it?
Patrick Eddington: Yeah, so the key phrase from Lonsdale's commentary was, "We don't set the policy."
And I think that's really what kind of matters here. I mean, they are creating—they have created—and this Foundry platform is just one of several different kinds of packages that they offer. And it makes it sound like, "Hey, we're just providing the tool here, and what somebody else does with it, you know, they shouldn't do this, they shouldn't do that."
But at the end of the day, I think all we have to do is go back and look at the FISA Section 702 program, which—for the benefit of those listening or watching—that program started its life as the unconstitutional Stellar Wind mass electronic surveillance program, literally just hours after the 9/11 attacks. When the then-head of the National Security Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden, told his people to go ahead, essentially, and flip the switch and begin tracking every last bit of communication to, from, and between the United States and Afghanistan.
That was a direct, absolutely direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was supposed to be the exclusive means for collecting foreign intelligence–related data. It didn't hurt Hayden's career, as some folks may know. He went on to become the director of the CIA, and I think he was the deputy ODNI—I'd have to go back and check his bio again to be sure on those facts. But in any event, nobody went to jail for that.
And to me, I always keep that in mind, because once The New York Times—once Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who were then at The New York Times—exposed the Stellar Wind program in December 2005, that put Congress on a path for two and a half years trying to take that illegal mass surveillance program and somehow make it compliant with the Fourth Amendment.
I don't believe to this day that it is compliant with the Fourth Amendment.
I think a lot of constitutional scholars would agree with me on that. Folks who are of a more conservative, hawkish bent might take a different view. But I think it's pretty clear that the Founders, when they wrote the Fourth Amendment, were thinking an individualized, particularized suspicion dealing with a specific individual or perhaps a conspiracy. Otherwise, you need probable cause.
And when we have a company like Palantir that is in a position to offer these kinds of advanced tools for folks to go in—whether it's the FBI, ICE, whatever—it's always imperative to remember that we're still dealing with a garbage-in, garbage-out kind of technology.
So if the data that's ingested on the front end is error-filled, you're going to get bad outcomes. I don't care how sophisticated the tool is. If the data that's plugged into the machine is not accurate—and this is critical, of course, as it pertains to individuals. Not just their rights, but their identity.
I mean, are you actually going after somebody who is not here in lawful status? Or are you going after someone who's actually been born in this country, and you've got a name confusion? I mean, this is the kind of thing that's happened to Arab and Muslim Americans in the post-9/11 era.
When you talk about the TSA's watch list… Secretary Noem over at DHS says they shut down the Quiet Skies program, which The Boston Globe did a whole series of scandalous stories on several years ago about the number of innocent Americans being swept up in that program. But the sister program, Silent Partner—which is the international travel aspect of it—is still running, so far as we know.
So whenever you have a company like Palantir creating this kind of capability, and you have a garbage-in, garbage-out situation, and you have bureaucratic incentives inside these federal agencies and departments—and then you have the president of the United States breathing down their neck, right? And the president's key advisers—Stephen Miller, Tom Homan—all these folks breathing down their neck to "Find the illegals, get the illegals, get them out of here," you're gonna get what we've gotten.
Which is masked people with badges and guns—maybe badges; don't know for sure in some of these cases—but they're armed and armored, and they're sweeping people off the streets of this country. And in several cases, they've absolutely been American citizens.
So that alone tells you that no matter what technology they're using on the back end to make these raids possible, it ain't working. It's not remotely working.
And I want to make it absolutely clear to anybody who's listening or watching: I want illegal gangbangers out of this country. I want illegal aliens who are murderers, rapists, thieves—I want them the hell out of here.
What I don't want is a system that obliterates hardworking families who made a bad choice—broke the law, no question about it. They crossed the border, that's a violation. But that speaks much more, I think, to the insanity of our immigration system, such as it is.
My colleagues Alex Nowrasteh and