A reflection on the process of mapping the industry of high tech surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border
By Andrew Zuker 8 August 2024 Reading time: 6 minutes
One of the surveillance camera displays at the Border Security Expo in El Paso, Texas. Photo by Dugan Meyer licence infos
Dispelling the Myths
When people in the United States speak about "the border," they are usually referring to the southern land border with Mexico. That is the "scary" one, the newsworthy one, always allegedly under siege, always in crisis, always in the headlines. For the vast majority of Americans, the remote and rugged southern border is an abstract concept. What people believe about it can be wildly disconnected from reality, based on their political worldview and media consumption. Xenophobia, racism, and compassion are exploitable traits.
While some conservatives falsely believe that Democrats want wide open borders, some liberals are wrongly convinced that the Trump era border security and detention policies were unique in their cruelty. In reality, the militarization of the border is a decades-long bipartisan project.
Funding for border enforcement and surveillance increases every year, regardless of which political party controls the White House or Congress. Border security and surveillance has become an expansive and lucrative industry, akin to the Military Industrial Complex, and involving many of the same corporations, increasingly powered by big tech, and funded by the American taxpayer.
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.
In the bustling exhibition hall, I spoke with the people behind the technology, entertaining their sales pitches and asking oddly specific questions while filling my free tote bag with cheap marketing swag. I drove along the border from El Paso heading east, winding through the residential neighborhoods with miles of homes and parks and orchards existing quietly below the towering, rusty columns of the border wall.
A telescoping tower for Mobile Video Surveillance Systems (MVSS). When fully compacted it can be hidden completely by a tonneau cover. Photo by Dugan Meyer
Mapping the Industry
In January of this 2024, as a student of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, I was selected for a research internship with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), under the mentorship of EFF Director of Investigations and Reynolds School Lecturer in Residence, Dave Maass.
With support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington, DC, Maass and I set out to create a comprehensive dataset of companies supplying the surveillance technology used along the U.S.-Mexico border. We focused on vendors with current federal contracts and companies actively marketing to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, specifically the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the United States Border Patrol (USBP), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).We verified active vendors through spending and procurement data from two government databases, using the USSpending.gov and Federal Procurement Data System (fpds.gov) websites.
Aspiring vendors were only included if we had evidence that the company was marketing directly to these agencies, such as handing out materials at recent Border Security Expos and other industry events. For each vendor, we included the general types of technology or services and specific surveillance products offered, procurement records, the company's website, parent companies and related subsidiaries, agencies they served, and additional relevant links to supporting documents.
On July 8, EFF published our work, making the dataset available to the public. This directory serves as a starting point for journalists, academics, and advocates working on issues that intersect with the southern border, such as immigration and asylum, human rights, privacy and surveillance, big tech, law enforcement, human trafficking, and government accountability. We hope that this work can lead to greater transparency around the relationships between government and industry.
The All-Seeing, Money-Eating Virtual Wall
Over the last two decades, the government has steadily built up surveillance capability along the southern border in a bipartisan effort to use electronics to secure the full length of the border with Mexico.
The virtual wall is a loosely-networked amalgamation of sensors, cameras, drones, radar, license plate readers, and various digital surveillance technologies intended to detect and identify human beings and suspicious vehicles crossing the border, which CBP has said is critical to the fight against illegal migration, smuggling, and human trafficking.
Sophisticated autonomous surveillance systems mounted on fixed and mobile towers scan the landscape using AI to identify threats and alert human CBP agents. Buried seismic sensors detect human footsteps up to a mile away, powered by covert solar panels that look like rocks, logs, and traffic cones. Huge airships tethered to the ground use radar to image hundreds of square miles of land and sea. Hypersensitive microphones listen for the unique frequency of human heartbeats as vehicles pass through the ports of entry where border agents scan passports, capture fingerprints, check backgrounds, and release or detain people. They use software to access private data on the mobile devices of the detained. CBP cell site simulators mimic official networks to log call, text, and location information from the mobile phones of the roughly one million people who pass through U.S. ports of entry each day.
All of these components generate mountains of data to be stored, accessed, and analyzed. This requires expensive, industrial-grade IT hardware and support services, cloud storage, data centers, and proprietary software. Border surveillance technology costs billions of dollars annually in addition to expenses related to detention, deportation, weapons, uniforms, training, vehicles, and communications tech for ICE and CBP agents.
All-terrain vehicles equipped with surveillance cameras can be quickly deployed to remote sections of the border. Photo by Dugan Meyer licence infos
The Mission and the Adversary
According to federal officials at the Border Security Expo, surveillance technology is a crucial “force multiplier” that keeps frontline border patrol agents safe and strategic in their mission of protecting the homeland. Over three days of panels led by top federal border authorities, it became clear to me the mission can be so much more. It can mean the government using some of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance technology to stop the drug trade, to cutoff the flow of unauthorized goods, or to arrest the people coming into the U.S. I realized that the adversary is not always someone who seeks to harm American people, but it can mean anyone with the potential to disrupt the revenue streams of the corporate ruling class.
It means the continued growth of the border security industrial complex as a war and weapons market in the model of the military industrial complex. It means the border can be understood not just as a boundary of national sovereignty, but an economic filter where maintaining control costs Americans billions of dollars. This marriage of industry and government is not accountable to the American people, allowing a small group of individuals to wield immense economic power and martial authority.
For more on the Border Security Expo in El Paso, read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's reporting. This article does not necessarily reflect the views of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington, DC.