At the end of months of research on the border security industry, I attended the annual Border Security Expo in El Paso, Texas, to see first-hand the companies and technology “protecting” the border. The trip made tangible all the things I had learned about surveillance tech and its purveyors. I sat in every general session, trying to appear low key while furiously scribbling notes in this rare opportunity to hear directly from senior government officials. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today has released the U.S. Border-Homeland Security Technology Dataset, a multilayered dataset of the vendors who supply or market the technology for the U.S. government’s increasingly AI-powered homeland security efforts, including the so-called “virtual wall” of surveillance along the southern border with Mexico.