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Comment by writepub | Hacker News Reader

The article, ahem hit piece, basically reports on surveillance commonplace along the border.

But, by picking a border reservation, the exact same surveillance is falsely setting CBP up as a bogeyman apparently racist towards natives - all of which is left unsubstantiated by the article.

The origin of surveillance tech is of no relevance, other than to malign Israel. What would change if the tech were from, say Canada? Nothing but the outage channeled at Israel.

Here's the entirety of the article without the undercurrent prodding outrage:

Surveillance towers capable of infrared tracking of humans for upto 1 mile are common along the border. Some borderland overlaps with Indian reservations.

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There are several other important points that your summary misses:

* A history of harassment by CBP towards inhabitants of the reservation which is driving people away.

* CBP is abusing this surveillance technology to monitor protestors.

* CBP lends its surveillance technology to other law enforcement agencies in a way that seems to have insufficient oversight and large potential for abuse.

Glad to see Israel has nothing to do with this.

Wherever CBP presence increases, questionings increase, regardless of race. To frame this tension as harassment targeting natives is disingenuous. CBP often gets accused of racism, especially towards Hispanics, though some 70% of CBP officers deployed along the border are Hispanic themselves.

If the protests are happening within CBP jurisdiction (100 miles from the border), how is deploying authorized surveillance per law "abuse"?

"CBP jurisdiction" is about as close to judicial activism as anything in this country. It's bunk and will be remembered in history as a blight on the US.

It's very telling that governments seek to abuse the rules they set forth, to deny citizens as much as possible. This idea that there is a 100-mile radius from the border, where constitutional rights just don't apply, is laughably authoritarian and will be expanded in the future. The history of human governments shows that absent very strong protections against the government, the citizenry will always lose in the end, whether it be loss of freedom, or loss of nation stability.

If you think CBP monitoring protestors isn’t abuse if it’s happening within 100 miles of the border, then I think we share too little common ground for this conversation to ever be productive.

Indeed - contrarian viewpoints are to be avoided at all costs for productively mass converging on falsehoods.

There has to be some basic set of shared values or else it’s just shouting.

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