U.S. border surveillance towers have always been broken
eff.org
eff.org
This is especially ridiculous when the failures of X Y and Z came from administration issues (failures of oversight), picking shitty contractors, buying faulty equipment, etc. all of which are solvable/preventable.
The takeaway of these past failures shouldn't be that securing the border is impossible and not worth even attempting. The takeaway should be that programs need to be meaningfully and intelligently invested in (maybe going with the lowest bidder or your personal friends/donors isn't always a good idea), and that there needs to be oversight and accountability to make sure that those funds aren't being wasted or pocketed by corrupt public servants and private contractors to ensure that systems are implemented correctly and maintained.
Of course it's going to take "record-level funding" to implement a massive solution when previous attempts were entirely half-assed, designed to attract and allow for corruption, and then neglected. Congressional leaders and the American public should be shocked and outraged at the money that's been wasted and they should be working to design a system that avoids those pitfalls and actually does the job right. Ideally we should also be tracking down the people responsible for those past failures and holding them accountable too where it's possible.
> Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border is a wasteful endeavor that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.
This article cites efforts of doing this all the way back to 1997. The critical problem is not that the cameras are literally broken, although they seem to have struggled with this, but the fact that the cameras have not shown to improve operational results.
An intelligently designed program would try to learn from these decades of trying the same thing unsuccessfully and try something else.
Before confidently claiming that the problem was the quality of the execution, you should try to present some evidence that this solution is a sensible one. Claiming it would work if it was better is something you can do indefinitely with no evidence.
I think it's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring that border is a necessity. We could hire humans to stand all day in watchtowers and scan for people sneaking in with just their human eyes, but (working) cameras have a lot of obvious advantages.
There is plenty of evidence and data showing that cameras can be a highly effective part of solutions to the problem of monitoring. There are countless companies, governments, and individuals using cameras right now with great success. Cameras are not an unproven technology and their usefulness is not theoretical.
I don't think that anyone would be opposed to a better option that would eliminate the need for cameras and sensors, but if one exists I've never heard of it. Cameras and sensors seem to be the best options we have. The cameras and sensors (when they were functioning) were never the problem with past systems. Those past problems were more like "We paid for a bunch of cameras but we never budgeted for anyone to respond to them, or to maintain them, or to maintain the systems we need to collect data from them". Those are all very solvable problems which shouldn't have happened in the first place.
How would you propose to respond to detections, if the cameras all worked?
As much as people hate the idea of a wall, and the entire concept has become politicized, it would make that process a lot easier, but the truth is that if you're going to monitor a border and prevent people from illegally crossing it, that will involve humans having to drive/fly out to wherever there are people who are illegally crossing in order to turn them away or arrest/process/deport them.
Will the border patrol get there in, say, 20 minutes? And we have cameras covering all the land within 20 minutes of the border, so we don't lose them in that time?
More people on the ground does cost money, but the good news is that those government jobs would be a real boon for people living near the border.
Yes, and I'm no fan of the so-called constitution free zones and the impositions on our rights that result from them. Thankfully, just as borders don't need to be 100% open or 100% closed, enforcement can also exist on a spectrum and to prevent border crossing most of the focus should be on the border itself and what's happening on the Mexican side (or indeed the Canadian one, but while there are problems with people entering illegal from our northern border it's at nowhere near the scale of the problem the southern border is because Canada is a more developed nation and a lot more careful about enforcing their own borders than Mexico is).
Again, there isn't low evidence for the effectiveness of cameras. They are a proven technology. It's primarily been the rest of the systems which failed (non-working camera purchased, bad contracts, bad contractors, lack of staff to respond etc). If you know of a better solution than cameras for monitoring large areas of the border for illegal crossings I'd love to hear your pitch
Will nobody acknowledge how ridiculous a concept absolute security of a border is? Nobody would want what this would actual look like—extremely violent and expensive with little benefit to anyone.
What do you think the ideal solution should look like? Keep in mind that you'll have to defend against or allow into the country economic migrants looking for higher wages, millions of truly desperate climate refugees who don't have homes to go back to, as well as terrorists and criminals.
Absolute border security - it is literally impossible by land/sea/air/tunnel to cross into the US territory from Mexico without rapid detection and response.
...
Open border - the US does not impede general traffic from Mexico, bringing certain goods remains illegal but enforcement of this is limited to additional penalties after apprehension.
We are pretty far from both of those right now. I don't think the person you initially replied to was arguing for an open border. But surely it's not an ideal use of resources to stop all of these border based crimes in real time?
Most people are not crossing illegally. Those that do are going to have to actively evade those consequences as long as they continue an unpermitted stay. How much of our GDP should we spend to move "up" that spectrum? What benefits are we gaining by doing so? What consequences do we face?
Almost nobody is arguing for absolute open borders or absolute closed borders.
Just ask any city that has had to deal with a massive unexpected influx of people. Try NYC for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...
Hospitals, schools, infrastructure, social services, housing, they all depend on planning for funding and to keep pace with population to avoid being overrun. Things are bad enough right now with the massive numbers of economic migrants coming into the country, but once there are literal billions of climate refugees things will be much worse unless we are prepared.
Now is the time to invest in the regulation of immigration and defense of our borders so that we can safely accommodate as many of the people climate change displaces as we can. We also need to be thinking about what climate change will do to populations within the US.
See for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/clim...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-america-3-millio...
If you think it isn't worth the investment, even in low cost expenses like cameras, I can only imagine you aren't living near the boarder or aren't considering the refugee crisis that is coming.
But there's plenty of America that isn't NYC.
Furthermore, Eric Adams is... ugh. How do I put it? The Wikipedia article on him has an above-the-fold mention of him doing community work with Nation of Islam[0], as an NYPD cop. He got elected because NY liberals would vote for Trump if he had a D next to his name. Furthermore, federal investigations have revealed he's a foreign agent of Turkiye and Erdogan, up to and including denying the Armenian Genocide[1]. He's hilariously incompetent and malicious at the same time.
[0] I mentioned this on a Discord call with a friend, who responded, "OH MY GOD, HE'S INTO THE BLITLER SHIT?"
[1] https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/10/04/eric-adams-brooklyn-turki...
Speaking of Hitler, denying the Armenian Genocide is a thing Literally Hitler Literally Joked About
I mean, yeah, places like NYC and Chicago genuinely do have some really messed up situations, but almost any large city would become quickly overwhelmed when a bunch of people unexpectedly show up needing help, smaller cities don't stand a chance.
The relevant border policies inside the EU are literally called open borders. I don’t know what would you call open borders if not what we have between EU countries.
> interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU going over the border for a holiday are very different from the situation we have with our southern border
This is undeniable.
On the other hand, EU external immigration is extremely controversial. Huge parts of the EU have an extreme far-right that's polling extremely well, and the liberal/centrist parties are all bowing to them by basically copypasting their entire external immigration playbook. The two major fronts in the EU immigration debate boil down to "do we just turn away all asylum seekers or do we start deporting citizens we don't like too?"
The reason why this happened is that the EU suuuuucks at integrating external migrants, especially from poorer countries. I think I saw a statistic which was that, like, Turks that move to the US hate the shit out of Erdogan as much as native-born Americans do, but those that move to Germany wind up loving him more than those that didn't emigrate[0]. Or something like that. The US at least has family migration, which means we've spent the last 50 years learning how to integrate basically everyone, which is the kind of institutional experience the EU's member states lack.
[0] Like to the point of joining hilariously (and illegally) far-right biker gangs
Yes, absolutely.
Talking about "defending" your country from economic migrants is like "defending" your country from having a strong economy.
Meanwhile, border security does little to prevent actual criminals from entering your country, nor does it help with the ones already there.
for instance, face recognition works, especially if we are tolerant of a very small % of false positives.
Facial-recognition scan plus rudimentary SIGINT to identify any e.g. cell phones or devices broadcasting a MAC address. I don't like it, less because of what it means at the border and more in that it requires, for step two, doing the same surveillance across the country. But it's not unsolveable. We just don't particularly have consensus it should be solved.
I think that is going to change as increasingly people see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked immigration. I fear that most people won't be personally impacted until the worst of it hits (due to climate change) and by then it'll be too late to make the sensible preparations needed to offset the coming refugee crisis.
I'm not a fan of domestic surveillance either, and hopefully we can place limits on its use internally to minimize the impacts to citizens within the US.
Doubtful. Wealthy communities profit from the wage disparity and can afford to insulate themselves from the problem. And the voters most animated by this remain hyper-responsive to performative solutions.
That way you can move your enforcement crews to where most people enter. That won't catch all, of course, but should be more performant than guessing.
There are some areas where cameras make sense. There are some areas where guards make sense. There are vast tracts where it’s an idiotic idea.
The bigger question though is whether other approaches besides just trying to catch and stop people could be better.
Every area where a person could cross can and should be monitored. Walls, cameras, drones, satellites, sensors, and guards are all valid tools for border protection. The question just comes down to where and how they are deployed and maintained.
> The bigger question though is whether other approaches besides just trying to catch and stop people could be better.
No one so far has managed to come up with an anything better. Have you?
People come here for economic opportunity. Remove the opportunity for people who enter without permission, and they stop coming. And that sort of solution deals with more than just border crossings.
Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.
The number one observation is that ports of entries are the largest area for illegal entry and violence and drug smuggling. Expediting bureaucracy there and improving the staffing of these areas would be far more effective than cameras watching the desert or god forbid some idiot’s delusion of “walls”
I’m not even arguing the politics of this. Focus the efforts on areas that are actual sources of problems. Stop appealing to idiots who want imagery of guns and fortifications. That’s not effective operations. The southern border patrol is underfunded. Adding more people to help manage the hotspots is more effective than cameras in cold spots.
People who've never visited the border — especially in the western bits of it — have very little idea how absolutely inhospitable it is.
Do you see the nonsense of your own argument? You’re advocating for surveillance installations into a place that you think is easily ignored
Without them you have massive blind spots which can be taken advantage of as soon as people realize that attempting illegal entry through the easier areas which are being monitored is likely to result in failure but there are locations which aren't being monitored in any way. The expected response to making it harder for people to cross illegally in one area is that they will try another place to do it.
Keeping an eye on those areas in the most cost effective way possible is the ideal. Keep in mind that the people illegally crossing today are mostly looking for higher paying work and citizenship for their children. Still they've already demonstrated that they can be very determined. The people crossing illegally tomorrow will be much more desperate and looking to survive. Intentionally leaving yourself blind to huge areas to save a few bucks on cameras is basically setting out a welcome mat.
The welcome mat is the understaffed border control ports of entry where the majority of problems arise.
Cameras in the desert address only the uninformed fantasy of how illegal immigration works.
The border is some of the most rugged and remote terrain on Earth. A lot (most?) of it is in country not well served by paved roads, cell service, electricity, etc. Even if you could have some sort of magic sensor network that alerted you with perfect accuracy every time someone crossed the border, the logistics of responding to every single crossing are incredibly hard. There are plenty of sections where there isn't even a road on the border.
How are you going to respond to a border crossing alert 10+ miles from the nearest agent, in terrain where it will take hours to get there by land?
It's wild that packs of migrants can travel over desert wastelands on foot and swim across rivers to cross over the border but it's seen as impossible to get a border control officer to them when we've got access to trucks, helicopters, drones, sensors, and all the advanced technology we could ever want at our disposal.
Border patrol already has tons of access to all of the things you listed, and they can’t come close to keeping up. That’s because the task is incredibly difficult.
The solution you are describing requires tens of thousands of miles of additional access roads, hundreds of guard posts, electricity and plumbing for that, thousands of staff willing to live in remote places or commute for hours. And that’s just for the people to watch the border. Add in vehicles for all of them, thousands of sensor stations, monitoring facilities, an entire Air Force of helicopters. Realistically, you are looking at something that is going to look a lot like the logistics for the war in Afganistan. And with about the same expenses and chance of success.
It’s a bit like saying that going to the moon is as easy as sending a rocket up there.
Major cities, with far more resources than most, like Chicago, NYC, Minneapolis, and Denver are already overwhelmed to the point of crisis just from a (relatively) small number of economic migrants and asylum seekers
See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/denver-struggles-cope-4...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/politics/white-house-chicago-...
https://www.startribune.com/migrants-fill-third-of-hennepin-...
These cities can't accommodate the levels they have now. How are they, or any city, going to handle an unregulated influx of migrants orders of magnitude greater in the near future?
I understand that the task is incredibly difficult. It's also critically important. It's such a massive project that the effort needs to be started quickly. Border patrol is currently underfunded, understaffed, poorly trained, ill-equipped, and terribly managed. We're starting from a very bad position, and we don't have a lot of time. What's worse is that a large part of the country is far enough away from the problems caused by the current migrant crisis and are unaware of what climate change will mean in terms of the migration of people within the US or the influx of climate refugees so they don't see securing the border or unregulated migration as a concern. The very concept of regulating immigration has become over-politicized. The short term benefits of sustaining an easily exploitable underclass of non-citizens to be used essentially as slave labor makes keeping things they way they are now very popular with the corporations who buy off our representatives. Only after cities are overwhelmed do they start asking for the federal government to do something about the problem.
We can secure our borders, properly regulate immigration and prepare our country for what's coming now, which could allow us to accommodate as many climate refugees as we can without overwhelming our cities and further destroying our environment or we can allow ourselves to be increasingly overwhelmed by the unchecked stream of migrants coming into the country every day until we're eventually blindsided by the climate refugees and powerless to stop them from surging in uncontrolled.
This is the goal of fewer people in power than you think, and keep in mind there is more border than the one between Mexico and the US. Most undocumented people have flown here and simply overstayed their visa. On the other hand, congress has been saber rattling about the southern border my entire life and has done little about it. It's useful as a wedge issue though, so from time to time, you'll see some spending a lot of money on walls and towers that just aren't very effective (and maybe callously separate some kids form their families).
On the other hand, undocumented people pay billions in taxes, work for cheap and make services (like dining, construction, landscaping, cosmetology, etc.) cheaper. The monied and political classes want to keep this status quo.
Solving it, now that would be a BIG PROBLEM! If it's not immigrants then you would have to blame someone else and/or more explicitly cite race/ethnicity/religion.
Seriously, when you have a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have illegally entered the country in the last 4 years, that's both hilarious and dangerous.
Plus all of them somehow managing to cast totally-undetectable votes in elections, traveling to specific swing states, for no direct gain to themselves even though getting caught would mean deportation, while uniformly maintaining superhuman levels of discipline and secrecy. /s
Are you saying it would be scummy for some folks to rail against certain groups while happily accepting their contribution to local census numbers?
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/19-aliens-charged-voter-fr...
Those are just a few of the ones who used their own names. An unofficial analysis by CBS "showed [at least] 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade [2006-2016]."
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/2-investigators-chicago...
We know the problem exists. We won't know how widespread the problem is without a thorough nationwide investigation, but the Democrats oppose that fiercely. They demand extensive evidence be provided before an investigation will be allowed, then ignore what evidence is available.
I am very amused at how you trying to present that as a Big Scary Number. It's as if some carnival barker is hyping up the ferocious lion, king of beasts, and then pulls the curtain aside to reveal confused Pekingese.
> We won't know how widespread the problem is without a thorough nationwide investigation
A false dilemma. State-level investigations are entirely possible and are also within the power of the most vocal doom-sayers to trigger... So why don't they? Because they do not want those investigations, which have a nasty habit of disproving the wild claims they've been peddling to motivate their base.
Demanding a national investigation is an excuse for inaction, firstly because it's legally incoherent with how states manage elections, and secondly because whether Louisiana can detect/stop a berjillion false-voters streaming across the border has nothing to do with requiring a report on how New Hampshire is doing.
It's more like you're lying about what I said. I offered that as an example showing that the problem exists and can be detected.
Isolated investigations with limited resources, facing official opposition, naturally find only isolated cases. We won't know how widespread ("scary") it is without better investigations.
> State-level investigations are entirely possible and are also within the power of the most vocal doom-sayers to trigger
> Demanding a national investigation is an excuse for inaction, firstly because it's legally incoherent with how states manage elections
Both statements are simply inaccurate. The federal government sets the rules for federal elections, federal courts oversee them, and federal courts have blocked state-level investigations.
For example:
AP: Texas can no longer investigate alleged cases of vote harvesting, federal judge says
https://apnews.com/us-news/texas-ken-paxton-fraud-crime-gene...
An example [0] suggesting ~0.0004% bad votes in an election is not a meaningful example unless you want to sneakily redefine "the problem" away from "significant numbers of bad-votes may change results" to a pointlessly bland "some nonzero number of bad-votes happen." [1]
If cases are as persistent and widespread as those politicians claim, it should be much easier to find similarly-large-scale evidence. (For example, their mythical "buses of illegals.")
> federal courts oversee them, and federal courts have blocked state-level investigations. For example [...]
That "example" is nonsense.
1. It has nothing to do with non-citizens (or felons) registering to vote or casting ballots. The thing Texas "can't investigate" is an entirely separate crime the state recently added to their books, involving a different set of people doing different things.
2. The reason they're being blocked from prosecution is because they passed a shitty law with a crime that might unconstitutionally restrict freedom of speech, not because the state doesn't manage and audit its own voter-rolls and election systems and enforce existing criminal statues.
____________
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ednc/pr/nineteen-foreign-nation...
It only does so under federal regulation and supervision, as proven by the fact that federal courts recently blocked three states from removing non-citizens from their voter rolls.
Regarding the example: once again you've raised irrelevant objections to an example that proves the federal government manages federal elections and blocks investigations into voter fraud. Your objection? That investigation was about a different kind of fraud.
Regarding your first point: once again you've demanded proof be provided before an investigation. Now that's "an excuse for inaction"!
Demanding a national investigation is certainly not "an excuse for inaction" as you claimed; it is in fact a call for action.
It has led to this situation where token gestures are made, largely to appease the Americans living in/near border towns and suffering under the weight of the negative consequences.
I don't know how long they'll be able to pay lip service to the problem though. There will be literal billions of climate refugees coming in the near future and they won't be economic migrants looking for higher wages. They will be genuinely desperate and for them getting past the border of another country will be a matter of survival. With a well secured border and carefully regulated immigration the US should be able to take a lot of those refugees in without being overwhelmed by them. If we're not prepared for it in advance, what we'll be left with will be far from the status quo the shortsighted have been trying so hard to preserve.
You agreed that it's a precarious and generally bad situation for the immigrants to be in, and objected on moral grounds,
... but then jump straight to the negative affects that local citizens are supposedly suffering from, without actually listing any that are unique to those border towns.
Undercutting workers would be nationwide, as would any adverse affects on the healthcare system. Being in the states illegally means you avoid going back and forth across the border - so being in a border town doesn't strike me as relevant to a discussion about illegal immigrants.
So I'm earnestly asking, which issues affect border towns more than any other place in America, considering most illegal immigrants are overstaying visas instead of trying to sneak through the US-Mexico border?
There is no shortage of news stories about the issues.
Examples:
https://www.tpr.org/border-immigration/2023-05-01/texas-bord...
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/07/03/texas-cities-confron...
https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/small-south-te...
https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/humanitarian-crisis-the-m...
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/21/texas-migrants-borde...
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/19/1232383832/schools-face-big-c...
https://nypost.com/2023/09/20/eagle-pass-texas-declares-stat...
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167645456/border-towns-are-f...
In other words, the US is already way more prepared for climate refugees than, say, the EU is. Though, to be fair, the US is also going to have a lot of internal climate refugees, too.
By making sure that when those refugees show up cities aren't already overwhelmed by migrants also by helping the government keep track of how many people are here and how many are entering so they can make informed decisions about how many refugees we can accommodate.
This isn't evidence-based policy, this is literally the opposite.
Can you name one program similar in-scope anywhere that would achieve results in-line with what you could see here? A pilot study in one small area that measured impact and effects? No? Oh well its just "plainly obvious" right so who needs evidence?
This is cargo-cult nonsense, through and through. "See if we do the right mystical movements and arrangements then magically things will be fixed".
Do we need to bring up that even Israel, one of world's most militarized states, failed to leverage this technology despite arguably far stronger technological knowledge institutionally and far more flexible hand in security spending?
No, October 7th showed the same failures as it would for this border program. The problem is and never was about interdiction, the problem is the root-causes of these "threats" having nothing to do with physical human beings crossing a geographical space without being recorded on camera or a sensor.
The problem is unauthorized border crossings. What about that is ill defined?
Otherwise you end up with billions of dollars spent on a useless wall.
I'm presenting the problem as it is understood by almost everyone who views the issue as a problem. The problem isn't ill defined: it's quite clearly defined. What we're disagreeing on is whether it constitutes the root problem. The EFF doesn't do itself any service by dismissing as ill-defined a perfectly well-defined problem when the disagreement is over whether it's a problem at all.
Put another way: if I say my problem is I'm seeing too many orange things, I think that problem is perfectly well defined. It's just not really a prolbem.
What I am saying is that there’s nuance to the mechanics of the problem that are important to acknowledge when forming an effective solution; and you’re just repeating yourself with no acknowledgement of the nuance and an appeal to the masses.
Sure. I'm saying that is irrelevant to whether it is an "ill-formed problem."
Obviously that's not the actual problem you're trying to solve, because the actual problem is political and ethnographic (c.f. Musk's thread that this will be the "last election" because of something to do with demographic change). But this is HN, and it seems like it's worth discussing actual solutions.
I agree that we should be strongly enforcing employment eligibility as well and that it would do a lot of good, but doing that won't mean that we can just leave our borders open and unmonitored.
Seems, again, like you need to first define what "the immigration problem" really is. I mean, if you mean it like I think you mean it, the truth is a lot of us don't think that's a problem worth solving at all. This isn't the forum, obviously, but maybe step back and have some discussions across the aisle before planning out policy.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632902/major-cities-are-s...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/denver-struggles-cope-4...
Climate refugees are coming and it's a problem:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/world/climate-global-displace...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim...
https://www.wired.com/story/migration-climate-environment-re...
I used to live in New York. It didn't hit home until we had our own refugee crisis. This is absolutely something you don't get a handle on until you've seen it in person. (We also have a bad habit of conflating legal high-skilled immigration, legal low-skilled immigration, refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants.)
This could replace the broken discretionary system we have now, where it’s all about family ties and not what we need economically. Plus, it would cut down on smuggling, raise a ton of revenue, and make immigration more efficient. It’s a practical way to let people in, without completely open borders, and would bring in the workers we actually need.
It’s not about scrapping border security—just rethinking how we approach immigration to make it work better for everyone.
A "What we need economically" immigration system is what's currently eating the EU alive. EU countries basically don't do any work integrating immigrants, they expect everyone to be an economically desirable immigrant that can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Which is great until you have a refugee crisis, or two, and now your country's flooded with people you don't know how to integrate, your native population is turning hard-right, and the migrants are too but in just an ever so slightly different way that somehow makes them more of a threat to the right than left-wingers and liberals.
We already have a "market-based immigration system", it's called a "golden visa", except the cost tends to be in the six to seven figures. It's a way for really rich people to buy their way into a country, not a serious means to admit large numbers of economic migrants. The above also applies to points systems like Canada's, which selects for middle-income countries that have lots of university-educated English or French speakers. That's great if you want to import half of India and China, not so much if you want a diverse immigrant pool.
The EFF article's expressed intent is first, that there's a history that goes beyond the NBC report. Then, that the history shows reports written by various governmental & non-governmental entities that the tools are not effective.
I'm genuinely curious why that felt schizophrenic. ex. to me, even if "crucial tool" was in a government memo, I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing that.
[1] "Nearly one-third of the cameras in the Border Patrol’s primary surveillance system along the southern U.S. border are not working, according to an internal agency memo sent in early October, depriving border agents of a crucial tool in combating illegal migrant crossings."
Its a data point, but without further context, you can't draw meaningful conclusions.
If I were to take a wild guess, one third of all security cameras in the world are probably not fit for purpose, and yet, the world keeps adding more and more of them. Smile, comrade.
I don't think working through this further conversations or sheds light.
IMHO it creates the same problem as the initial comment, though the avenue is different ("its too confusing to discuss because the EFF says they're ineffective, but the NBC article contains 'crucial tool" vs. "its not worth discussing because the memo in the NBC article can't be trusted, broken could mean anything")
It's one thing to argue about results, it's another thing to argue about the minutia of the process that gets those results, and who's at fault for what, and which parts of it need to be fixed up, and which are just not a large priority.
You don't need to be a subject matter expert to know that your city had a power outage, and be pissed about it.
You do need to be one, in order to have an informed opinion on how to best prevent the next one.
They don't dispute that. That's what's so weird. The argument boils down to "historic border surveillance tools have been pork-barrel debacles, therefore all border surveillance tools are bad," but the article doesn't even manage to draw a line from the past, cancelled programs to the current program.
A: "I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing [that the program is a crucial tool]"
B: "They don't dispute that"..."the argument boils down to "historic border surveillance tools have been pork-barrel debacles"
B's two clauses seemed to me to be in direct contradiction at first blush. Ex. "debacles", seems to indicate awareness that they were not "crucial tools"
My steelmanning is that debacle is only meant to cover they were costly. There's numerous bits of the article that go beyond cost. The EFF article cites, inter alia, GAO[1], DHS[2], and RAND[3] saying it wasn't shown to be effective.
[1] In 2017, the GAO complained the Border Patrol's poor data quality made the agency "limited in its ability to determine the mission benefits of its surveillance technologies. In one case, Border Patrol stations in the Rio Grande Valley claimed IFTs assisted in 500 cases in just six months. The problem with that assertion was there are no IFTs in Texas or, in fact, anywhere outside Arizona." [2] CBP is not well-equipped to assess its technology effectiveness to respond to these deficiencies. CBP has been aware of this challenge since at least 2017 but lacks a standard process and accurate data to overcome it. [3] RAND Corporation published a study funded by DHS that found "strong evidence" the IFT program was having no impact on apprehension levels at the border
An estimated 870,000 Mexican migrants came to the U.S. between 2013 and 2018, while an estimated 710,000 left the U.S. for Mexico during that period. That translates to net migration of about 160,000 people from Mexico to the U.S., according to government data from both countries.
That's 160,000 net in-migration from Mexico over 5 years. How much would you spend to bring that to zero?
You might think a bunch of tech people would profile performance before deciding what to optimize.
[0]https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...
That would be a much better way to spend their time and money than invading the privacy of actual US citizens.
Nobody investigated enough to figure out things like:
* Why the FAA administer the towers and what the actual hold-up is towards getting a fix? Certainly at least the backstory should be public information.
* Why the towers are broken. This is probably sensitive information but I'm sure some of the disgruntled border patrol agents would be willing to have a chat about it.
* Is it a specific generation of tower that's broken? Is it some kind of backend issue, or just rot from deploying electronics into a hostile desert environment full of people trying to destroy them?
* How do the new "AI" towers work? They're probably just drawing boxes around people and items, no?
This is a disappointing and silly article, in my opinion. It doesn't convince me at all that border surveillance overall is a bad idea or a waste of money, just that some old programs turned into pork-barrel debacles. There's no fresh information or anything that would convince me either way on this issue.
Do you not understand that the tools the government uses to control non-citizens are turned inward all the time? Military tech is tech, surveillance tech is tech. They are not chiming in on 'immigration policies', they are chiming in on technology used to actually implement those policies. If all you care about is not having tracking pixels in your personal consumer browser you're going to miss the most dangerous encroachments on your freedom.
>Military tech is tech
I want the US military to have the best guns, best tanks, best nukes, best drones, best planes, best satellites, best boats. And spoilers: they do. Yet somehow that has not encroached on our lives. Adding “best surveillance of our foreign borders” does not for a dictatorship make.
>They are not chiming in on ‘immigration policies’
I’m not sure how else you can read this statement in the concluding paragraph: “Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border as humanitarian crises.” Agree or disagree, this is pure domestic politics.
I was also surprised to see on 60 Minutes coach loads of middle class Chinese crossing the Mex/US border who'd bought some fly to the border and claim asylum in the US package. Immigration can be an odd business.
Why is this not surprising anymore?
What is the problem statement? If the problem statement is: people are coming into this country illegally, and we need to stop that, then the next question is: why are they coming here?
If the answer is: to find work because there are no opportunities at home - that's easy to solve. Anyone caught employing illegal immigrants gets mandatory prison time. You would find the work would very, very quickly dry up removing the basic reason for coming here.
Folks fleeing political violence aren't illegal, they have a valid political asylum claim and will be processed much quicker when the illegal folks are no longer flooding the border.
I myself have paid handymen under the table.
I'm an American who has lived and worked in Mexico. I found it quite funny that the Mexicans i worked with always complained about the Guatemalans coming over the border and how they needed better border security.
i'm of the opinion that freedom and abortion rights are more important to Americans than being at population replacement rates so our only hope of surviving as a nation is with a huge influx of legal immigrants.
We need to build a border & make it much easier to become a US citizen while making it a felony for hiring an undocumented immigrant.
Or are they government-owned buildings, like on a military base?
If they wanted to make some sort of a precise argument against border surveillance, they failed to do so in this write-up. "Public contracts are rife with grift, so the government shouldn't be doing stuff" isn't likely to change too many minds.
Right. Israel has towers like this. But theirs have guns.[1]
[1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-remote-occupation-wome...
They are claiming it is an ineffective solution to the problem, conceptually, that is perpetuated by bad political and lobbyist incentives.
The position is not that it does not work well enough. The position is that it would not be a viable solution regardless of the quality of execution. Therefore we should stop allowing corrupt and fear mongering politicians from manipulating public optics to support these surveillance companies.
That's definitely the implication, but it doesn't really substantiate this, as far as I can tell.
"Past iterations were filled with pork, therefore future ones must be as well, therefore this conceptually cannot work."
For example, the RAND study that they said showed "strong evidence" that IFTs were having no effect actually... doesn't say that at all.
IFTs actually lowered apprehension levels, to which RAND says, "we conclude that there is strong evidence for the presence of a deterrent effect as migrants choose to avoid areas surveilled by IFTs—a proposition for which there is also qualitative evidence outside the data."
Then it goes onto say that for every other technology type, they increased apprehension levels, i.e. they worked. They didn't seem clear on why IFTs behave differently.