The RT-RG targeting system, which sucks up and processes hundreds of millions of phone and internet records per day in order to “find, fix and finish” enemy combatants, has been deployed on the US’ southern border since 2010, according to documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

When NSA agents gave a presentation at the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) in 2008, the Drug Enforcement Administration, one of 21 law enforcement agencies with a presence at the center, dropped everything to get its hands on an RT-RG of its own.

ALSO ON RT.COM‘War on journalism’: Snowden slams US indictment against AssangeWhile the NSA praised the system for boosting the military’s kill-count in Afghanistan and Iraq, the documents show it gave soldiers a false sense of certainty, leading to an explosion in civilian casualties following its deployment. Most of those kills – 90 percent, in one five-month period of airstrikes – were not the intended targets. For such a flawed system to be placed in the hands of domestic authorities already prone to itchy trigger-fingers is unsettling.

“Many called it an industrialization of warfare,” Kristian Berg Harpviken of the Peace Research Institute Oslo told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. “The rapid turnaround made it harder to insure the quality of the intelligence, and the large number of operations meant that civilian injuries increased accordingly.”

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